The Logic of Layoffs
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Mayor Bloomberg on Friday started to talk some sense when it comes to New York’s budget. In his weekly radio address, hizzoner said that thousands of layoffs from the city’s payroll, which now carries the equivalent of about 300,000 employees, would be needed to help close the budget gap. Estimates of that gap, caused by burgeoning spending and compounded by Mr. Bloomberg’s antigrowth policies, have gone up and up as the April budget has approached. Until now, the mayor has not spoken so openly of layoffs.
To achieve the $600 million in savings from the unions, he would need to eliminate about 12,000 jobs. While the mayor does not seem to be contemplating any such purge, such a measure would be less radical than it seems. It would be just 5% of the city’s workforce. The city government’s headcount is about one-seventh the size of the federal government’s civilian workforce. One out of every thousand Americans is a New York City government employee. The city’s workforce outnumbers New York State’s by tens of thousands.
Mr. Bloomberg has resorted to the threat of layoffs only after ramming through an enormous increase in excise taxes, instituting his 18.5% increase on the property of ordinary homeowners, and after proposing to jack up levies on commuters, while New Yorkers also face higher water rates, rising subway fares, and Governor Pataki’s executive budget, which will hit the city with higher Medicaid costs.
Civil service unions have been unable to come to terms with Mr. Bloomberg in a meaningful way. While peddling their own plans to close the budget gap — DC 37 has been hyping the commuter tax — they have shied away from the mayor’s requests for productivity enhancements. The mayor said on Friday that “Anything the unions can do to help us, I will try to use that to protect their jobs.” Hopefully he meant the converse as well — where the unions get in the way, he will wield the ax.
New York’s budget gap is not going to be closed without shrinking the size of the city’s government. And, given its bloated size, there’s no reason for the mayor to present this as a last resort. If he had started cutting first, and avoided tax increases, the city’s economy might have been on the rebound, as opposed to its current slump.
