Hundreds of City Employees Laid Off

I’d meant to post on this earlier but better late than never. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made good on his threat to Chicago’s public employees unions:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is sending pink slips to up to 625 city employees Monday and privatizing many of their jobs to finish closing a $30 million budget hole, but union leaders said the mayor jumped the gun and never gave them time to negotiate.

Nearly 130 seasonal transportation workers will be told to leave immediately. That means fewer sidewalks, curbs and gutters will be repaired.

Emanuel said he intends to get private companies to clean the city’s airports and libraries, work now done by city employees. Operators at the city’s water-bill call center and employee benefit managers also will see their jobs outsourced. Those union workers will receive 30- and 45-day layoff notices.

The mayor followed through on his threat to lay employees off because, he said, organized labor failed to offer concessions or cost-cutting ideas to close a budget hole left by the expiration of a deal with City Hall unions to take unpaid days off.

“It has been two weeks and despite ongoing talks between leaders of organized labor and my administration, none of the changes yet have been embraced or agreed upon,” Emanuel said.

“My duty as mayor is to protect our city’s taxpayers … not to protect the city’s payroll.”

That’s certainly a novel theory of Chicago city government. The late Mayor Daley cultivated a reputation as a brilliant negotiator largely by bringing the union leaders into a room and giving them whatever they wanted. His son cultivated a similar reputation by negotiating concessions from the unions but, generally, dealing with them cautiously. I guess now we’ll see if hardball works.

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