IT'S GOOD TO BE A UNION GOVERNMENT DRONE

That’s $2,000 for every donut he consumed on the job while protecting us from phantom terrorists and showing up five minutes after every crime committed in his community. Hat tip to Robmu1 for sending me this inspirational article.
Highest-Paid California Trooper Is Chief Banking $484,000

By Alison Vekshin, Elise Young & Rodney Yap – Dec 16, 2012 10:04 PM ET

California Highway Patrol division chief Jeff Talbott retired last year as the best-paid officer in the 12 most-populous U.S. states, collecting $483,581 in salary, pension and other compensation.

Talbott, 53, received $280,259 for accrued leave and vacation time and took a new job running the public-safety department at a private university in Southern California. He also began collecting an annual pension of $174,888 from the state.

Union-negotiated benefits, coupled with overtime that can exceed regular pay and lax enforcement of limits on accumulating unused vacation, allow some troopers to double their annual earnings and retire as young as age 50. The payments they get are unmatched by those elsewhere, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million employees of the 12 states. Some, like Talbott, go on to second careers.

“I think some of our rules were negligent, and I think people were allowed to build up overtime pay who shouldn’t have been, who accumulated leave time and furlough time,” said Marty Morgenstern, a member of Governor Jerry Brown’s cabinet and secretary of the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency, which oversees labor relations, employment and unemployment.

‘Absolutely Inappropriate’

“Those kind of payments are absolutely inappropriate and we’re doing everything we can to see that does not recur,” Morgenstern said.

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