My wife works for the state of Michigan and they have told all state employees that they need to take off certain days this summer without pay. Next year they plan on doing it again but only twice as many days. That means this year there will be two weeks unpaid and four weeks next year.
This is a lot of money when you only have one income and five kids to support. This is one of the sacrifices we are going to have to deal with in order to get the economy back on track in our state and federal level. We think this sucks but it has to be done, at least my wife still has a good job and we can put food on the table.
The union my wife belongs to is the U.A.W., the same union as the automakers, which has not been looking to good lately. When they decided to issue furlough days to all state employees, One of the first things the union tried to do was find a way to manipulate this to their advantage and get something out of it. This is the mentality that got our country in trouble in the first place, everyone is looking for a way to take advantage of a situation. When are the companies and big business going to realize that we need to buckle down and take our lumps to get this country back on track?
