Mayor Rob Ford issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to city staff on Friday: take a buyout or face layoffs. “If they don’t take the package, what else do we have to do? We might have to lay ‘em off” he told Sun News Network during an interview in which he also criticized idle bureaucrats and vowed to sell off the city’s theatre and zoo assets.
Asked by host Sue-Ann Levy if he would invoke layoffs, Mr. Ford said, “I don’t know if we have a choice.”
His comments reiterated views he shared last month that the city had “thousands” too many staff and that pink slips would be issued if a buyout plan didn’t succeed in convincing enough workers to leave. “We just can’t carry 53,000 employees any more.”
Both union and city sources told the Globe and Mail at the time that the buyout package, which offers unionized workers three weeks’ pay for every year of service, was unlikely to lure more than a few hundred employees from the municipal payroll, clearing the way for layoffs.
During his campaign, Mr. Ford promised to trim the city’s workforce buy attrition.
Mr. Ford says he’s found proof of Toronto’s bloated payroll at the City Hall cafeteria, where municipal bureaucrats waste time when they could be returning phone calls.
“I go down there this morning,” he said. “And I see like 20 bureaucrats at 10 o’clock. I don’t know if they’re having a party for somebody. And I’m thinking like what’s going on here. They didn’t see me. But I’m going to look into this. If they’re having a breakfast party or whatever it is, that sort of culture, they should be at work at 10 o’clock in the morning...I might have to make an example of a few people.”
The mayor admitted “there very well could be” a strike in the city in reaction to his hard-line labour stance.
Of the recent 22-hour executive meeting he chaired, Mr. Ford said the only people who showed up to speak were “all the people who were getting grants saying don’t take my free money, my grant money. All the special interest groups. Again, let’s call it for what they are, they are the left-wing NDP people who always got this money handed to them year after year after year.”
The also stated his desire to sell the Toronto Zoo and a number of Toronto’s performing arts theatres.
“I don’t think we should be in that business,” he said.
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Source:Globe&Mail
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