While other state workers endure unpaid furloughs, California Highway Patrol officers are getting more money.

It's not much. "Less than 1 percent," said Jon Hamm, head of the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, which represents 7,000 sworn officers. He declined to be more specific.

But the union doesn't want the money to show up as a pay raise. It's in talks with the Schwarzenegger administration to put the money elsewhere, although union and government officials won't disclose those details, either.

"We're still discussing that," Hamm said. The final deal needs legislative approval, so CHP officers won't see anything different on their July pay stubs, because the deadline for submitting payroll changes is Wednesday.

The union's five-year deal expires July 2, 2010, making it the only active labor contract among the 21 union bargaining groups that represent about 200,000 state workers.

A key part of the pact pegs wages to an annual survey of salaries paid by five California law enforcement agencies: San Francisco city police, city of San Diego police, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, city of Los Angeles police and city of Oakland police.

The state engineers' union had a similar wage-parity requirement built into a five-year deal that expired last year, but those terms aren't etched into government code like the CAHP's.

So while other state worker unions have to bargain from scratch, CAHP pay negotiations focus on interpreting the yearly survey. The new pay rate is supposed to take effect each July 1, but this year the state and the union were grappling with the numbers and missed that deadline.

Over the past four years, CHP officers received raises ranging from a low of 4.1 percent, to 6.1 percent.This year's hike is lower because earlier increases aimed to bring the patrol to pay parity that has been mostly reached, Hamm said. And the recession has forced agencies to forego scheduled increases to save jobs, further suppressing the survey results.

Ken Jacobs, a labor expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said union leaders probably feel pressure to avoid appearing greedy.

"There's an ongoing issue of resentment from parts of the public when public-sector employees have benefits that they don't have, including firefighters and police," Jacobs said.

CHP officers have better retirement benefits than most of their public employee peers and the private sector, including the option to retire at age 50 and draw 3 percent of their highest annual pay for each year of service.

And while other state employees' wages are down almost 15 percent due to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's three-days-per-month furlough mandate, CHP officers have gone untouched because of their contract status.