Anna Valdez didn’t have to worry about layoffs — not until this summer.

The 53-year-old had worked for the city since she was a teenager. Her aunts, uncles and grandparents did, too. Her late grandmother was former mayor Federico Peña’s secretary, she said, and there’s a city library named for her late grandfather, Bernie Valdez.

She was the kind of institutional employee who enjoyed strong job protections. Seniority protections meant the longest-serving workers would be the last in line for layoffs.

“This city is really important to us, and I just think that we have stuck it out,” she said on Wednesday. “It’s not always been easy, but we stuck it out, because this is the rule — that once we put in our time, that we were going to be able to keep contributing.”

But the rules changed thi

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