Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
A few years back, the local media ran big stories about government workers getting huge raises despite tough times. Outrage followed.<\/p>\n
Wasn\u2019t true, of course, it was \u201caccurate but false.\u201d Turns out that public employees are paid on a 2-week pay period system instead of being paid on the 1st and 15th. We get 26 paychecks per year instead of 24. But every seven years, payday falls on New Year\u2019s Day which is a holiday, so the check is cut one day early and that results in 27 pay checks issued during in that year.<\/p>\n
Is that a raise? No \u2013 the employee keeps the same hourly rate of pay. The money would have been paid in the new year, but for shifting the payday backwards. It\u2019s a fake controversy based on a calendar quirk. It\u2019s like claiming a 63-year-old man is 9 years old because he was born on Leap Day so he\u2019s only had 9 birthdays. Calendar quirk.<\/p>\n
Look for those stories again this year.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
People who put these sorts of things out there as if there’s not some sort of “gotcha” involved annoy me to no end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: A few years back, the local media ran big stories about government workers getting huge raises despite tough times. Outrage followed. Wasn\u2019t true, of course, it was \u201caccurate but false.\u201d Turns out that public employees are paid on a 2-week pay period system instead of being paid on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[255],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-racket"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49281,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49214\/revisions\/49281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}