Chicago Public Library officials gave 30 days’ notice to an unspecified number of unionized library workers July 1 that they must either accept a lower-paid position or be laid off effective August 1. Setting off a domino effect, the process began when Librarians V were informed that they must, in effect, bump Librarians IV, who were told that, if they had sufficient seniority, they too would be entitled to bump downward. Mayor Richard Daley has ordered personnel costs to be cut for every city department, which is intended to save Chicago some $9 million citywide of an anticipated $115-million shortfall, city budget office spokesperson Lisa Schrader told American Libraries. The library is being asked to cut just over $1 million.
“I don’t think [the public] will feel it at all,” CPL Commissioner Mary Dempsey said in the July 4 Chicago Sun-Times, explaining that her aim was to put “the smallest number of people completely out of a job.” Daley spokesperson Roderick Drewes told AL, “Those laid off will probably come from the clerical pool,” adding that all city employees earning more than $55,000 (including Dempsey and Mayor Daley) will have taken three furlough days by the end of 2002 to save an additional $1.5 million.
“I don’t believe any layoffs are necessary,” Roberta Lynch, deputy director of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees’ Council 31, told AL. Noting that library funding, which comes from property taxes, is unaffected by the multimillion-dollar shortfall in the city’s corporate fund, Lynch questioned why Daley would “undermine the cause of stimulating reading and access to books in a city where so many kids are dependent on the library just to do their homework.” Confirming that the fiscal crisis “is a corporate fund issue,” Schrader told AL that Mayor Daley has nonetheless ordered personnel cuts “across all funds.”
Posted July 8, 2002.