By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

The Citizens Budget Commission recently issued reports that call for public employees to become the latest victims in the race to the bottom of wages and benefits that is afflicting American working families.

The CBC reports — which were released in April and lauded in the editorial page of the conservative New York Post — claim (not necessarily accurately) that
public employees in the city now enjoy higher wages than their counterparts in the private sector.

Citing the supposed closing of the wage difference, the commission argues that our health and pension benefits should be slashed. Now that our wages are no longer lower than those of workers in the private sector, so the argument goes, the city shouldn’t continue to compensate its employees by providing them with a decent benefits package.

Of course, whenever an attack is made, you want to consider the source.

So, it’s not surprising that the latest salvo against us should come from the Citizens Budget Commission, whose list of trustees reads like a “Who’s Who” of the power elite.

The trustees represent J.P. Morgan Securities, Inc., Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, Citigroup, Moody’s Investor Service, Goldman Sachs and Co., Proskauer Rose LLP and Merrill Lynch. They happen to be the very people who would benefit the most from the tax cuts that would be possible with deep reductions of the city’s personnel costs.

On its Web site, the CBC describes itself as a “nonpartisan, nonprofit civil organization devoted to influencing constructive change in the finances and services of New York City and New York State government.” In fairness, I should acknowledge that the commission occasionally does make sensible policy recommendations, such as calling for civilianization at the New York Police Dept.

But the commission’s latest analysis amounts to an exercise in intellectual dishonesty.

The CBC uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to claim that public employees are better off than private sector workers. The report compares broad categories of workers rather than specific jobs. But these categories include many low-wage jobs that are rarely used in the public sector.

There is an element of truth to the argument that the wages of many private and public sector workers are becoming more comparable. But the commission glosses over the reason for that trend — the decline in well-paid, unionized manufacturing jobs.

War against labor
The war against labor in recent decades has reduced union representation in the private sector to less than 8 percent, a percentage not seen in a century. This lack of union representation — coupled with downsizing, the export of jobs, the ripple effect of the decline in the real value of the minimum wage and the use of labor-saving technology — explains the erosion of wages of blue-collar and other workers.

Threatened by privatization and budget cutbacks, public employees are far from immune to the assault on working families. But more than a third of the public sector is unionized. For that reason, we have been somewhat more insulated from the erosion of wages and benefits than our brothers and sisters in the private sector.

The commission also complains that the pensions of New York City retirees “are exceptionally generous when compared to benefits provided to retirees of large private sector employers.” Again, this is another effort to put us in a race to the bottom on pensions.

Traditional pension plans are not as common these days as corporations shift to 401(k) plans or fail to even offer retirement benefits. Tragically, as many private-sector plans go belly-up, the government is being forced to take over traditional pensions, leading to huge cuts for retirees.

Regarding the so-called ballooning pension obligations of the city and the state governments, the Citizens Budget Commission ignores that the rise in employer obligations is not simply the result of overgenerous plans but is also the result of the three-year decline on Wall Street that led to tremendous investment losses.

The commission conveniently fails to account for the huge pension losses caused by the corruption scandals involving companies like Enron and WorldCom, Health South, Adelphia and Tyco, as well as financial institutions like Citibank and Merrill Lynch and accounting firms like Arthur Anderson.

So, the way I see it, what the Citizens Budget Commission wants is misery for everyone, except the corporate chieftains they represent.

With our economic agreement nearing its expiration on June 30 and fiscal monitors warning about future deep budget gaps, you cannot ignore the political implications of the commission’s demands. But we won’t let their scurrilous attack on public employees be used to hurt us at the bargaining table.