230 Quincy (MA) teachers receive layoff notices (But $2.3m in wage giveback may cut number)

[Bluebear]

Another example of how we treat important American resources. Yay, us.

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About 230 Quincy teachers received pink slips yesterday, but officials said the $2.3 million in wage concessions this week by the teachers union will end up saving some of those jobs.

“I’ve been spending the whole day responding to panicked questions and people crying,’’ said Paul Phillips, president of the Quincy Education Association. “Right now, the whole system is in an uproar.’’...

Officials said that the union’s decision Monday to defer a 4 percent pay raise for one year, provided the savings go toward saving jobs, would spare at least 50 positions. But it will be several weeks before it becomes clear which programs and jobs will be lost.

The union made the concessions as the schools faced a shortfall of more than $9 million for fiscal 2011, which begins July 1. The schools had requested $91.6 million, but Mayor Thomas P. Koch allocated about $82.3 million.

The scheduled pay raises for school employees accounted for half of the shortfall.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2010/05/28/230_quincy_teachers_receive_layoff_notices/

[William Z. Foster]

1. downward spiral

Austerity measures (nothing for us, the working class people) and privatization and bail outs (give the wealthy all our money, or else they will make us really sorry) are what have caused the economic problems. Governments are now responding to that with more bail outs and privatization and with more cutbacks and austerity measures, which will lead to more economic collapse, more suffering, more environmental catastrophes and more desperate attempts by the wealthy to extract as much as they can from all of us.

Austerity measures and cutbacks and privatization schemes and bail outs for the wealthy are like throwing gasoline on a fire hoping to put it out. Things could get very bad very quickly at this rate.

[havocmom]

2. Throwing people out of important jobs, or expecting them to do more for less

means less taxes in the coffers. Meanwhile the gap between working people, and even professionals and the top tier gets wider. The working poor and unemployed just don't matter in corporate America. If you are not rich enough to spend spend spend or you are not exploitable labor, they just want you off their lawn. And they have all the lawns.

We are all on the reservation now.