PEP, December 2010: Bloomberg to kill 10,000 jobs

Public Employee Press

Bloomberg to kill 10,000 jobs

DC 37 demands mayor collect neglected taxes as he seeks 6,000 layoffs (900 hit soon)

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Hundreds of DC 37 members could get pink slips soon as the city implements a plan to wipe out over 10,000 municipal jobs in the next 18 months.

Facing a projected $3.3 billion budget gap, Mayor Michael Bloomberg last month announced that he would eliminate 2,102 positions by June 30, 2011, and 8,264 more in the year starting July 1.

"The city's workers should not be asked to bear the burden of this financial crisis," said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts.

Before Bloomberg issued his mid-year budget modification on Nov. 18, Roberts wrote him, specifying revenue enhancements that could help avoid slashing jobs and services.

All told, the city would cut 10,366 positions - 6,201 through layoffs and 4,165 through attrition - in the next year-and-a-half. Almost 900 of the layoffs would hit before June 30, 2011, and probably much sooner than that.

The budget changes would eliminate 6,200 teacher slots, almost 4,300 of them by layoffs, as federal stimulus funds end.

Mayor's layoff targets

The nearly 2,000 planned layoffs in non-teaching and non-uniformed jobs would include:

workers at the Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Public Library
151 Administration for Children's Services employees, including 118 administrative and support staff and 27 Child and Family Specialists
193 workers at cultural institutions
62 Health Dept. employees, and
129 clerical, technical and other employees in the Dept. of Finance.

As PEP went to press, the city had not issued layoff lists or details on the titles slated for layoffs. The union will aggressively monitor any layoffs to ensure that the city follows union contracts and civil service law, said Evelyn Seinfeld, acting director of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept.

One positive aspect of the budget modification is a plan to hire 61 new revenue-producing staffers at the Dept. of Finance. The New York Public Library has indicated that aggressive fund-raising should let it avoid layoffs.

Furloughs and pay cuts

Besides the layoffs, Bloomberg's budget modification included a number of legally questionable measures.

These include converting 1,468 full-time Parks Dept. jobs to nine-month positions, furloughing 641 Transportation Dept.
employees for a week in the winter, and eliminating 350 Police Dept. civilian positions despite a court order for the department to replace uniformed officers in desk jobs with non-uniformed workers in Local 1549.

In the letter Roberts sent Bloomberg on Nov. 9, the union recommended steps the city could take to generate up to $500 million in additional revenue and savings:

collecting an additional $22 million in fees for New York City Transit billboards
collecting taxes and fees on all 9,000 cell phone antennas to generate an additional $19 million to $27 million
eliminating certain property tax exemptions and collecting taxes on newly constructed properties, generating over $173 million in extra property taxes, and
pressing city vendors to cut the cost of their contracts by 15 percent to cut city spending by $316 million.

In addition to the $500 million in recommended revenue enhancements, DC 37 continues to press the city to find savings in its bloated $10 billion procurement budget for more than 19,000 contracts.

Comptroller John Liu also urged the city to "identify and trim any fat around city contracts. Specifically, agencies should question whether contracts are truly necessary and ask for reasonable cost concessions from major contractors as the MTA has successfully done."