In an organisation where most of the £2 billion revenue budget is spent on hiring staff, how else would you save so much money?
When you have a transformation programme that chiefly involves installing modern IT systems to do the work carried out by thousands of people, and paying outside consultants to run the systems, why would you need to have so many permanent staff on the payroll?
Ironically, in pushing through the Single Status programme, equalising blue and white collar pay and ending unfair wage rates between men and women, the council has given itself yet another financial headache. Staff running libraries, swimming pools and community centres now have to be paid time and a half for weekend working when this was not the case before, cabinet leisure services member Martin Mullaney has revealed.
And the latest report on business transformation to the finance scrutiny committee sheds light on yet another financial black hole.
At least £10.9 milllion of the savings envisaged this year will not now be made, as complex transformation programmes slip behind schedule.
But the money still has to be found in order to balance the council budget.
Ominously, the committee is being told that "urgent work to identify new savings" is underway.
It is all a long way from the words of comfort expressed in 2008 by council chief executive Stephen Hughes and cabinet HR member Alan Rudge.
Between them the pair dreamt up something Orwellian called the Employee Bargain, which proposed that anyone wanting to remain working for the council would have to accept a new pay and grading system and very possibly a wage cut, would have to work wherever and whenever they were told and re-train if necessary in order to switch jobs, but would be rewarded with if not a job for life then the likelihood of employment for the forseeable future.
Clearly what has happened is that the pressing financial need to shed jobs is far greater than has hitherto been admitted and almost all those at risk of redundancy stand no chance of finding another role with the city council.
Council leader Mike Whitby - anyone seen him lately? - attracted some criticism when popping up on the television last year to announce that 800 council jobs would be disappearing in 2009/10. At the time, I suggested he had missed a nought off the end and the real figure would be 8,000.
No one contradicted me then, and it's a figure I intend to stick with.
It will take about two to three years to sack so many people, and in the end 8,000 might be on the low side. But the local government party, in Birmingham anyway, is well and truly over.