Results tagged “financialclusterfck”

There's news out of City Hall today and for the first time in weeks it doesn't involve Mayor Daley's Prophesies of Doom™. Instead, it seems the Mayor and union leaders have worked out an agreement that could greatly reduce the 929 planned layoffs in the city's 2009 budget. In exchange for offering eligible union members cash incentives for voluntary retirement, union leaders have agreed to reduce the cost of overtime for city workers.

"We have 433 eligible people in the Laborers pension fund. We're hoping around 60 will take advantage of it," Lou Phillips, business manager of Laborers Local 1001, said Monday.

Continue reading "Daley, Unions Work Out Agreement to Reduce City Layoffs"

Mayor Daley's proposed 2009 budget got no love from organized labor this weekend. But Daley's not taking any of their guff by telling them to go along with the plan or be prepared to find a pink slip. On Friday, union leaders and city officials met to discuss the 929 city employees who would be laid off if Daley's budget were okayed by the city council (we wonder what the odds are on that bet).

In order to save some money, Mayor Daley announced today that City Hall would be closed on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and New Years Eve both this year and next. The six day shut-down will save the city approximately $19.8 million total. Sayeth the Sun-Times, "The only city employees scheduled to work those traditionally high-absenteeism days will be police officers, firefighters, 911 center employees and a skeletal crew in departments like Streets and Sanitation, Water, Aviation and Family Services." The stinker? The rest of the city workers will have to take the days off unpaid in order for the whole thing to work. We guess a few unpaid days beats getting laid off. In the event of a snowstorm, the city workers would be called back in.

Ah, those Economic Stimulus checks. Remember those heady days? The Summer of '08, when the government just handed us money and few did what they should have done (pay off credit card debts and mortgage payments) and instead stimulated the economy by purchasing that HDTV they didn't need. That worked well. According to the IRS, almost 100,000 Chicagoa-area residents haven't filed for theirs and the deadline is approaching. Tomorrow, in fact. Illinois ranks 7th nationally in terms of those who haven't filed. Those who still want to file can check out more info at the IRS website. All told, 4.3 million Americans have yet to file for the stimulus check for a total pay-out of $1.3 billion. Look...we know things are tight all over, but $1.3 billion? It wouldn't be the thing in the world if that goes unclaimed and the government could, you know, use it to pay off a small chunk of that $10 trillion debt, would it?