By Heather Grossmann
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — The state legislature approved Gov. David Paterson's emergency budget bill on Monday, which authorizes the administration to furlough 100,000 state workers without pay one day a week.
The state budget is over a month overdue and the governor and legislature still have not come to an agreement on how to close the state's $9.2 billion budget deficit. The bill passed on Monday will allow the state to keep running for the time being.
The furlough will save the state government about $30 million a week, and will affect about half of the state's workforce. Nurses, corrections officers and state troopers will be exempted. The furloughs are scheduled to begin next week.
Leaders of public unions said that the furloughs are illegal and planned to go to court to block the governor's plan.
In a statement following the legislature's passage of the emergency budget bill, Paterson lambasted the state's unions, saying that everyone had to make sacrifices in times of fiscal crisis, but the unions had chosen not to.
"Unfortunately, however, all we've heard so far from the leadership of our State's public employee unions are expletives and excuses," Paterson said.
"I recognize that these furloughs represent a difficult sacrifice for many of the State's public employees. That sacrifice is only necessary because their union leadership has rejected all other reasonable attempts at compromise."
Paterson has been trying to get the unions to forgo a scheduled 4 percent pay raise for state workers, but union leaders will not agree to the concession.
