Furlough Fridays: A Day Off With a Financial Downside

Kira Hudson is spending her Friday at the playground, enjoying precious time with her two young sons.
 
"That's always wonderful because I am a student, and I work full time. So any free time I get, I love spending time with them and just showing them how much I love them," Hudson said.

  But the single mom and DMV worker says there is a big downside to this Furlough Friday, forced by the state to save money during the budget crisis.
 
"Not getting paid,” Husdon laughs, “that's the horrible, horrible part of it. Being a single mother, all of my resources are dependent upon my paycheck. And primarily most of it goes to paying necessary bills,” she says.
 
With recent cuts, Hudson says she’s bringing home less today than when she worked part-time for the DMV a few years ago. And she fears an additional, fourth furlough day being considered in Sacramento will cut her pay by twenty percent, and put her over the edge.
 
"I'm always worried that I won't be able to provide for them and that I may have to move back in with my parents.   Because it's really coming to that point where I don't know if I'll be able to make it another two or three months," she said.
 
Mostly, she worries about keeping her boys under medical coverage.
 
"Both of my boys have asthma so they have to have health coverage, they have to have it," she explains. Hudson can’t afford what she would need to chip in for coverage under the state, yet she makes too much to qualify for Medicare. Her two boys are currently covered under the state’s “Healthy Families” program, which may fall victim to the budget axe.
 
Hudson says she certainly can’t afford to let her four-year-old play soccer, anymore. And the family has given up cable and driving anywhere out of town because the gas is too expensive. She has nothing left at the end of the month to save.
 
"A lot of sleepless nights wondering if I can make ends meet for them," she said.
 
"Workers here at the DMV, they don't make a lot of money to begin with, so when you're cut twenty percent out of your budget, that's gonna put a lot of people over the edge, it's really beginning to do that now," said Roland Becht, a DMV Field Representative.
 
Becht says he knows many people think DMV and other state workers do not work hard, but he insists they do exactly that, for not much pay.
 
" We do work hard and we and I don't think we expect something for nothing. But we expect, I think, a fair treatment for the work that we do," Becht said. "We're average working people just like everybody else. "
 
At the Chula Vista DMV office, customers also say they’re also feeling the pinch of the reduced hours.
 
"I can't get business done cause they're closed now," said Xavier Davis Friday morning. He hoped to pay for his car registration so he could get the towed vehicle back. Now he’ll have to wait for Monday, as he racks up a bill at the impound lot.