Furlough Fridays: Taking leave of reality

So you need to renew your driver’s license.

Which is the greater inconvenience: Waiting in line to get the new license, or paying a fine because the DMV was closed and your brake light burned out and you handed the police officer your expired license?

Surprised?

So are we.

This topic is timely. Today is the first of 10 “furlough Fridays” for about 26,500 state workers. They get the day off, but they don’t get paid.

State officials intend to schedule nine more furlough Fridays over the next 18 months or so, the last scheduled for May 20, 2011.

The goal is to save the cash-strapped state money — an estimated $2 million for each furlough day.

We don’t object to furlough days for state workers.

Tens of thousands of private-sector employees have made the same sacrifice — some of them for more than a year now.

What annoys us is that state officials decided to let all 26,500 workers take the same day off.

The result, of course, is that most state offices, including DMVs, will be closed on furlough days.

The disruption that results is certain to generate plenty of publicity.

But it’s not necessary (the disruption, that is).

The state should mimic private businesses that require their workers to treat furlough days as unpaid vacation that must be scheduled in advance and with the permission of a supervisor.

It’s only five days per year.

State agencies somehow manage to work around employees’ absences during their multiple weeks of paid vacation, and sick days, and maternity leave, without closing offices.

Yet state officials would have us believe that the five furlough days per year are somehow different, and that adding them requires the drastic action of closing offices altogether.

That’s ridiculous.

Furlough days aren’t different.

Of course distributing the extra days off throughout the year rather than scheduling them on certain Fridays would cause hassles, both for the workers who aren’t taking a furlough day and thus have to pick up the slack, and for their clients.

But we’re mired in a recession. Hassles abound, many of them much worse than languishing in line for an extra 10 minutes.

Yet our state government seems to think that closing offices for an entire day is a better option — a smaller hassle, if you will — than having fewer employees in those offices on certain days.

Unless, that is, you need to buy a bottle of gin rather than, say, renew your drivers license.

Perhaps the most galling aspect of the state’s furlough farce is that officials themselves concede that the Fridays-only approach is not necessary.

Here’s the proof: Employees whose jobs the state deems “essential” are not required to take their furlough days on particular Fridays.

The list of essential workers includes obvious ones such as State Police officers and prison guards.

Yet the state also has decided that the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, the only legal purveyor of booze in the state, is too important to close.

We all know the economy is bad. But there’s no excuse for the state, with this furlough Fridays debacle, to make the situation seem worse than it actually is.