Layoffs and Downsizing

The Full Monty

How Is Firing 5,000 LAUSD Teachers Preferable to Chipping at Their Huge, Union-Protected Health Benefits?

Merry Retirement​Either we're missing something here, or this is the biggest no-brainer in the history of L.A. education (teehee, oxymoron). The Los Angeles Unified School District is facing at least a $408 million budget shortfall for the 2011-12 school year. No matter what, someone -- make ... More >>

L.A. Teachers Union Loses Historic Lawsuit to ACLU: No More 'Last Hired, First Fired'

Better luck next time, Duffy​Updated after the jump: UTLA plans to appeal the ruling. Update: L.A. Mayor, Board of Education Prez and Superintendent-to-be join the victory lap. This one's for the kids. An L.A. Superior Court judge ruled just a few hours ago, in Reed v. State of California, ... More >>

Union Votes To Authorize Strike Against Westside Hyatt Hotels

​ Unite Here Local 11, a union representing hotel workers at two Hyatt hotels on L.A.'s Westside, voted Thursday to authorize a strike, according to a statement from the group. The vote affected employees at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Century City and the Hyatt Andaz in West Hollywood ... More >>

Police Arrest 13 People At Janitors' Union Rally

​ Police arrested 13 people Thursday during a rally in which union members were protesting the layoffs of 16 janitors. SEIU's United Service Workers West organized the march and rally that drew about 300 people outside the Century Plaza Office Building, which is where the laid off janitors w ... More >>

"Jack Dunphy," LAPD Officer, Decries Cuts To Police Agencies, In An Odd Venue: National Review

​ "Jack Dunphy" is the pseudonym for an LAPD officer who blogs. Today, he laments what's bound to happen when Oakland fires 80 cops. His choice for the lament , National Review's blog The Corner, is an odd one. The conservative magazine was founded by the godfather of the movement, William F ... More >>

360 Los Angeles City Layoffs Set To Begin Today

​About 360 city employees faced layoffs Thursday as the dawn of the new fiscal year means that Los Angeles leaders would have to adhere to a deficit-reduction plan that includes hundreds of pink slips. A last-ditch effort by three City Council members to avoid layoffs, and to accept some conc ... More >>

Chamber of Commerce Applauds City Hall Layoffs

Gary Toebben, CEO of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce​L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council have earned a pat on the head from the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce for approving a budget that includes 761 layoffs.But as the layoff date approaches, the Chamber is worried that the mayor ... More >>

L.A. City Layoffs Set To Begin Wednesday

​Pink slips will go out Wednesday to 278 Los Angeles city employees as part of the 761 layoffs planned by the City Council for the fiscal year that begins July 1. City Hall is still negotiating with the Coalition of Los Angeles City Unions in an attempt to get concessions that could avoid layo ... More >>

L.A. Union Official Threatens To Sue City If It Follows Through With Furloughs

​An official with the Coalition of Los Angeles City Unions threatened to sue if the City Council followed through with a plan to furlough workers for 26 days out of the next fiscal work year in an effort to balance the L.A. budget. Victor Gordo, counsel for the coalition, said that such furlou ... More >>

Mayor Villaraigosa Says 3,500 Will Have Been Cut From City Payroll Come July

Fox News​In a bizarre pronouncement, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa this week told Fox News' Neil Cavuto that 3,500 workers will have been cut from city payrolls come July 1 as City Hall balanced a budget that at one time was recently $585 million in the red. It's bizarre because it's not a number ... More >>

L.A. City Council Puts Off Massive Layoffs

The Los Angeles City Council on Monday put off massive layoffs but agreed to cut 761 city employees in order to reduce $585 million in red ink. Approval of the $6.7 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 came late Monday as the council voted to let city unions have until Oct. 1 to co ... More >>

Mayor Villaraigosa Asks Council To Wait For Union Concessions Before Approving Layoffs

​Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa Monday asked the council to hold off on passing deficit-cutting measures for the city while L.A.'s chief administrative officer negotiates with city unions for concessions that could reduce the number of layoffs required to balance the budget. Such layo ... More >>

L.A. Council Once Again Puts Off Tough Choices

​Surprise, surprise. The Los Angeles City Council on Friday put off a vote on the city's budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1, opting instead to issue dire warnings while threatening to finally make a move on Monday that could result in hundreds of job cuts. City Hall is facing $585 ... More >>

On the Backs of Children

How UTLA's teacher-layoff rules are devastating inner-city L.A. schools

Layoffs Blocked At Trio Of L.A. Schools

​A day after Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decried layoffs at a trio of struggling area public schools as discriminatory, a judge blocked the teacher cuts at the campuses, siding with an ACLU lawsuit's claims. The Wednesday ruling by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge William Highberg ... More >>

