Right Wing Mayor Attacks Public Sector Unions

Rahm Emmanuel.

The mayor-elect was cagey on the subject during the campaign, but massive tax increases are off the table, and so are big bailouts from Washington DC.  According to Time magazine, the campaign has spoken cryptically about saving $110 million from reducing “outdated and duplicative work processes to focus on front-line service delivery.”  Translate that out of bureaucratic Newspeak and it means getting more work done with fewer people: layoffs.  Emanuel says that the city’s generous pensions need to be preserved, but may also have to be, ahem, renegotiated.  This does not sound like a renegotiation up.

Strip away the fluff and the rhetoric and it looks as though Chicago’s new mayor plans to balance the city budget primarily through layoffs and cutbacks.