In Watertown, good news and bad news for jobs

A couple stories from Jefferson County today on jobs from the Watertown Daily Times. First, Samaritan Medical Center in Watertown says it will lay off 23 staff members as part of a restructuring it’s doing (they’re also reassigning 42 others, which is the sort of thing that could mean they’ll have lower salaries or could mean nothing at all other than that they’ll be better used).

Obviously this is quite worrying news for the people who work for Samaritan, and the people who are going to be laid off or reassigned (six people in management and 17 others) may not know about it quite yet — the paper says they’ll be notified over the next couple days. Any loss of jobs in the North Country is always a topic for concern, as well, although as we’ve previously discussed Jefferson County’s doing better than much of the North Country in unemployment. Like the planned cuts at the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center in Ogdensburg (see the bottom of this story for the Office of Mental Health’s press release), the changes at Samaritan are being framed in terms of a shift from inpatient-based care to a more “community-based” setting. So we’ll see what happens with that.

In more positive employment news, it seems like Fort Drum’s furloughed civilian workers won’t be quite as furloughed as had been planned: Their number of unpaid furlough days will be cut from 11 to 6. You may recall the furloughs were the result of the federal sequester, which kicked in March 1 of this year.

The Times reports the reduction in furlough days is possible “due to budget savings within the final few months before the end of the fiscal year at the end of September.” Hm…(there’s more on this in the article but none of it is any clearer.) Anyway, it seems workers will be able to return to their full schedules (and full paychecks) the week of August 18.

Of course, the sequester is still going on, so this probably isn’t the last we’ll hear of it and the issues stemming from it.