L.A. City Official: 1,761 Jobs Must Go

​Maybe Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks was right when he called Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's budget proposal for the next fiscal year a "fantasy." Along with optimistic revenue projections, the document stated that only about 750 layoffs would be needed. On Tuesday, the city's chief ... More >>

Villaraigosa Decries Teacher Layoffs At Los Angeles Unified Schools

​Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday decried layoffs at the Los Angeles Unified School District because, he argued, they often end up leaving the most vulnerable schools with the newer, less-experienced teachers. At a press conference scheduled Tuesday afternoon the mayor was expected to "c ... More >>

L.A. City Contracts Go Overbudget And Unreviewed As City Workers Face Layoffs

Wendy Greuel.​At a time when the city of Los Angeles faces thousands of layoffs in order to deal with a more than $400 million deficit due July 1, City Controller Wendy Greuel says the City Hall is not doing enough to ensure that contracts to outside vendors are not for work that could be done ... More >>

Guessing Game

How L.A.'s budget clouds suddenly parted

Librarians Stake Out Mayor Villaraigosa's House To Protest City Cuts

Getty House, the mayor's official residence.​Once upon a time there was a big-city mayor who ignored a looming budget deficit by trekking to Europe, appearing on a soap opera and hosting an Oscar party. He avoided the problem until last-minute, when it was almost too late. But the mayor had a ... More >>

L.A. County Ponders Layoffs Too

William Fujioka.​Los Angeles City Hall isn't the only place facing budget problems and layoffs: The county of L.A.'s CEO on Monday proposed 131 layoffs as part of a belt-tightening measure to keep the county's books in order. As with the city of L.A., county revenues have been hit by the rece ... More >>

POPEYE 3D: Who Says There Are No Jobs For Journalists?

​Last night, Variety broke the news that Sony is launching a new, CGI 3D Popeye franchise. The 1920s-era comics will be adapted by Mike Jones, who was a journalist on the indie industry/film festival beat until he was sacked by Variety in a major editorial lay off a little over a year ago. In ... More >>

L.A. City Council Aims For 4,000 Total Layoffs

​The City Council on Thursday voted to order city departments to identify and layoff an additional 3,000 employees, above the 1,000 already targeted for cuts. The vote was nine in favor and three abstaining but, once again, layoffs have not been set in stone. Based on a motion by Councilwoman ... More >>

Transferring Jobs No Panacea For City Budget Crunch

​On a week when Los Angeles city administrative officer Miguel Santana expressed optimism that half of the city's planned 1,000 layoffs could be spared through job transfers to independent city departments such as LAX, the L.A. Daily Breeze reported that only 86 open positions could be found f ... More >>

City Sinking $350,000 A Day Deeper Into Red Ink

​Los Angeles city administrative officer Miguel Santana has revised his estimate of how much red ink the city takes on as it fails to slash its $212 million deficit: $350,000 a day instead of his earlier projection of $338,000. That's according to a Q&A the budget maestro did with the Downtow ... More >>

Mayor Villaraigosa Asks What Cuts You Would Make To Heal The City Budget

​Do you have the guts to pull the trigger on 1,000 layoffs, putting good workers and their families in financial peril? Taking a page from the book of ain't-so-easy-if-you-try-it-yourself, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday unveiled a website where residents can weight in with their suggest ... More >>

UPDATE: Sending Trutanich to His Corner

In layoff roulette, mayor aims at city attorney but City Council won't pull trigger

Mayor Begs Council To Make Cuts

​Strange. The same mayor who last week ordered 1,000 city layoffs, and who said he had the authority to make the cuts, on Tuesday urged the City Council to do the deed, begging the question, who is in charge here? "We can't keep saying no to layoffs, no to furloughs, no to department eliminati ... More >>

City Budget Crisis: LAPD Layoffs Put On The Table

​In the ongoing effort to address Los Angeles' more than $200-million deficit, city administrative officer Miguel Santana on Wednesday put officer layoffs on the table. As the City Council pondered cutting 1,500 L.A. employees, Santana gave it the options of laying off 616 recently minted off ... More >>

City Department Heads Revolting Over Mayor's Proposed Cuts

​We have a mayor who last month trekked to Europe and this month made a cameo appearance on the soap opera "All My Children." All this was happening as the city faced its worst budget crises in many years. So you can hardly blame the city's department heads for bristling when L.A.'s absentee l ... More >>

L.A. Tops The Nation In Job Losses

​We've been lamenting the losses handed to us by New York lately, specifically its claim that it gets twice as many international tourists as L.A. Well now we have something we can hang out hat on: Los Angeles beat New York and every other city in ... job losses. Yay. According to the Los Ang ... More >>

