De Blasio Revives Layoff Warning For 22K City Workers

NEW YORK CITY — Mayor Bill de Blasio dusted off a dire warning for 22,000 New York City public employees: your jobs are at risk.

"If we don't have something else that stops it, we do plan 22,000 layoffs on Oct. 1," he said Wednesday. "It's a massive, painful number. It resembles the kinds of things we had to do decades ago, but the job here is to try to avert it if we can."

The layoff warning isn't new — de Blasio brought it up repeatedly as the city grappled with a $9 billion coronavirus-related shortfall in the run up to the recently-approved budget.

But de Blasio stayed relatively quiet on the layoffs as he repeatedly pressed Congress to pass a stimulus and Albany to give the city borrowing authority.

His silence ended Wednesday as a reporter questioned whether his warning was "fear mongering."

"We cut the budget by billions and billions of dollars already," de Blasio said. "I want to be very clear, the overwhelming cost of local government is personnel."

Personnel — meaning 22,000 city employees — now face layoffs after cuts and cuts in other parts of the city budget, de Blasio said.

The number of potentially is sadly real, especially now that talks of another federal stimulus in Congress have sputtered out, he said.

"We're going to Albany to ask for appropriate long-term borrowing capacity that would stave off the layoffs," he said. "If we don't have that, we're going to keep working with labor looking for every solution, every kind of savings."

But once those are tapped, de Blasio warned layoffs remain on the table starting Oct. 1.