Democrats point out that changes to collective bargaining have had a bigger impact on lower paid state workers. Madison Assembly Democrat Brett Hulsey says numbers from the non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau detail the impacts on state employees of the Budget Repair Bill — which has state workers paying more for health care and retirement benefits.
“I you make $25,000 a year, you took about an eleven percent pay cut,” said Hulsey. “If you make $125,000 a year like the governor does, his pay cut was half of that.” Hulsey said half the state’s employees are making less than $50-thousand dollars a year, and that a state worker making $25,000 a year will see a pay reduction of about four-thousand dollars.