Michael Bloomberg announced his proposed $63 billion budget for New York City at a news conference on May 6, detailing the devastating cutbacks he says are needed to close a $5 billion budget deficit in time for the legal deadline of July 1.
Although newspaper editorialists praised the billionaire Mayor’s proposals as moderate and responsible, and said they would have been far worse if the city hadn’t made earlier cuts, this only means that workers in New York are already suffering and will be facing far greater attacks in the immediate future. The most dramatic of the planned cuts affects the school system. The budget would reduce the number of public school teachers by 6,700, the first such layoffs since the city’s near-bankruptcy of the mid-1970s.
Other cutbacks include the elimination of 400 firefighter jobs and the closing of 50 senior centers and 17 day care centers. Five thousand city workers’ jobs would be wiped out, in addition to those of the teachers, though the Bloomberg claims these will be cut via attrition. Among the few areas to be spared is the police department, with Bloomberg pointing to the latest failed car bomb plot in Times Square as the reason.
To make the education cuts even more deep-going, the Bloomberg administration is calling for doing away with seniority rules in implementing the layoffs. This would supposedly allow the city to retain good young teachers, but would in reality allow the layoff of higher-paid and more experienced educators. Chancellor Klein said the layoffs should begin with the 2,000 teachers who received unsatisfactory ratings from their principals.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/nycb-m10.shtml