Feeling duped and bitter, public employees scheduled to be laid off under fiscal emergency Law 7 called for the people of Puerto Rico to support them in a general strike in their prolonged fight to keep their jobs, some of the workers told the Daily Sun.

Unionized workers at Minillas Government Center protests last week said the commonwealth agencies that laid them off have either hired private companies or “trust” employees to do their work.

Many said they voted for the governor, but were outraged by his about-face on his pledge to address the island’s fiscal crisis without laying off public workers. They all said they would participate in a prolonged general strike.

They described situations within their agencies that included employees getting extra work after being assured they would not be laid off, but then falling under the hatchet in the second round of layoffs under Law 7. These stories reveal apparent irregularities within the agencies.

Such was the case with Samuel Carrasquillo, 32, who worked at the Permits and Regulations Administration, or Arpe, mailing room for six years before being laid off.

He said his supervisor — Arpe Internal Resources chief Carmen Márquez — told him and other co-workers, who were also subsequently laid off, that their jobs would be safeguarded by a reserve account if they helped organize the agency’s 34th anniversary celebration.

Carrasquillo said the agency held this celebration at an Aguadilla waterfall theme park Sept. 15, just days from the government’s Sept. 25 announcement it would layoff 17,000 in the second round of firings.

“Supposedly there is a fiscal crisis, but she said there was a secret agency account from which the money would come to keep us in our jobs. I guess she fooled us,” he said.

Dana Angulo, 45, who worked eight years in Arpe’s endorsement division, said her layoff was postponed until Jan. 8 due to a court ruling that notifications at her agency were done without due process.

Angulo said Arpe’s anniversary celebration was paid for by the engineers and builders who normally submit projects to be approved by the agency.

“Of course, it’s a conflict of interest, but this has always been going on here,” she said when asked about this alleged practice.

Despite the government’s spending millions to contract private human resources companies, there were many irregularities in the Law 7 layoff process at Arpe and other agencies, Angulo said. She said that after workers were sent information on their seniority in May so that they could correct it, workers were not subsequently notified if their corrections were taken into account.

“All of the seniority data was plagued with errors,” she said.

Angulo said she was on vacation when workers in her area were notified in September of the layoffs. She said that the work of those who have been notified they would be laid off is being given to others, even before the layoffs take effect.

“We are going to work, but find that there are no tasks assigned for us,” she said.

Angulo said the private sector is not the panacea the Fortuño administration tries to make it out to be. In fact, she said, many public employees like her came from the private sector.

She said she worked at a Cayey Procter & Gamble pharmaceutical plant for six years before being laid off from the job.

“How are we going to get work in the private sector when Johnson & Johnson announces that they are going to cut 8,000 jobs [nationally],” she said. “That’s why I’m in the government.”

Carrasquillo said the mail room job he was fired from was posted on the Labor Department’s Puerto Rico Works job search Web site.

“I applied for it and the next day it was gone,” he said. “There’s no work in the private sector. I have gone to five places and nothing.”

Carrasquillo said he fears he could be arrested for falling behind on his children’s pension payments.

Carmelo Ramos, 44, a driver and messenger in Arpe’s general services division for past three years, said his layoff was to be effective Friday, but was put off due to a court ruling. His wife, Lorna Losada, 42, who worked for the Planning Board’s inventory division for more than six years, was laid off last Friday.

“We came into government thinking it was more secure, but I guess we were wrong,” she said. They both had worked in the private sector.

They have three children ages 22, 19 and 13. The oldest is unemployed.

“I still don’t believe it. It’s really a big blow for us. The governor promised so many things that I never thought he would lay off people,” said Ramos, who noted that while he didn’t vote for Fortuño, he originally thought of him as an “earnest and honest person.”

Ramos said he will use pay from his prolonged stay to pay off accumulated bills and debt. He said he would not consider leaving the island to look for work because he owns his house.

He said that in contrast to the struggle in the late 1990s against the sale of the Puerto Rico Telephone Company — which went through despite a 41-day strike by workers of the then-public corporation and several single-day general work stoppages — there is too much at stake in the massive layoff of public workers.

“I do ask the general public to support us, because today it may be me, but tomorrow you could find yourself in the same situation,” he said. “I know that if the people unite we can stop this.”