Nurse Makes $270K on California’s Overtime Binge

A state employee in California earned $269,810 last year working as a nurse at a men’s prison by tripling her regular pay with overtime hours.

Jean Keller worked 2,450 extra hours in 2010 at a prison near San Luis Obispo, Bloomberg.com reported. Some of those hours were required, but many were volunteered.

California’s public workers collected $1.7 billion in extra pay last year, more than half of it in overtime pay and the rest for unused vacation time and union-negotiated benefits such as clothing allowances.

State taxpayers shelled out the additional wages — enough to pay the average salaries of about 25,000 teachers — even as California faced a $19 billion budget deficit and cut school spending and services for the elderly.

“It’s fiscal insanity,” Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Republican, told Bloomberg, criticizing “this notion of spending money and paying people more than we need at a time when every department is broke, when we are starving our local schools and we are cutting public safety.”

Ironically, requirements that workers take three unpaid days off each month, instituted during Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure as governor, increase the workloads for remaining employees and the need for overtime hours.

Keller was far from the only public employee to reap huge sums in extra pay last year. Among them: A prison doctor cashed out more than $590,000 in vacation time when he retired, and the head of the state gambling commission received $169,623 in unused holiday pay.

“The extra compensation underscores a broader trend in California, where government workers are paid more than in other states for similar duties,” Bloomberg observed.

For example, firefighters in Los Angeles are paid twice the national mean.

The average state worker in California earned $58,340 in total pay last year, while per-capita income for all employees in the state, public and private, was $42,578.

New York, with about half the population of California, gave state workers about $1.5 billion in extra pay last year.