By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

We are surrounded by tough times — a collapsing national economy and a state with gigantic budget gaps — and our city is facing its own economic crisis. Layoffs are spreading fast in business and industry, dependence on Wall Street’s broken bubble has made New York more vulnerable, and city tax revenues are falling even faster than recent predictions.

As the holes in the budget grow, I am urging City Hall to avoid the kind of self-defeating slashes in services and jobs that in the past socked it to hardworking, productive taxpayers with decaying parks, subways, roads and hospitals, rising crime and falling school scores.

Instead, our elected leaders must take a sharp look at the colossal waste of contracting out, which has grown outrageously over the last five years to the point where it is now a $9 billion cost item in the city’s $60 billion budget. The administration hands over this $9 billion of our money to an unelected, unaccountable “Shadow Government” of outside consultants and private contractors.

These shadowy firms do the same work as our members in city agencies. They clean buildings, run computers, truck food to schools, care for students’ health needs and put up the signs that tell motorists where to park. But the shadow government is fueled by big profits, so it’s a lot more expensive than city employees. And many of the companies involved are incorporated in other states. They take their profits out of the city and give back nothing to our local economy.

The contractors perpetrate a huge fraud on the taxpayers, by pretending to competence but using an untested “parallel work force” of more than 100,000 employees — hired without the “merit and fitness” tests and background checks that the city requires for its own civil service employees.

Handing the public’s work to the private sector is an unacceptable waste at any time and an outrage during the current economic crunch. City employees should be doing the city’s work, and no government official should dare to think about laying off one city worker while the shadow government keeps its parallel workforce in place.

Despite the $9 billion price tag, there’s almost no public scrutiny of the city’s contracting out. In all their years of carping about our pay and pensions (click here), I have never seen the so-called Citizens Budget Commission complain about the city’s oversized payments to private contractors. In truth, they are not fiscal watchdogs, they are shills for business.

DC 37 has been carefully documenting the vast waste in the city’s use of consultants and outside contractors, because we take very seriously our role as watchdogs of the public’s money.

Our money, our jobs
After all, it’s our money being wasted. Some 85 percent of our members live in the city and pay taxes. Union members work hard to bring in the city’s revenue — tax auditors, city assessors, clerical workers in the Finance Dept., hospital care investigators and tow truck drivers, for example. We don’t want to see it squandered.

With our money on the line and our jobs at stake, we are going to lead acampaign to cut the giveaway of city funds and city jobs to the private sector.

We saw the power of the people in the huge vote for President Barack Obama, and I’m glad to see that his recovery plan will help save jobs here in New York City. When we release the results of our investigation of the gigantic waste in contracting out, I believe an aroused public will demand change.