LA to Lose More Jobs

It looks like things are going to get a lot worse in the city of Los Angeles then it will before things get better, at least in terms of budgets and jobs that is. The city has decided that it needs to make some job cuts to its court system in a big way. The city is getting ready to be rid of, or otherwise impact 431 workers in a bid to cut back on their spending. The impact will come in three forms. The first will be layoffs. The second will be forced cuts to the workers pay. The third will be the forcible transfer of the workers as they are moved out of facilitates that are going to be closed.

While at the moment we do not have specifics about how many workers are going to be impacted by each type of cut we do know that they are likely to end up with something similar to the numbers for a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days. So given the number of impacted a mass layoff action is likely.

Of course, this is not the first time that we have talked about layoffs to civil servants in LA this year. Some of you may recall our earlier coverage about losses to civil servants, but for those of you who did not catch it here is an excerpt that will get you up to speed in no time at all, “The new proposal made by the city major, Antonio Villaraigosa, is getting ready to cut loose 669 workers from the city payroll. According to the current estimates only about 231 of those jobs lost are expected to come from traditional layoffs. Other methods, such as attrition and the non-renewal of contracts for some workers. So even though the 231 number sounds much more reasonable it is likely not to by the only number of people actually put out of a job. In addition the city hopes to raise the retirement age to 67, cut down on the size of the pension for newer city workers and generally shrink services offered by the city. All of these cuts are designed to help the city shore up a major hole in the coming fiscal years budget. The city is currently staring down the barrel of about $238 million in deficit.”

With a hole in the budget that big it is hard to say just how bad things will get before they get better. The city is handing out the layoff notices today.