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

New York City is becoming the inequality capital of the nation. Wealth beyond imagination looks down on grinding poverty and a middle class steadily losing ground - a recipe for chaos and conflict.

Yet our mayor is in touch with only the wealthy 1 percent as he turns his back on the poor and the working class. New York City once built the finest array of public services in the nation - services that improved the lives of working and poor people, striving minorities and immigrants, and gave all families hope that their children could go on to productive, rewarding lives.

But hope shrivels as the mayor chisels our public schools, libraries, public housing, public health clinics and social services, squeezing budgets and contracting out jobs to firms with employees in faraway places.

From 2000 to 2010 - basically, the Bloomberg years - incomes in the city's wealthy neighborhoods shot up by 55 percent, while middle-income and poorer areas fell behind. The 2011 poverty rate was the highest in years and a record 50,000 people, including 20,000 children, now sleep in homeless shelters every night.

Our hope is focused on electing a new mayor in November, and DC 37 has invited those who want our support to our Mayoral Forum on May 16 (see back page). The recommendation of our political Screening Committee and the decisions of our Executive Board and Delegates will have a major impact as our Green Machine volunteers campaign citywide for the candidate we back.

Mayor Bloomberg's legacy is that he compounded the pain of the national recession with his own layoffs. Now we need a progressive leader who will use budgeting, labor policy, education and economic development to relieve economic misery. We need to replace a mayor who has wasted billions of dollars using contracting out to avoid hiring and promotions with a bold executive unafraid to restore the civil service system that has traditionally offered minorities and women bias-free access to public service jobs.

Bloomberg dumps costs on the future mayor

Speaking for Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway IV just told the Citizens Budget Commission (which represents business elites, not average citizens) the city has no money for pay increases to cover the years that city workers have been waiting for contracts. Then, in a snobbish insult to working people, he said we are lucky to have jobs at all.

The rising cost of food, rent, subways and everything we need has cut our members' buying power sharply since our last pay hike four years ago. The teachers have waited six years for a raise, and not one municipal union has a current contract. Yet all along the mayor has given private firms contracts loaded with cost-of-living bonuses ranging from 2 percent to 7 percent a year.

By not budgeting for retroactive increases - a standard feature of city workers' contracts for decades - Mayor Bloomberg is irresponsibly trying to dump the costs onto the next mayor. We need a new mayor strong enough to take fiscal responsibility and respect the hard-working people who keep this city running every day and answer every disaster with dedication and heroism.

Bloomberg said there would only be pay raises if we found the money. We accepted the challenge. We did the research. We know the money is there, stashed by the mayor in various reserve funds, and we know more would be available if he collected taxes and fees that are owed to the city and rescinded unnecessary corporate tax breaks. The city will end this fiscal year with a surplus, not a deficit. What is lacking is the political will to do the right thing.

We will work hard to elect a better mayor in November, but we are not accepting zeroes from this one. DC 37 and all the unions in the Municipal Labor Committee are bringing the fight to Bloomberg's doorstep with a giant City Hall contract rally at 4 p.m. on June 12. If you want a pay increase - if you want a mayor who respects you - join me at City Hall on June 12.