I get a lot of reader feedback when I write about some of the cutting-edge benefits that pop up at many forward-thinking companies across America, whether the perks are spiritual and faith-based services by businesses in Florida, or free food and a highly paid chef to prepare it by a certain well-known technology company in California’s Silicon Valley.

But here are some choice benefits that I’ll bet no one in the private sector gets: big bucks for certain California public sector workers who cash in unused vacation time when they depart their jobs.
“More than 400 state workers cashed out thousands of dollars for unused time off—a practice shunned in the private sector—when they left their state jobs in the 2007-08 fiscal year, according to a San Jose Mercury News computer analysis of payroll records from the state controller,” included in a story published this week.

Here’s where this story gets outrageous: “One doctor [working in the state’s prison system] racked up more than $815,000 in unused vacation and on-call pay—the equivalent of almost four years of pay at his final annual salary. When the Mercury News asked for specifics on that massive out-the-door paycheck, a state prison spokesman said ‘there is no way to tell’ when and how the doctor earned all that extra money during his 10-year career.”

And the newspaper also points out a fact that’s obvious to everyone living in the Golden State: “The massive payouts come at a time when California faces unprecedented budget shortfalls and is now grappling with a national financial meltdown and plummeting tax receipts. While labor groups say the workers are simply cashing in what they’ve been owed for years, there’s a huge benefit for waiting: the lump-sum payments are paid at the employees’ current—and, most often, highest—pay rate, no matter how long ago they accrued the time off.”
Worse yet, the state “has no way of predicting from year to year how many employees will retire with huge banks of unused time off on the books.”

The story has to be read to be believed, but here are a few more nuggets:

“The Mercury News analysis of the controller’s payroll figures, which do not include the University of California system or state legislative staffers, also found:

•  36,238, or nearly one in seven, of the state’s full-time workers earned $100,000 or more in salary and overtime in the 2007-08 fiscal year.
•  1,223 state employees earned more than $200,000 in salary and other pay; 19 employees took home $400,000 or more for the year.
•  More than 100 of the high earners made at least $100,000 in overtime for the year, including a prison nurse who racked up more than $200,000 in overtime.”

Is there any private sector worker in America who gets to cash out unused vacation like this? I would be shocked if there is a single one anywhere. You get this only in the public sector, where employee unions wield way too much clout and publicly elected officials show way too little backbone to stand up to the never-ending demands for more and more taxpayer-funded pay and benefits that are grossly out of proportion  to the actual work performed.

California has big financial problems for a variety of reasons, but the payouts are a big part of the problem. And at a time when our financial markets are melting down before our eyes, they point to a public sector pay system that is hard enough to fathom in good financial times, but now is wildly unsustainable at a time when everyone with a private sector IRA or 401(k) faces having to stay on the job a lot longer than they ever intended.