Posted on 03/17/2011 6:25:41 PM PDT by dragnet2
Officials aim to contract work out to curb future pension obligations and eventually close a budget gap. A union leader says the city didn't try to negotiate other options. Workers are shell-shocked, and one dies in an apparent suicide.
Costa Mesa has sent layoff notices to nearly half of its employees in a dramatic austerity program being closely watched by other cities struggling with ballooning pension obligations.
The move was sharply criticized by union leaders, and it stunned city employees, one of whom apparently committed suicide by jumping off Costa Mesa City Hall hours after layoff notices went out Thursday.
The six-month termination notices affect 213 of the city's 472 full-time employees and cut across departments: firefighters, maintenance workers, jail staff, even dogcatchers.
Costa Mesa is among hundreds of local governments around the country facing massive future shortfalls in what they owe retirees. This year's tab — $15 million out of the city's $93-million budget — is estimated to grow to more than $25 million within five years.
"Clearly they are trying a new model," said Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission, a bipartisan state public policy oversight agency. "A city that lays off half its staff — by any standard that's got to be considered a big move."
Costa Mesa "appears to have gone with the nuclear option," said Joe Nation, a professor of public policy at Stanford University
Faced with an unprecedented pension and retiree healthcare crisis, "cities are being forced to look at things that would've been unthinkable before," he said.
Controversy over public employee pensions and benefits has roiled state and local governments in recent months
Conservatives have attacked longstanding and seemingly unassailable perks won by public employee unions, and unions have struck back, unleashing bitter battles in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Who does have useful skills today? The only people in demand seem to Mexicans. Maybe we all should live the Mexican way. I guess the young man who killed himself should have been willing to go to work in a Chinese sweatshop.
I feel for that guy, because he was obviously troubled beyond just losing the job. But having said that, let’s just say, forget Gil Gottfried, this story is bringing out the Mike O’Donoghue macabre humor in me.
This burns me up. How much did they save by firing the janitor?
It’s the idiots at the top that should get the ax in that town.
al baby smh
Sounds like so many I know of. The AA ones are always protected no matter how much they text on the job, wear whatever, esp in business settings, send e-mail with all kinds of horrendous grammar and spelling problems, and generally running rampant without fear of reprisals.
At my last company, I was the one who followed the cell phone rule (none), clocked in and out normally, taught and trained techno-illiterates to be useful, only one with a real technical background and an IT cert of two, helped break an employee theft ring by keeping honest records, and never turning anyone away who needed help.
For my troubles, I was told by the head man himself that I was being put in a department to be failed on purpose. It did and I left because of disgust and a couple of AAs got my old job plus weeks of training and the ear of the main manager.
LOL!
As a military guy with a very specialized job, I resemble that remark.
If I get canned, I'm gonna be living under an overpass.
Where did you read that none of them did? Lead-in to the story said the cuts were across all departments, and even included firefighters and dogcatchers. Who'd they miss?
GOP controlled area
Not really
“We told all the illegals the approaching radiation plume will cause them to grow horns and their babies will have two heads...Get ready for your new arrivals muchacho.”
Was your statement supposed to make any sense?
Sad about the guy jumping off the roof but union workers voting for liberalism and the hussein - what did they expect.
The other people’s money is running out in California.
I wasn’t the one with the two decades experience. But I was fired by an AA monkey, who had been promoted to management 6 months after being hired, despite others in front of him (not me, who never had mgmt ambitions.) The company fired 25% of its IT in two years, replacing them with Bangalore people, who’d stay on the job for 6 moths or less, such was competition for their talents over there, requiring constant training from the US side, but it evidently paid off for the company. In a short run, anyway. Who pays attention to anything beyond the next quarter? The company was soon sold to a European firm, which, I suppose, solved their cash problem - most of their cash was parked overseas, and you know the story of American firms not being able to bring back their foreign earning without being penalized for the good deed.
More from the LA Times:
“City officials said the cuts were the first step in a plan to outsource many services to the private sector and significantly reduce the number of workers at City Hall.
The six-month termination notices affect 213 of the city’s 472 full-time employees and cut across departments: firefighters, maintenance workers, jail staff, even dogcatchers.”
Moments later, the city council double-checked the lay-off roster and realized their mistake. His job was safe.
He was young enough to join the military though. This whole economic atmosphere is making my decision to complete my twenty plus years pretty damn prescient!
*
I had an illiterate AA as a supervisor at a state agency for a few years. The guy turned off spell check and never could grasp cut and paste and this was a technical job.
He was a puppet of the tech manager upstairs and it was so sad in a way. The other puppet was a loud mouth 55 year old redneck ass-kisser/informer.
I run into so many since I am reduced to contractor jobs (which I like better in some respects) that have absolutely no clue and are always back for project after project. One (somehow) managed to shut down a supersized financial callcenter including voice, data, and apparently main power too. The PM would never tell me exactly what he did but all he would say was the action was a common sense one and the guy had no sense.
He tried to get rid of him but the guy stayed on for whatever else there was for a few weeks but was told he was stuck. Glad I wasn’t there.
“Part of Barry’s “new norm”. The commies are running the planet now. We’re going to have to live by their rules. Kiss freedom and liberty goodbye. Our asses are belong to the commies now.”
Helped by TV viewers in HD because all of TV loves him and protects him. Fox is only marginally better and cable/sat TV bills are divided up among the networks/channels.
He can do anything he wants because TV and the newsmedia support him and he knows it.
Out of perhaps 200 IT people on 3 continents, the company had one black cat, he graduated from IT Operations when there were still IT operations, he handled backups and restores, and he dressed in purple suits, and such, real nice cool dude, fantastic guy, but not the modern assimilated black with an MBA. He was laid off. No African-Americans in the department. So they hired this monkey, who, paradoxically, wore dreadlocks, but spoke, or rather whispered the proper English of the Good Negroes like Obama, showed no leadership qualities whatsoever, was skilled enough as a Java programmer, and they promoted him almost immediately, his underlings all over 50 and over 20 years older than him, the kind that would be insecure in their jobs to complain about him. But he was, I must say, OK, non-confrontational, unlike his boss, there was no reason to dislike him, even if there was no reason to love him.
Stop taxing the bejeevers out of people and let them save enough for their own retirements and not be a burden on younger generations to fund it.
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