Layoffs

The Los Angeles City Council moved forward Wednesday with a plan for layoffs and furloughs but declined to end discussion over a proposal to give employees early retirement, leaving that question to its labor negotiators. As they struggled to eliminate a $405-million budget shortfall, council members said they still hoped the city's negotiators would come up with other budget solutions over the next two days that would help them avoid the most draconian cuts. The council referred the early retirement plan to the Executive Employee Relations Committee, which is composed of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and four council members.

The University of California remains outstanding. By some rankings, three of its schools are among the top 20 universities in the world. But for how long? The budget has been cut by 20%. The Board of Regents votes today on UC President Mark Yudof's plan to deal with the shortfall. Yudof's original proposal included salary cuts across the board of 8% or furloughs leading to an equivalent reduction. This at a time when UC salaries are already 10% or more below those at peer institutions.

Archimedes, who knew about such things, said that with a long enough lever and a solid place to stand, he could move the world. Watching Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa trekking around the city this week, making the case for dramatic action to correct the structural deficit that threatens to push Los Angeles into insolvency, was a bit like watching a man intent on moving the civic world as we've known it. And it was clear he believes he's found his...

An independent auditing firm has concluded that Compton's budget crisis is so dire that it's an open question whether the city can remain solvent. The auditor's report was made public as the Compton City Council struggles to deal with a fiscal crisis, voting this week to lay off employees. Though city officials did not say how many layoffs would occur, union representatives said they had heard estimates of between 97 and 120. The city budgeted for 575 employees in the current year.

Large and mid-size businesses continued to lay off workers through the end of 2009 but at a significantly slower pace, according to new U.S. employment data. Citing organizational changes, financial concerns and lack of demand for their products, companies let 321,569 people go in what the federal government calls "mass layoffs" of more than 50 employees during the last three months of the year. Among metropolitan areas, the Los Angeles-Orange County region was the hardest hit in the nation, losing about 19,000 jobs.

The Energy Department said that layoffs might be needed to save money at the Nevada site picked for a national nuclear waste dump, even as a Las Vegas newspaper reported that hundreds of thousands of dollars have been paid to settle complaints about quality assurance. Joe Davis, spokesman for the Energy Department in Washington, D.C., blamed congressional budget-cutting, not the settlements, for layoffs that he said could come this summer at Yucca Mountain.

Local teachers union leaders angrily denounced on Wednesday an agreement that would result in sweeping changes to teacher seniority protections in the nation's second-largest school system. They said the pact was reached without their participation and they are weighing court action to block the new policies from taking effect. The union response comes one day after the announcement of a tentative settlement reached between the Los Angeles Board of Education and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and other firms.

Faced with a shortfall now reaching $208 million, the top budget official at Los Angeles City Hall said Friday that he is preparing a list of 500 jobs to be cut from the payroll -- on top of the 1,000 already threatened with elimination. Those reductions, if approved by the City Council over the next several weeks, would bring city government personnel cuts to 3,900 this year. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the council have already agreed to let 2,400 employees retire with full benefits up to five years early.

About 10,000 workers marched through downtown Seoul on Saturday to protest plans by large companies to lay off workers amid a severe economic recession. "Guarantee job security!" the protesters chanted as they pumped their clenched fists into the air. The marchers swarmed out of a park in the center of the South Korean capital and marched along a busy boulevard through two commercial districts, causing traffic jams. No clashes were reported.

Citing worsening conditions in the semiconductor market, Japan's Toshiba Corp. said it plans to slash nearly 5,000 jobs, or about 8% of it work force, and omit its interim dividend payment for the first time in half a century, as it forecast a loss for the year.