San Francisco Judge Charlotte Woolard this morning ordered that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's furlough order be lifted immediately for all employees at the State Compensation Insurance Fund. The judge also held that no mandatory stay will be applied if, as expected, the administration appeals the decision.
"Plaintiffs have shown that they will suffer irreparable harm if the stay is not lifted," Woolard noted from the bench.
"This means the furloughs are over and even if they appeal it won't be stayed," said attorney Ron Turovsky of Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. Turovsky was representing SCIF president Jan Frank who was fighting the application of the furlough order on workers at State Fund.
"This means our people are going to be at work on Friday receiving their regular pay and benefits," added Paul Harris, chief counsel for the Service Employees International Union Local 1000.
The state has another "furlough Friday" scheduled for this week. To comply with the furlough order, SCIF workers had been taking three days off per month but on a rotating schedule to allow the carrier to maintain regular business operations.
It's unclear just when the workers will be made whole for wages they've lost to date under a furlough plan that two Judges now have ruled should never have been applied to the State Fund. Like Judge Peter Busch in an earlier case, Woolard held that SCIF is exempt from the furlough order under Insurance Code section 11873(c). That section says SCIF is exempt from "staff cutbacks" and both judges held that a furlough is a form of a cutback.
The administration did make a last minute attempt to limit the impact of the ruling.
David Tyra, an attorney with Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard in Sacramento who has represented the administration in these cases, asked Judge Woolard to only apply the order prospectively -- meaning that workers would not be subject to any more furlough days but could not collect on lost wages. He argued that allowing the order to be applied retrospectively would result in workers being paid for days they did not work, which he said would be an "illegal gift of public funds."
Judge Woolard declined to include language on the retroactive/prospective nature of the order saying that the administration has "enough to go over to the court of appeal and see what they think" about the issue. Tyra said after the hearing that it was not his call as to whether or not the administration would appeal the decision or raise the retroactive issue with the Court of Appeal.
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