2010 Legislative Victories Printer-friendly version

Furloughs Stopped
While many states implemented furloughs (such as Georgia mandating 12 days for DHHS employees and three days for all employees, and Ohio’s 10-day furloughs), SEANC fought back a threat of 20-hour furloughs for all state employees. As a result, no mandatory furloughs were in the final budget.

Privatization Blocked
Efforts to privatize probation services, prison maintenance and police at some DHHS facilities were real threats this year. SEANC spent countless hours educating legislators that the problem is not the services, but low pay that won’t attract a competitive pool of qualified professionals needed to keep our communities safe. As a result, SEANC effectively killed all of the privatization provisions, except one which orders probation services to create a “pilot program” to study privatization.

Pay Cuts Avoided
Like furloughs, a number of states implemented state employee pay cuts to balance their state budgets. North Carolina’s state employees received no pay cuts.

Jobs Saved
SEANC was able to save the jobs of members who alerted the lobbying staff about programs or jobs that were on the chopping block. Examples include positions at the N.C. Schools for the Deaf and the Governor Morehead School for the Blind and employees of DHHS’ Vocational Rehabilitation.

Employee Protections Maintained
The N.C. Press Association put forth a full-fledged war in the final week of session to open up state personnel files completely to anyone who wanted to see them. SEANC matched them move for move and the battle went into the wee hours of the final night of session. SEANC managed to keep the personnel records changes in the ethics act to a minimum, allowing only promotion details and the dismissal letter of an employee to be public, rather than an employee’s entire personnel file.

Employment Rights Protected
SEANC fought a bill to allow investigatory suspensions of employees without pay for up to a month based simply on an allegation with no proof of employee wrongdoing. This kept a harmful “guilt before innocence” precedent from sweeping across state government.

SEANC also helped defeat a provision to give the DMV Commissioner authority to move employees around at will. Agencies can already accomplish what they need by using current procedures in the State Personnel Act. If DMV got a pass, every other agency head could have chosen to bypass the rules as well.

SEANC worked for the passage of a “Mary Easley” provision to help prevent political favoritism (such as Mary Easley’s 88 percent raise in 2008) by requiring universities to report personnel actions and salary increases to OSP and OSBM quarterly.

2009 Legislative Victories