Public Employee Press

Breakthrough agreement adds hundreds of new union member
Union, city agree on insourcing

“Bringing information technology work home will generate significant savings while giving our members greater job security.”
— Henry Garrido, DC 37 Executive Director


By GREGORY N. HEIRES

The union has reached a major agreement with the city that calls for insourcing computer work.

The agreement should help the city save millions of dollars by reining in the use of excessively paid information technology consultants.

"This is about good government and assigning work to the people who know how to do it best - civil servants," DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido said. "It will increase transparency and accountability. And bringing IT work home will generate significant savings while giving our members greater job security."

Stopping wasteful contracting

Before becoming executive director late last year, Garrido was in charge of the union's efforts to identify wasteful contracts and ways to help the city increase revenue.

One of his accomplishments was to help expose vast corruption and waste at the CityTime automated payroll system. CityTime was marred by years of delays and more than $700 million in cost overruns before a dozen consultants were convicted on graft charges.

"The city's aggressive contracting out of computer work has never made sense from a budgetary standpoint," said Robert Ajaye, president of Data Processing Personnel Local 2627. "It's not cost efficient. You have civil servants who are making, say, $45 an hour and you're bringing consultants who are easily being paid more than $100 an hour. When you add the company's administrative charges and profits, the situation really becomes absurd."

The city stands to save an estimated $100 million converting hundreds of consultant positions into union jobs.

Today, the city spends $13 billion dollars a year on outsourcing. Computer work eats up a big portion of the procurement budget, and the city historically has had trouble monitoring information technology projects.

Too often, the city is stuck with paying consultants expensive maintenance fees even after projects are completed because the in-house staff isn't trained to do the work. The deal between the city and the union includes an oversight committee and calls for consultants to make "knowledge transfers" before finishing their jobs.

Under the agreement, the city will set up insource pools of highly-trained city computer workers, who will be assigned to short-term projects throughout the city. The work of the teams - dubbed "flying squadrons" by Garrido - will include upgrading, troubleshooting and installing new programs, all previously done by consultants paid as much as $600 a day.

The agreement also calls for a review of the work of the thousands of computer consultants employed by the city.

The criteria for insourcing include determining whether consultants are needed over the long term and whether they doing the work of civil servants. Work will also be brought in-house if the city can recruit new employees to do the job or achieve savings by assigning it to the existing
staff.

Among the types of work that would be insourced are desktop support, help desks, networking, programming and business analysis.

With input from the union, the city will also review the existing computer titles and create new titles. This will help the city deal more quickly with changes in technology. Pending approval by the New York State Civil Service Commission, the city will create seven new IT titles, including six non-competitive union titles, which will allow for quicker hiring than the civil service exam process.

The insourcing agreement came after more than two years of discussion between the union and the Dept. of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT). Little progress was made during the previous administration, because former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was ideologically committed to contracting out. After Bill de Blasio became mayor, the tenor of the talks changed.

Contructive negotiations

"The agreement shows how the negotiations process can be used in a constructive way to improve city services," said Garrido, who in recent weeks was helped by Associate Director David Paskin and Sr. Analyst David Moog of the DC 37 Research and Negotiations Dept. The top city officials involved in hammering out the agreement included 1st Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris, Labor Commissioner Robert W. Linn, and DoITT Commissioner Anne Roest.

"We recognize that that the city needs the flexibility to hire consultants," said Paskin. "But this agreement calls for in-sourcing whenever possible and assigning long-term projects to civil servants, who have dedicated their careers to public service."