My husband works for a city gov’t. and consistently works 12 hour days (no overtime, he’s salaried.) No pay raises for the past 3 years, in fact last year across the board pay cut of 3%. No COLA, of course. No additional “leave” policies. Hiring freeze, so those with exisitng positions have to carry more of a work load. The good news, I guess, is our city is now fiscally above water...no red ink on the books, but it took sacrifice on the part of city employees for it to be that way.
Seems that on state and municipal levels the employees are making sacrifices, but on the federal level very little sacrifice has been made.
And as far as civilian employees...glad your brother got a promotion, but our family members (some engineers from schools like GaTech, some with their master’s degrees in their field are are suffering from depressed wages...but are glad to be employed at least.)
I knew that state and local did not have it as well. Hopefully you will see a raise in the future after the sacrifices that were done over the last three years. Hopefully the economy just comes back. I predict that it will recover in 2012 IMHO. Thanks for the info.