|
|
|
Rockford Register Star
  • Library layoffs to be announced Monday

  • ROCKFORD — Rockford Public Library employees expect to learn Monday who will be laid off as part of the library’s financial restructuring plan.

    • email print
  • ROCKFORD — Rockford Public Library employees expect to learn Monday who will be laid off as part of the library’s financial restructuring plan.
    Under a labor agreement struck late last year, the library will lay off 14 to 16 nonunion employees and 14 to 16 union staffers to save money. Labor leaders have been told who will stay and who will go come Monday, said Jay Ferraro, a union staff representative for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, which represents the library’s union workers.
    “I would say employees are worried. They’re anxious,” Ferraro said. “They’re worried about having jobs, having their jobs affected, and they’re worried about their ability to still provide quality services under the new conditions.”
    Ferraro said he has attempted to get a list of people who will be laid off and an explanation of the criteria used to identify employees chosen for layoffs, but hasn’t yet received answers. Library and union leaders agreed to take employee performance and seniority into account when deciding who will be laid off.
    “I’m sure people will have questions,” he said. “We were told it would be by performance, but we don’t know how they’re judging performance. Will it be last evaluation?”
    The actual number of people who lose their jobs could be lower than 30 if some employees take advantage of an early-retirement package that was offered.
    Struggling under the weight of the recession and reduced revenues, the library was dealt an additional financial blow last year when the city decided that it would no longer use property tax revenue to pay for library employee pensions, workers’ compensation and audits, an annual cost of $856,897.
    The loss of city revenue, coupled with the loss of other forms of revenue and an estimated $295,000 hike in expenses, meant the library was facing a $1.7 million deficit in 2010.
    At one point, library administrators considered a plan to eliminate librarian assistants and cut services to youth at the downtown main library. Officials also contemplated closing a library branch. Both of those options have been dismissed in exchange for about 30 jobs — a savings of about $1 million — and a wage freeze, pay changes, reduced hours and increased fines for late materials.
    Staff writer Corina Curry can be reached at ccurry@rrstar.com or 815-987-1371.

        calendar
http://www.rrstar.com/x1377000951/Library-layoffs-to-be-announced-Monday
www.rrstar.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
70142
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:V6E4X2C3B3YSBCQ4J2MPWY3AMZFSAF5G
<urn:uuid:6ea705d5-42d6-41be-bbae-43e00d03f77a>
2015-04-18T09:16:05Z
64.94.90.199
sha1:H2SZCXHKXCZUSPIHVN24WCJXHYA3GF5E
<urn:uuid:5e33021d-4bb9-49d0-b39c-d54966f0cfaf>
http://www.rrstar.com/x1377000951/Library-layoffs-to-be-announced-Monday
response
<urn:uuid:80139f4c-9279-4a50-832a-caae9b802d4c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf