Public Employee Press

Pest Control workers:
Layoffs loom
Local 768 fights firing of 63 workers who clear lots where rats breed

Who will stop the rats?
DC 37 and Local 768 are fighting Health Dept. plans to fire most Pest Control Aides in mid-May. Since the Aides generated $6.4 million in revenue last year and the layoffs would save only $1.4 million, the move raises suspicions that the administration aims to hand the work to outside private contractors.

By ALFREDO ALVARADO

Rusty nails and spikes sticking out from planks of wood, broken beer bottles, and jagged-edged sheets of aluminum siding are among the debris City Pest Control Aides handle every day as they clean up abandoned properties.

The head-high mountains of rubble the Local 768 members dispose of are often riddled with used hypodermic needles, carcasses of dead animals, packs of rats scrambling for food and every so often, human body parts.

The Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene employs only 78 City Pest Control Aides for the entire city, men and women with a life-and-death responsibility — reining in rat infestation and the spread of disease. City plans to lay off most of them May 14 threaten the health of all New Yorkers.

“These workers perform one of the dirtiest and toughest jobs in the city,” said DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts. “Control and reduction of rodents is a critical function of public health. Instead of layoffs, we need more of these workers.”

They also help reduce mosquito infestations, which are linked to West Nile disease. Heavy rains, especially during the summer, create ideal conditions for mosquitoes to multiply in trash-laden lots.

Resurgence of rats

The layoff plan ignores economic common sense. Since the Health Dept. bills the owners of the lots and houses for the cleanup, the pest control crews generated revenue of $6.4 million in the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The plan to fire 63 of the 78 Pest Control Aides would save only $1.4 million.

“If the Aides are fired, we will see a resurgence of rats in the city,” predicts Fitz Reid, president of Health Services Employees Local 768, “and DOHMH will probably hire more private contractors.” He pointed out that the private exterminators the city uses charge three times as much as the Local 768 members earn, although they pay their workers less.

In 2007, when television news showed rats running rampant in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, the city quickly hired a “rodentologist” at a salary of over $100,000. The average salary of City Pest Control Aides is $28,000.

In addition to the pest control workers, the Health Dept. says it will soon lay off 42 Public Health Advisors, eight Supervising PHAs, a Public Health Assistant and a Social Worker — most of them from tuberculosis units in Brooklyn and Queens.

Reid testified against the layoffs in City Council budget hearings and DC 37 and the local mounted an aggressive media campaign to alert the public to the threat. Members and Reid answered reporters’ questions on an array of radio and television news programs.

On a sunny March morning, one crew of Aides tackled an abandoned two-story house packed with garbage inside and out on a quiet tree-lined street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. An irate woman who stays in the house welcomed the crew with a stream of profanity and racial epithets, most of it directed at CPCA Diane Hill, a 12-year veteran who brushed off the comments. “We’re here to do our job,” said Hill. “Sometimes, that is part of the job.”

Despite the distraction, Crew Chief Jerry Cox and his team wasted no time attacking the backyard. “I feel a lot of satisfaction when we’re done and everything is cleared away,” said Cox, as he wrestled with a piece of aluminum siding.

Most properties are foreclosures

The following week a crew in a residential neighborhood in Jamaica, Queens, took on a two-story house on a corner property strewn with garbage front, back and all along one side. Several members of the crew had just received city notices of the looming layoffs.

Many of the abandoned homes are foreclosures. “Now I’m concerned about paying my own mortgage,” said Talib Shakur, a worker with 12 years on the job who is on notice that he may soon be out of work. A family man with two boys, he feels fortunate that his wife has a good job.

In less than an hour’s work, pounds of rubbish vanished from the yard and appeared in neat piles along the sidewalk to be carted away.

“I’m so glad they’re here,” said next-door neighbor Renald Verman, who called 311 for months about the ugly menace to area health and property values. When he learned that the city plans to fire the workers, he asked, “Who is going to clean up this mess?”

That’s what the members of Local 768 want to know.