The Bloomberg administration’s announcement yesterday that 3,400 workers will be laid off had something of the feel of the first shoe dropping — belatedly at that. Nonetheless, it reflects the recognition that it will take more than begging concessions of the municipal unions to close the city’s looming $4 billion budget gap. So far, the unions have been less than cooperative, and Mayor Bloomberg certainly doesn’t have Governor Pataki on whom to fall back.

Perhaps the mayor found himself riled up when his April 1 deadline for the unions to come up with $600 million in savings came and went without a meeting — not to mention that the $600 million had rolled into it the original $200 million that the unions never came up with the last time. Or perhaps he’s none too pleased that when the unions have come up with suggestions to save money, those suggestions have consisted of schemes such as the one floated by the Municipal Labor Committee: that the city could borrow money against the pension fund the taxpayers provided — at 8% interest.

The mayor certainly sounds angry these days. “We’re not kidding,” the mayor said on his weekly radio show. “I think anybody who knows me knows we’re not kidding. This is not the old game where the mayor cuts, the City Council restores, the unions scream and then they get paid later on. Those are not these days. We are going to cut $600 million in expenses, which is painful, will be painful throughout the city.” He doesn’t need to protest too much. A city with 248,000 full-time workers can get by with fewer still. Why, as has been asked in these columns again and again, should New York City require a municipal government one-seventh the size of the federal government?

“It’s been obvious from the very beginning that they had to make major reductions in their personnel costs,” a fiscal policy expert with the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon, told us yesterday. “Here we are, basically 15 or 16 months into this administration, going on 18 months since 9/11, just beginning to deal seriously with the personnel issue.” Mr. Bloomberg may have thought he could lean on Albany to avoid the issue, but by now he must be disillusioned. As a reinstitution of the commuter tax looks less and less likely at Albany, perhaps the unions will get the message, too, and realize they will have to cough up more concessions. “Every step of the way we seem a little behind where we need to be,” Mr. McMahon said. Hence the fact that people are still waiting for the other shoe.