The employees say the furlough days amount to a 6 percent pay cut. The employees are all members of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 21, which has about 800 members in Contra Costa County.
"The county's being truly unfair," said Sue Guest, a 23-year county employee who is the Public Health Nurse Program Manager for Contra Costa Health Services. "They're wanting us to take 96 hours of furlough in this compressed time. We think it's seems really inequitable and unfair to be doing this to the people who actually run the county."
Contra Costa Supervisor Mary Piepho would not get into specifics because of ongoing negotiations with Local 21.
"Everybody is absolutely having to make sacrifices," said Piepho. "One of their concerns is about a tightened time frame, needing to do a wage furlough or wage decrease. Over 5,000 of our employees have already done that over a two-year period."
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