Facing layoff, California city worker commits suicide

[Hannah Bell]

On March 17, nearly half of the workforce in the Southern California city of Costa Mesa received “pink slips,” termination notices effective in six months. That afternoon, one of those workers, 29-year-old Huy Pham, a city maintenance employee, committed suicide by jumping off the fifth floor of the Costa Mesa Civic Center building.

Pham, who had worked for the city for four and a half years, was helping to support his mother and an extended family....At about 3:20 p.m., witnesses saw him leap from the eastern rooftop of City Hall.

As workers gathered at City Hall, several lashed out at City Council members and blamed them for Pham’s death. One man cursed at the city manager. Others rushed at council members entering the building. One worker, stricken with grief, had to be restrained by his comrades from physically assaulting two city officials.

Costa Mesa is in its fourth year of budget deficits, largely due to a much smaller tax base as a result of collapsing housing prices and falling sales tax revenue from large area retailers... City Councilman Jim Righeimer, a right-wing real estate developer, is leading the attacks. He is a vociferous backer of targeting labor costs, including pensions.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/mesa-m30.shtml

[aquart]

1. Won't be the last time.

[flpab]

2. Space Center layoffs

They are saying it was a tragic accident but a long time employee from KSC "fell" from the 215 level and died a couple of weeks ago. His family will now be taken care of. Very sad and NASA is not calling it anything else because of their lovely moving Gifford-Kelly story they have going at the moment. Over 6000 layoffs of top dollar jobs my husband included. NASA and their cronies will be alright, it is the men and women that do the hard work to get that shuttle off the ground and back that are losing their jobs and they knew this was coming for years but never had the leadership to get their act together to have another vehicle in place to take us to the space station. Now we pay Russia.

[flpab]

3. whitenewsonly?

Wow, went to get a link to the story and got a yahoo search for whitenewsonly, very scary site and did they ever have the facts twisted. It is all Obama's fault. Anyway the local paper has taken the story down and the workers out there posted comments saying it was a cover up and that he did indeed jump, for one thing he had no safety harness on.