With the budget already more than a month late, some New York lawmakers expect Governor Paterson to include state worker furloughs in his next budget-extender at the end of the week, in order to keep the state afloat fiscally.

The governor told NEWS10 on Monday he had not yet made up his mind.

Paterson has been threatening one-day-a-week, unpaid furloughs for tens of thousands of state employees to avoid, he says, a state government shutdown.

The governor said, “A government shutdown means nobody gets paid; it is a terrible thing.”

Meanwhile, the Empire Center for New York Policy, a right-leaning, pro-business think tank, says furloughs are the wrong way to go. Instead, the center says it believes the State Legislature has the legal right to impose a wage freeze on all public employees from the smallest villages and towns, to local school districts, to those working in state agencies.

The Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA), the state’s largest public employee union, called the center’s proposal “absurd, a blatant attack on working people.”

Under Paterson’s plan, state workers would have to take one furlough day a week, for each week there is not state budget in place. Paterson says furloughs would save the state $30 million a week as it faces a fiscal crisis.

The Public Employees Federation says the plan would take more than half a billion dollars out of the state’s economy. It has proposed alternative budget solutions including replacing half the private consultants with state employees…

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