City Workers Flood Early Retirement Program With Requests

​The city's early retirement program received hundreds more applications than it can accommodate, according to former Los Angeles Daily News editor Ron Kaye. The program's deadline came and went this week with 2,718 city workers raising their hand to ask to get off the ship, Kaye writes at O ... More >>

Another One Bites The Dust: Washington Post Closes L.A. Office

​In yet another sign of the print media meltdown the venerable Washington Post newspaper on Tuesday announce it's closing its Los Angeles bureau along with its outposts in Chicago and New York. Some of the Posts top journalists (John Pomfret being one) made career stops at the L.A. bureau, a ... More >>

City Moves Closer to Layoffs

There will be blood. That, according to the Coalition of L.A. City Unions, will take the form of a lawsuit to force Los Angeles to honor a pact the coalition says should have gone into effect when the City Council approved it June 26. That agreement postponed city worker cost-of-living raises for tw ... More >>

City Hall Showdown Looms Over Early Retirement Agreement

Who's got a tourniquet? That seems to be the only tool available to the city of L.A. to stop bleeding money -- according to Controller Wendy Gruel, L.A. is spending $1 million a day more than it takes in. Today the City Council is debating an agreement that had been hammered out between Mayor Antoni ... More >>

MySpace Deletes 30% of Workforce

Beverly Hills-based social-networking Web site MySpace is cutting its workforce by 30 percent. According to a CNET report flagged by LAist, the Fox Interactive Media.-owned site has been hit by slow growth, a sluggish economy and tough competition from rival Facebook. CNET says that while some early ... More >>

Some L.A. Teachers Get a Reprieve from Ax

L.A. school superindendant Ray Cortines announced today that the LAUSD is rescinding layoff notices for 505 teachers. The breakdown, according to the L.A. Daily News,  includes "271 non-permanent, secondary English teachers; 114 non-permanent, secondary social studies teachers; and 120 non-perm ... More >>

Bill Rosendahl Unexpectedly Votes for LAPD Hiring Freeze

Over the course of Bill Rosendahl's run as L.A.'s 11th District councilman, he has been called a lot of things by friends and foes alike: eccentric, opportunistic, someone who knows the issues and gets the job done. Few people have ever considered calling the politician courageous, but as a member o ... More >>

School Board Saves 2,000 Teachers' Jobs With Fed Money

School Superintendent Ray Cortines and the school board today announced they were saving about 2,000 elementary school teachers' jobs, thanks to federal stimulus money. It sort of reminds one of the finale of Threepenny Opera, when Macheath's bail money arrives to save him from the gallows -- or, as ... More >>

LAUSD Meets to Finalize Layoffs -- Unions Will Protest

All the drama about Los Angeles Unified School District's cutting of nearly 8,600 jobs seemed to peak last week, when school superintendent Ray Cortines made his final recommendation for the cuts. Today, however, is the moment when LAUSD will actually vote to approve the layoffs, which inc ... More >>

Where Are All the Lawyers Going?

If the recession's exploded one myth it's that lawyers will always be employed, boom or bust. Today's L.A. Business Journal reports that Gibson Dunn & Crutcher has sacked 36 "support staff workers" in its nine offices due to the downturn -- seems individuals and businesses are shying away from l ... More >>

Stage Against the Machine

Cortines Gives Teachers the (Pink) Slip

L.A. school superintendent Ray Cortines only climbed down a few hundred today from his original recommendation of cutting nearly 8900 teacher and support staff jobs to close a massive budget hole. (For 2009-10: $596.1 million; for the remainder of this year: $140 million.) The roughly 8,400 layoffs ... More >>

Pink Slippage: Teachers' Unions Gear Up for Combat

These are not the best of times to be a public school teacher in California. The United Teachers Los Angeles is facing a potential loss of nearly 5,500 instructors from its 48,000-member union due to layoffs -- a devastating blow to any organization that size. The UTLA is gearing up to reduce the ... More >>

Cortines: School's Not Out for LAUSD Teachers

On the day that California's unemployment rate continued to inch toward double digits, many L.A. Unified teachers are breathing a little easier following school superintendent Ramon Cortines' announcement that none will be laid off -- for the time being. Ten days ago the school board told Cortines h ... More >>

Last Supper Lunchbox for Dire Economic Times

How about those layoffs? Those of you who still have jobs, do you still have lunch at restaurants or buy takeout? Magazines and various lifestyle segments on TV "news" programs are saying that to save money, people are brown bagging their lunches more these days rather than eating out. It's probabl ... More >>

No Alternative to Higher Profits

Layoffs at Village Voice send message to investors and employees alike

The Big Kiss-off

On the Edge

In times of war, living-wage backers fight for the jobless