Imagine your boss telling you that your business is taking a step to encourage productivity and trim costs by converting your pay from a monthly salary to a daily wage – with no compensation for sick days, personal days, or vacation days. That would be hard to take, but would be a little bit easier to swallow if the daily compensation is calculated to offset the loss of paid days off.

But imagine that your employer doesn’t do that — so you’ll take a big pay cut when the daily pay rate is computed by dividing your previous monthly salary by the number of business days in the month. (If you get 3 weeks of paid vacation and holidays, and also take an average of 5 paid sick days or personal days each year – for a total of 20 paid days off — the new pay plan would amount to about an 8 percent cut from your previous annual earnings.)

Envision that these changes are imposed despite the fact that you have accepted a frozen salary level for each of the past five years. Read more

Many very important issues in the budget bill have gotten little or no public attention. That’s true of most of the topics coming up this Tuesday, May 31, relating to support for low-income families – including topics like Wisconsin Works (W-2), the Wisconsin Shares child care subsidy program, the state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and other uses of federal funds from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grant.

The full May 31 agenda of the Joint Finance Committee and links to all of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB) papers can be found on the JFC website. This post provides a summary of some of the more significant issues for children and families, and links to those LFB papers.

Using TANF funds to supplant state EITC funding – Unfortunately, one key issue didn’t get an issue paper, perhaps because it’s the continuation of a funding shift that was initiated in the budget repair bill. Read more