VICTORY FOR SPITE AT DC 37

VICTORY FOR SPITE AT DC 37

District Council 37 delegates who voted last week to place 3,000 former welfare recipients directly under the Council's control rather than assigning them to a local rewarded spite while punishing the workers.

They may also have aided DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts and her sponsors at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in evading the DC 37 constitution, which provides for "the organization of such employees into local unions."

The local union in this case that should have been given representation rights was Motor Vehicle Operators Local 983, which strived for years to organize what are now known as Job Training Participants. Local 983 is headed by Mark Rosenthal, however, and he and Ms. Roberts bitterly parted company three years ago for reasons that included her bungling of negotiations on a collective-bargaining agreement for the JTPs.

Ms. Roberts insisted that the Bloomberg administration pay the employees an hourly wage 25 cents higher than it was prepared to offer. Mr. Rosenthal had been willing to settle for the $7.75 hourly offer, and typically executive directors have deferred to the wishes of local presidents in such cases, but Ms. Roberts was characteristically stubborn and dug in her heels.

The end result was that the Bloomberg administration walked away from the talks and set a wage for the JTPs that was 25 cents below its previous offer, and their lack of union status left them without health benefits. Ms. Roberts tried to turn her blundering into a political asset during her 2004 reelection campaign by accusing Mr. Rosenthal, who ran for re-election as treasurer on an opposing slate, of being more concerned about collecting dues from the potential members than ensuring that they were decently compensated. The language she used in one flyer led some of Mr. Rosenthal's allies to accuse her of anti-Semitism. As far as she was concerned, however, the ends justified the meanness: she was narrowly re-elected and Mr. Rosenthal was defeated in balloting by the same delegate body that approved last week's resolution.

A subsequent Board of Collective Bargaining ruling compelled the city to negotiate with DC 37 on behalf of the JTPs. At that point, a local president Ms. Roberts managed to co-opt from her opposition expressed interest in representing the JTPs.

Rather than acknowledge the efforts Mr. Rosenthal had previously made to organize the group, Ms. Roberts turned the matter over to AFSCME, which Mr. Rosenthal repeatedly criticized in the past for allowing corruption to fester within DC 37 in the late 1990s. Predictably, DC 37's international union did not do the right thing and instead recommended placing the JTPs under the wing of DC 37 itself.

There is one added political twist to this maneuver: the JTPs will be entitled to have only one delegate, rather than the four that a membership gain that size would have given to a local such as 983. This means that if they are not satisfied with their treatment by DC 37 under Ms. Roberts, they will not have the voting strength they deserve to do something about it in next year's officer elections.

That aspect of the resolution has some unfortunate echoes of the days in which Southern states for purposes of Congressional representation counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. In this case, the fractional right isn't about race; it's about indulging the thirst for revenge, and the political needs of an executive director who has been so ineffective that DC 37 enjoys just a fraction of the power and clout it should have as the largest municipal-employees' union.