February 1, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Washington
The American Red Cross said today that it plans to lay off about 1,000 workers here — roughly a third of its national headquarters staff — at the beginning of March.
The layoffs — part of an administrative restructuring of the national headquarters — are expected to reach into nearly every part of the organization, said Carrie Martin, a Red Cross spokeswoman. “Every department here is being restructured, as far as how we’re going to be doing business,” she said.
The sole exception are employees at the organization’s biomedical facility in Northern Virginia, who will be exempt from the layoffs, Ms. Martin said. Instead, the biomedical section will be asked to find other ways to reduce costs.
In 2003, the Red Cross cut a total of 310 positions from the biomedical section in an effort to reduce its expenses and streamline the section.
Employees will not be officially notified of specific cuts until the Red Cross board approves the planned reduction at the end of this month, Ms. Martin said.
The board and the Red Cross leadership decided that reductions were necessary last November, after they determined that the organization’s revenues were $209-million short of its annual budget of about $3.45-billion.
Many observers inside and outside the Red Cross have attributed its latest budgetary problems to the organization’s fund-raising approach, which emphasizes disaster fund raising and does not focus on building on donations throughout the year. The organization has been without a lead development officer since the departure last month of its acting chief fund raiser, Kathleen E. Loehr.
Ms. Martin said the current deficit was not due to inadequate fund raising, but rather to an unsustainable expansion. In recent years the Red Cross sought to expand its programs and services but has not been able to find revenue to continue to support the new programs, she said.
