Puerto Rican government announces massive layoffs....suicides...

[Hannah Bell]

The Puerto Rican government announced last Friday that 7,816 public employees are to be sacked. This will be the first round of layoffs that could result in 30,000 terminations this year. The layoffs are part of Governor Luis Fortuño’s plan to reduce a government budget deficit of $3.2 billion...

The measure would increase the island’s unemployment rate, which recently reached 14.7 percent.

At the Medical School in the Southern City of Ponce, authorities announced a program to forestall a wave of suicides as the layoffs take place. José Enrique Cangiano, who works at the Medical School, explained, “Taking the economic circumstances we are living through, in the socio-economic structure that surrounds us, the unemployment that these layoffs will produce places additional stress and could lead to suicides. We need to preempt this because the suicide problem is getting worse,” he said.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/wkrs-j02.shtml

[leftstreet]

1. Why does the working class commit suicide instead of .... oh, never mind

That article is sad

:-(