PEP, April 2009: Cuts and white paper on menu

By DIANE S. WILLIAMS

DC 37 welcomed City Council members to the table Feb. 25 for the annual breakfast meeting organized by the union’s Political Action and Legislation Dept.

“We want to express our appreciation for your support on the residency issue,” said DC37 Associate Director Oliver Gray. “So many of you stepped up to the plate. Speaker Quinn took the lead and the entire Council voted to support the measure and override the mayor’s veto. For that you have our deepest thanks.”

The breakfast menu moved quickly from celebrating the residency victory to protecting the jobs and services threatened by the deep cuts Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has proposed in the 2010 city budget. With more than 60 percent of the City Council and their staff in attendance, local presidents and Executive Board members explained to the legislators how the planned cuts would harm DC 37 members and the services they provide in communities citywide.

“We are calling on you to act responsibly,” saidDC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts at the meeting, which was emceed by Political Action Chair Lenny Allen, the president of OTB Local 2021. “The mayor has outsourced $9 billion in taxpayer dollars to private contractors to do our members’ jobs. It’s all explained in our white papers. I know you share our concern that resources, especially in this current time of crisis, are used properly.”

Political Director Wanda Williams outlined the challenges the union faces as the City Council considers the impact of the proposed state executive budget that would eliminate $18 million from city libraries and cultural institutions, $400 million from health care, and $770 million from education, while the city budget would close the city’s free school dental clinics and underfund vital social services or contract them out at much higher costs.

In February the city eliminated the jobs of 230 DC37 members at New York City Housing Authority community centers through layoffs that Williams called “displacement and union-busting.” She said, “These are union jobs that the mayor has given to nonprofit organizations,” and urged Council members to “work with us to stop it.”

“These are interesting and challenging times,” said City Council Majority Whip Leroy Comrie. He explained that after the Council had included funds to save the NYCHA centers and the jobs of the DC37 members in a budget modification, the mayor had blindsided the Council with his contracting-out plan. “We thought the modification was to protect jobs, but we wound up losing union jobs,” Comrie said. “We will restore those jobs. Protecting union jobs is a priority concern of the City Council.”

Mayor aims to “divide and conquer”
Roberts said contracting out community center jobs to nonprofits pits these groups against labor unions and is a divide-and-conquer tactic that Bloomberg is using as people scramble for scarce jobs.

The union anticipates support from City Council members to restore funding and to use federal stimulus monies for city services and jobs for its unionized civil service workforce. DC 37 leaders urged the Council to address the $9 billion the mayor has contracted out to a “shadow government” of private companies that use a “parallel workforce” to do union members’ jobs.

Roberts pointed to wasteful practices that include the city’s failure to provide permanent housing for the homeless while it pays exorbitant rates to hotels that house them. She also said the city’s failure to offer real jobs to Job Training Participants, who work six months for city agencies in exchange for welfare benefits, “is just recycling the welfare rolls.”

“It is an atrocity to use public dollars to pay private corporations for services our members provide,” Roberts said. “We’re counting on you to not let the mayor get away with this.”