Firing back at President Trump’s massive job and spending cuts, City Councilor Benjamin Weber suggested that Boston look at ways to hire some of those laid-off federal workers to fill 2,000 vacant city government jobs.
He may not have meant to, but Weber’s proposal raised some questions.
What are these 2,000 vacant jobs? How much do they pay? In what departments? How has the absence of these workers affected how the city is run and how public services are delivered? Do all those vacant jobs need to be filled, or can Boston save much-needed funds through attrition?
Weber’s focus, however, was on using these vacant jobs as a landing pad for the federal workers dumped by Trump.
“As of April 2024, the City of Boston had nearly 2,000 vacancies across multiple city departments, including many of those positions remaining unfilled for extended periods of time,” the councilor wrote in a hearing order Monday. “The City of Boston should examine whether it should recruit and train federal employees who have recently fallen victim to draconian, mass layoffs without cause.”
Lots of people have been laid off from private sector jobs in Boston and Massachusetts. In January of 2024, 730 were let go at Boston-based Wayfair, and almost 5,000 tech workers lost their jobs last year in the Bay State, most in Greater Boston, according to Axios. Where was the plea then to give these folks prime consideration for unfilled city jobs?
Or do layoffs only matter when they’re in the public sector?
Weber said his hearing order, which he plans to introduce at Wednesday’s City Council meeting, “is more of an issue of filling long-term vacancies in the city workforce that we already budget for than increasing the budget.”
Just how long have these jobs gone vacant, and what’s happening to the money budgeted for them that’s not being used?
“Where people like our veterans are going to be denied basic services, and where we have some long-term job vacancies in the city government, I think it makes sense to see if we can bring in experienced government workers to provide some of the basic services that our residents are going to be deprived of if we don’t take action,” said Weber.
If there are long-unfilled vacancies affecting basic services, why wasn’t “action” taken sooner?
Cutting government spending isn’t a bad idea just because Trump is doing it, and Boston’s budget warrants scrutiny. The city’s $4.6 billion budget grew by 8% this fiscal year. The city’s payroll grew by more than 2.28% last year, from $2.14 billion to $2.19 billion.
It’s not just pay hikes spiking the numbers: the Wu administration created 54 new positions last year, as part of the 301 new positions that have been created since the mayor took office in November 2021.
So we have thousands of unfilled jobs, and we’re creating new ones.
“These mass layoffs are being done without any thought to the impacts that may have on the public or to the workers themselves,” Weber said in a statement to the Herald.
The impact on the public is to trim some of the costs born by taxpayers, a chilling thought to those on the public payroll. Layoffs are devastating to the workers affected, whether they’re in the public sector or private.
City staffing (and the taxpayer dollars that fund it) calls for transparency and efficiency. It is not a tool for resistance.
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