By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME, AFL-CIO

Mayor Bloomberg's unrelenting effort to lay off 700 dedicated school employees - mostly African American and Latina women - puts the spotlight on his warped priorities. The mayor is ready to sacrifice the future of our children in working class communities and the careers of hard-working people so he can keep handing our tax dollars to his friends in the private sector.

These essential support workers put the heart in the school system. They offer compassionate care to younger pupils, they monitor hallways, lunchrooms and bus transportation so teachers can concentrate on teaching, and they link students, families, communities and their schools.

This decision is not based on sad financial necessity. The workers on the firing line - mainly low-paid, part-time employees - together are paid far less than this year's

$600 million increase in contracting out by the city Department of Education.

These layoffs are a tragedy, because the city has the money to halt them immediately. The moral outrage is to put these workers in the street while the administration squanders billions of dollars through runaway waste, fraud and corruption in contracting out.

For eight years I have been voicing members' complaints that consultants do city employees' jobs at grossly inflated costs, and DC 37 has done the research that proved the overspending. The City Council is considering proposals to rein in contracting, because people are catching on to how the mayor uses the public's money to enrich his friends in the business world. Here are a few examples:

• Investigators say Future Technology Associates stole $6 million from our schools by overcharging for employees while using low-paid workers in India and Turkey. Administration supervision of FTA's no-bid computer deal was so lax that some oversight officials did not even know the contract's basic terms.
• DC 37 blew the whistle on FTA's overspending more than a year ago, just as we did on CityTime, the worst example of corrupt contracting, where federal prosecutors have arrested a dozen people for $80 million worth of fraud.
• Mayor Bloomberg's Automated Personnel System was supposed to cost only $60 million, but by now, the taxpayers - including our members - have been soaked for $363 million, the job is incomplete and the cost is still rising.

The city could learn from Washington, where the Project on Government Oversight found contractors billing the government double the pay of public service workers for 33 of 35 job titles they studied, many of them identical to our members' jobs. Half of the $320 billion the United States spends on service contracts supports inflated costs, overpaid management and rich profits. Without this waste, the feds could redirect $160 billion toward preventing city and state layoffs.

But rather than cutting waste, our mayor keeps contracting out. While President Obama has introduced the American Jobs Act to stop layoffs and create jobs, the mayor is killing jobs, destroying careers and hurting the working families and communities of our city.

We desperately need the jobs act, which Comptroller John Liu estimates would save or create 50,000 jobs here and avoid or reverse thousands of layoffs in our schools.

As we fight the layoffs, I urge you to ask your U.S. Congress members to pass the American Jobs Act. Call the DC 37 Political Action Department (212-815-1550) for help in reaching them. Tell them we need jobs to keep putting food on the table and providing vital public services.