Public Employee Press

30,000 say: Save our city


Thirty thousand municipal workers from 99 unions issued a loud wake-up call to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the City Council June 16: Service cuts, layoffs and contracting out are not the answer!

"You don't cut services.you don't lay off people when you have a surplus of $3.2 billion!" said Harry Nespoli, president of the Sanitation workers' union and chair of the Municipal Labor Committee. The MLC sponsored the massive Save Our City rally outside City Hall with DC 37 and the United Federation of Teachers.

Chants of "We are New York!" thundered along Broadway from City Hall to Federal Plaza as unionized public workers flooded the streets to say New York City is the economic engine that drives the state and the nation - and they are the gas that makes it run.

"Cuts to city services do more harm than good. Closing libraries, hospitals, pools and firehouses, and laying off teachers and school workers is not a way to solve our budget problems," DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts told the demonstrators. Also on the podium at the afternoon rally were other DC 37 leaders, AFSCME's Lee Saunders, state AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes, city Central Labor Council head Jack Ahern, PBA chief Pat Lynch, and emcee Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT.

Speakers blasted Mayor Bloomberg's proposed budget, which would close a $4.9 billion gap by laying off up to 6,000 city workers and cutting essential services that keep New York City, safe, clean and livable.

"It's time for City Hall to stop blaming workers," said Ahern. "We deserve fair pay and benefits, not the unemployment line!"

The message of the demonstrators resonated at the City Council, which two weeks later approved a budget that included millions of dollars in restorations and fewer layoffs than projected in the mayor's original financial plan.

In May, Bloomberg laid off 63 of the city's 84 pest control specialists in Local 768 and in June 100 social service workers in Local 371, each with 15 years or more on the job, got pink slips from the Administration for Children's Services.

The mayor's plan called for cutting more Sanitation and Health Dept. workers, slashing library funds (threatening 620 layoffs at Queens and Brooklyn libraries), closing public swimming pools two weeks early (chopping workers' pay 20 percent) and shuttering 20 firehouses (despite a Columbia University study showing that the city needs more firehouses).

His proposed budget would have shrunk the count of first responders to pre-9/11 levels, and wiped out Health and Hospitals Corp. jobs by closing neighborhood clinics and replacing its central laundry with outside contracts.
"The mayor chooses to give $9.5 billion to 18,000 private contractors when city workers can do a better job, faster and cheaper," said DC 37 Treasurer Maf Misbah Uddin. "The mayor is making the wrong choices. There are no savings in these cuts."

"We are not going to stand by and lose our jobs as work is handed over to private contractors," Roberts said.

Rally speakers urged the mayor to consider other cost-saving measures and reminded him of labor's role in saving the city from bankruptcy in the 1970s, when the federal government told New York to drop dead and public employee pension funds financed a rescue.

Today the mayor has divided the city - conservative politicians against labor, the rich and powerful against middle-class and working-class families - and labor's suggestions fall on deaf ears.

"Our solution is to end the rampant contracting out of the work of civil service employees to private contractors and consultants at an exorbitant cost," Roberts said. "As an immediate solution, we call on the City Council to exercise its power to cut funding for consultant contracts by at least 15 percent. The $316 million savings would be sufficient to
avert all layoffs and service reductions."

"The mayor and City Council have the opportunity to do the right thing by workers," said Faye Moore, president of SSEU Local 371.

"Creating and sustaining jobs should be politicians' number one priority," she said.

Instead of the rosy future Bloomberg painted as he campaigned for a third term last November, his 2011 budget would create a New York nightmare resembling the dismal late 1970s and 1980s.

Do the right thing

The mayor and the media scapegoat municipal employees for the role their modest pay, benefits and pensions play in the city's budget problems, but they ignore the greedy Wall Street titans who bankrupted Main Street through subprime mortgage scams and crooked investments, took a $700 billion bailout from taxpayers and rewarded themselves with multi-million-dollar bonuses.

"Labor makes this city happen. Without us this city doesn't move," said Local 372 and DC 37 President Veronica Montgomery-Costa. "Labor is alive and well and we will fight to the bitter end to get what we deserve."

Video footage from the rally is posted on the union's Web site, www.DC37.net