Thomas MacMillan Photo
Barber and her philodendron.
(Updated 1:37 p.m.) Kristin Barber, a city government disability worker, made an appointment Thursday morning to help a man who was suicidal. Before she could go to meet him, she was called into an office to learn the city has laid her off.
So instead Barber was clearing a philodendron out of her City Hall office. She was one of 82 city employees who received layoff notices Thursday.
Mayoral spokesman Adam Joseph released a list Thursday afternoon of the workers who lost their jobs. Read it here. Another 14 vacant positions were eliminated.
Layoffs hit school teachers, librarians, school security officers and crossing guards. Sixteen cops scheduled to be laid off ended up leading a 200-strong march to City Hall instead. (Read about that here.)
Some people were being laid off for the second time, including Doreen Larson-Oboyski. She works for the Livable City Initiative arranging community flower planting and other neighborhood beautification projects.
Barber works as assistant coordinator of disability services for the city. Or did.
She was told she could work through Friday if she wished. She decided to leave right away.
She wasn’t happy about the layoff, for personal and and for policy reasons.
She was just three months away from reaching 10 years of service. At that point she would have been vested in the city’s pension plan.
Barber, who turned 61 on Groundhog’s Day and lost her husband to a heart attack in November of 2009, said she’s more worried about people she helped in her job.
“There’s nobody else doing my job,” she said. “I work with people who are totally ostracized from other services.” She said she had just helped a one-legged man “living under a bridge” connect with social-service agencies.
“These are the kinds of people I’m helping,” Barber said, then stepped into a white Volvo station wagon and left city service.
The city faces an estimated $5.5 million budget gap for the fiscal year ending June 30, a gap this first round of layoffs is meant to help close. It faces an estimated gap of over $20 million for the next fiscal year. More layoffs are expected to meet that challenge, including some 60 teachers.
Stay tuned here for updates throughout the day.
Sad -- but perhaps some of the essential staff who are being laid off right now (as well as their supposed advocates in City Hall, foundations and other civic minded groups) will start seriously working towards a more progressive system statewide.
The response should be to go out and create public change, not hunker down at home and watch television.
The progressive system that is needed here would all people to have equal opportunity to achieve human dignity -- not be one like the current, which gives excessive tax breaks to wealthy people who criss-cross the state in their obscenely enormous SUVs (some, like Superintendent Mayo's, publicly-subsidized), on publicly-subsidized highways, using publicly-subsidized gasoline, on their way to publicly-subsidized second homes that receive enormous mortgage deductions.
To start with, the gas tax needs to be dramatically raised so that our state can cover the true cost of its economic infrastructure and transportation systems. Sprawl, which has enormous long-term costs, needs to be taxed out of existence using land use policy. For those low income families that could be hit hardest by an enormous gas tax increase, the state should pass an expansion of the EITC.