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

WE LIVE IN A STRICKEN CITY, surrounded by suffering. Poverty and hunger are rising and more families with children than ever before are living in homeless shelters.

The recession has thrown millions of working people on the scrap heap with foreclosures ending their dreams of homeownership and Republicans in Congress blocking extensions of unemployment insurance.

The mayor of New York City fought against "fair share" taxes for the wealthy, but his administration has been crushing working families with higher sales and property taxes, rising rents and water fees, and so many parking tickets that they are really a new form of taxation.

Layoffs have already hit the city workers who provide the services New Yorkers need, and today these employees are being tortured by constant threats to their pay, their important health benefits and their modest pensions.

Now the mayor is making the hard times harder and increasing the fear and misery. His proposed budget changes would lay off thousands of public employees, wipe out 10,000 jobs over the next 18 months and slash important services. The deepest cuts in the next six months would hit libraries, cultural institutions and the Administration for Children's Services, and thousands of teachers would be targeted after July 1, 2011.

The rats are dancing on our subway tracks, but the mayor refuses to bring back laid-off pest control workers, even after the City Council provided the funds. (Is this a childish macho game of "You can't make me do it" at the expense of public health?)

Two of Bloomberg's plans would unilaterally cut our members' pay: So-called one-week layoffs of DOT road repair crews would be like the payless furloughs the governor tried until DC 37 and other unions went to court and a judge ruled it illegal. Reducing Parks employees' work year from 12 months to nine months - a 25 percent pay cut - would involve a "mandatory subject of bargaining" under our labor laws. As we fight this budget, I will stop at nothing to block these apparently illegal moves.

Reduce the suffering

The job of a mayor in tough times is to reduce the suffering, not increase it. The tragedy is that if this mayor would do his job right, these cuts would be unnecessary.

Before he issued these harsh budget proposals, I wrote him detailing some of the business taxes his administration should start collecting - money the city is entitled to. I also described the simple voluntary cost reduction program that Chicago and Los Angeles have used to trim spending on outside contracts. Here's how much the city could save - a total of over $500 million:

• $22 million by collecting proper taxes on billboards
• Up to $27 million by taxing all 9,000 cell phone antennas instead of only 3,300 of them
• $173 million by eliminating inflated property tax exemptions, which have more than doubled since Bloomberg took office
• $318 million by pressing personnel and professional services contractors and consultants to reduce their rates, which have increased by 79 percent in the last five years.

The public and city workers are suffering while the city neglects available revenue and the hidden workforce of consultants and contractors enjoys huge profits. Any responsible government would collect the taxes and ask the contractors to shoulder their fair share of the pain.

The approaches I am suggesting could close a half-billion dollars of the city's budget gap without one layoff, without putting one more child at risk of abuse and neglect and without depriving one neighborhood of libraries by day or fire protection at night. Mr. Mayor, are you listening?