Jerry Copas doesn’t get it.

After ten years of working at the same company his last day will be June 13.

“They gave us about four or five weeks notice,” he said. “I was totally devastated. I didn’t expect it at all, didn’t see it coming. At first I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, it was terrible.”

Copas works at the Workforce Development Center in Albert Lea. His job is to help displaced workers and the unemployed get back to work. Now he’s taken on their shoes. He doesn’t know how laying off those helping others to get jobs is going to work in a bad economy.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “I’m here to get people off of welfare, and because of state budget cuts, they are cutting this position. What is going to happen to all these jobless people?”

Workforce Development Inc. is a private non-profit company that gets government contracts to find work for welfare recipients.

Copas is one of hundreds across the state dealing the ripple effects of the state’s largest deficit in history.

While statewide, the unemployment numbers are slightly less than the national average. The public sector has been hit by lay-offs because of the slashes in state funding for government programs and departments.

Copas said 27 Workforce Development employees from a ten county area in southern Minnesota received their pink slips.

Copas has been laid off before.

After working at Farmstead Foods for two years he came to the Workforce center seeking career placement assistance. He didn’t have to look far, they gave him a job there and he has spent the past decade working with unemployment cases.

In his tenure there he has helped numerous people get back into the workforce.

“In the past five years,” he said. “I have helped over 750 find work. That’s around 3 per week.”

The state’s recent budget cuts hit some of the programs that the center has contracts for. The center was put in the position where they had to cut, according to Brian Vairma, a Workforce Development Coordinator at the center.

Nonna Goin has been a secretary at the development center for two years. Secretaries at each location are being cut, she said. Her biggest worry is not being able to afford her daughter’s medical expenses.

Goin gave birth to a premature baby a few months ago. Her bills for medical expenses are extremely high, but her insurance from her job has covered those costs.

Now, with just a few weeks left working, she doesn’t know where she will come up with the money for the necessary treatments.

“If I find another job and there’s no insurance, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said.

Both Copas and Goin are confident they will find work again, but they’re both hoping it will be sooner rather than later.

&uot;A year from now I will look back and it will just seem like a bump in the road,&uot; he said. &uot;But it sure hurts now.&uot;

Randy Johnson, head of Workforce Development, Inc., was unavailable for comment.