PEP, February 2011: Letters to the Editor

Public Employee Press

Letters to the Editor

Editor's note: This letter was sent to the Daily News, but not published:

The rich should pay a fair share of the tax bill

Your editorial today leaves out one big solution to the city and state budget problems. That is to raise taxes on the millionaires and billionaires back to the rates they were 15 years ago.

After all, they pay a much lower percentage of their income in taxes than the other 99 percent of us. The richest 1 percent have 44 percent of the city's wealth. They also just got their Bush-era tax breaks extended.

Ralph Palladino
2nd Vice President, Local 1549

Retiree says unions make a big difference

I am a retiree since 1993, but I applaud the strong people who are still fighting battles for the working class.

Members of my family are still in the union. Thank God for unions.

It's obvious that if not for the unions, most big cities would only have their officials' friends, connections and contractors working. Our Mr. Bloomberg makes that very clear.

Without unions, most needy and working people would not survive. Keep up the great work.

— Delores S. Williams
Retiree

'Sno way to run city government, Mr. Bloomberg

With the failure of the City of New York to adequately prepare for the amount of fallen snow, which made havoc of our transit system, the majority of City employees were unable to get to their jobs on Monday morning, December 27.

Several MTA trains were not running, bus routes were canceled or stuck in the snow, and unless employees were able to don snowshoes and trudge 20 miles to their respective jobs, they were stuck. It's not that they are lazy and said "Good, snow, let's stay in bed," but there were NO options available.

Many city agencies added insult to injury by charging employees an "annual day" from their accrued leave. In reality, the city had less than 10 percent of their workforce in place, and most left early or arrived late and were excused.

Punishing the other 90 percent of employees, who heeded the public announcements to "stay off the roads" to allow clean-up crews to clear the roads, with a loss of an annual day, is patently unfair to the dedicated city employees who carry on and trudge in daily to their jobs, some of which pay meagerly.

Bloomberg, reverse this unpopular decision and return the day to the employees annual leave!

— Gilbert Sambolin
Local 2627 Shop Steward

CityTime: overpriced, dysfunctional, corrupt

Even if there had been no corruption at all, the contracted-out CityTime project would still be way overpriced at $600 million, and by all accounts dysfunctional as well.

In stunning contrast, the Transit Authority's timekeeping systems, ATS and UTS (which actually function as designed), were developed in-house for less than $30 million, with a good portion of the work being done by members of Local 2627.

— George MacDonald
Computer Specialist, Local 2627

Correction

The January article, "Answering the BIG LIE about city workers' pensions," misreported that retiree Helen King, who lives in a senior residence, is dependent upon Medicaid. In fact, her Medicaid coverage is pending. Thus, Ms. King said, the residence is taking her pension and Social Security to cover costs of $9,000 a month, which significantly exceeds her pension and Social Security payments.