By LILLIAN ROBERTS
Executive Director
District Council 37, AFSCME

The headlines about a recovery hide the truth: Only Wall Street is doing better, while average working people are still in deep trouble.

Thanks to taxpayer-funded bailouts, stock market profits surged to a record $61 billion last year, but 15 million Americans are still out of work. Our state has a $9.2 billion budget gap, the governor aims to cut $1.3 billion in aid to the city, the Health and Hospitals Corp. is looking to downsize 2,400 positions and the mayor plans to wipe out 11,000 jobs.

In Albany, DC 37 and other unions are fighting Gov. Paterson’s plan for one-day-a-week payless furloughs — a 20 percent pay cut — for state workers, including hundreds of DC 37 members. And here in New York City, we are working to convince the City Council to stop the devastating service cuts and layoffs in Mayor Bloomberg’s budget.

With our national union, AFSCME, we are pressing for the federal assistance America’s cities and states need to protect jobs and keep delivering basic needs — education, health care, public safety, aid to the poor and maintenance of the infrastructure that gets us to work, brings us clean water and controls disease by removing sewage and garbage.

But we can’t sit around waiting for help. Instead of focusing only on cuts, our city and state must help themselves by increasing income — without hurting the public, like the city’s recent 13 percent hike in water fees — and cutting waste.

Billions of dollars in revenue are readily available by bringing in an estimated $2 billion in uncollected taxes and fees, temporarily cutting the stock transfer tax rebate to 80 percent, and implementing a millionaire’s tax to make the wealthy pay their fair share (see pages 6-7 and the May PEP).

The number one way the city can balance its budget without slashing services or increasing unemployment is to cut down the $9.5 billion of taxpayers’ money the mayor hands his private business friends by contracting out work city employees can do better at a vastly lower cost.

Mayor cuts jobs and services, but not outside contracts

While the mayor’s cuts target a broad array of services, he has not asked the city’s 18,000 contractors to give up one cent of their profits. I believe the City Council is coming to understand that putting this one-sixth of the budget off limits punishes the public and the workforce while it caters to private greed.

We have broadcast this message loud and clear in demonstrations and testimony at the City Council, and recently we received important support from a highly regarded economic think tank, the Fiscal Policy Institute. In a recent report, the FPI said a “balanced approach” to closing the city’s budget gap would achieve “savings from contracting in professional, clerical and maintenance services now contracted out.”

Contracting out squanders money, sends profits to other states and countries, shrinks our local tax base and wastes the city’s greatest human resource — the dedication and expertise of its civil service employees. Remember, it was a school nurse who first saw a pattern in students’ symptoms and alerted public health officials to the outbreak of swine flu.

As we rightly praise Captain Sullenberger for the miraculous landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson last year, we should remember that it was city 911 operators who sent out the call for help and 35 union ambulance crews who rushed to the shore to help the shivering passengers.

District Council 37 stands for these workers, the city’s true everyday heroes. Instead of contracting out that undermines their morale and destroys the civil service system, they deserve support from City Hall.

Together, we can overcome the threats to our jobs. I am urging every member to be ready to participate in this battle.