Tim White provides the numbers for the long-term leave benefit that allows state employees to change jobs with a right to return to the jobs they left:

More than 1,600 positions in state government are effectively on hold, with employees having the right to return to them and potentially bump the worker who holds the job now, according to data reviewed by the Target 12 Investigators.

For the record, 1,600 jobs is about 11% of all authorized full time jobs in the state budget.  More telling, though, is this:

“The Leave to Protect rule was developed really in large part as a management tool to encourage employees to accept promotions, take a chance on a new opportunity and later if they did not pass the exam for that opportunity they would still have the ability to go back to their former position,” [Deputy Director of the Department of Administration Mark Dingley] said.

Merit exams are no longer common with promotions in state government, Dingley said. Yet the Leave to Protect policy has expanded to cover more employees as another job protection prized by organized labor.

Merit exams go away; this aristocratic benefit just keeps on going.  Just so, the benefits and stability that used to be the public sector’s compensation for its lower pay remain in effect though government work has become increasingly lucrative.

These provisions are like calcification in the blood stream, sticking to the walls and forcing us to work harder to push the blood through.  Once again, it appears that they don’t work for us; we work for them.