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This morning’s Sun-Times reports that the Daley administration may have to pinkslip 1,000 city employees to try to make up for a huge budget deficit, though city officials still haven’t specified how large it is or where exactly the money’s short. Chicago Federation of Labor leader Dennis Gannon was predictably wary of the plan to slice the city payroll, saying layoffs in 1992 and 2002 had already pared the workforce down as far as it could go. “We’ve cut to the bone already,” he said. “Now, you’re at the bone marrow.”
Beneath the rhetoric, it is true that the city payroll dropped by about 1,200 during Daley’s 1992 cuts, and it declined by another 1,000 during the late 1990s. But it’s barely changed over the last ten years, even as the budget has gone up more than 50 percent—and Daley twice was reelected decisively.
YEAR
PAYROLL
BUDGET
1991
41,800
$3.3 billion
1992
40,600
$3.4 billion
2000
39,500
$4.3 billion
2003
37,500
$4.2 billion
2005
38,700
$5.1 billion
2006
39,600
$5.2 billion
2007
39,800
$6.0 billion
2008
38,700
$6.3 billion
