Razzle Dazzle: DC 37
Union As Clubhouse

By RICHARD STEIER

It could be argued that Charles Ensley's own supporters believe that the odds are worse than 10-1 against his chances of unseating District Council 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts in the Jan. 23 union election.

This conclusion is based on the fact that none of them chose to run for DC 37 treasurer, a job whose salary of $180,000 is 10 times greater than the annual stipend paid to executive board members who attend all the union's monthly meetings.

It's not as if the incumbent, Maf Misbah Uddin, is so universally beloved by DC 37 delegates as to be unbeatable in his bid for re-election. But Mr. Uddin is running with Ms. Roberts, and so he figures to benefit from her edge among delegates who opt for slate voting rather than choosing individual candidates; enough so that nobody on Mr. Ensley's slate wanted to gamble a surer stipend as a DC 37 vice president for the much-bigger payout.

Doesn't Like His Chances

Mr. Ensley himself called Ms. Roberts a shoo-in for re-election right after the delegates in late 2005 rejected a resolution that would have transferred their power to elect the union's officers to rank-and-file members. And that was before she got a wage contract last July that removed much of the acrid taste from her previous deal with the Bloomberg administration by providing decent raises without any concessions.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow WON'T MAKE HER BLUSH: Lillian Roberts has flip-flopped on a proposal to allow District Council 37 members to elect their leaders and made little effort to reduce the unusually high percentage of dues-payers who aren't actually voting members of their locals. She seems no more embarrassed by these politically expedient decisions than she was three years ago about running an election campaign that some critics thought played on ethnic and racial divisions within the union.

It might seem, then, that he is running this time only to deny Ms. Roberts a walkover, or to be the standard-bearer for a slate that hopes to preserve its one-vote majority on the DC 37 executive board. But while the facts of Ms. Roberts's three-year term as executive director may be irrelevant to a majority of the union delegates, they present a powerful case for examining Mr. Ensley as a preferable alternative, someone who could actually make DC 37 a vibrant organization again.

MARK ROSENTHAL: 'She's why we're divided.'

The strongest argument for giving Ms. Roberts a new term rests with the gains she has produced by cultivating friendly relations with Mayor Bloomberg. A city housing program under which union members are given preference in both selection and mortgage terms has helped more than 1,100 DC 37 members become homeowners in the less-than two years that it's been operating. And the contract deal six months ago produced solid wage hikes, Mr. Ensley's criticisms notwithstanding.

But the housing program was launched on terms favorable to DC 37 largely because the city was having trouble finding credit-worthy candidates among the general public for homes in the areas targeted by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Housing Development Corporation. And the wage contract contains one loose end - a relaxing of residency requirements - that highlights one of Mr. Ensley's prime criticisms of Ms. Roberts: that although she's a skilled in-fighter when it comes to protecting her own political turf, she has allowed DC 37's external political operation to fall back into the wasteland that existed until a major corruption scandal in 1998 led its national union to take over and strengthen that and other parts of its structure.

The move to allow DC 37 members to live in any of six contiguous state counties - amending then-Mayor Ed Koch's 1986 order requiring them to live within the five boroughs - had two primary objectives. It would offer veteran employees the chance to get better value by buying homes outside the city, and symbolically it would give DC 37 the same residency rights as uniformed employees, from cops and firefighters to sanitation workers and correction officers.

Path Blocked by Council

But the enabling legislation, in the form of a change in the city's Administrative Code, is currently languishing in the City Council. The prime reason several prominent Council Members oppose the amendment is their concern that future job-seekers who live in their districts will be rejected in favor of candidates who live in the suburbs.

The reality is that both Ms. Roberts's hopes and Council Members' fears about the legislation's impact are exaggerated. One veteran union official surmised that a "minuscule" number of incumbent employees would look to take advantage of a change allowing them to move to the suburbs, and Mr. Ensley himself acknowledged that young men and women from Nassau and Westchester would not pursue city clerical jobs with the same ardor or in the same numbers as those who seek to become city cops or firefighters.

But the bill's having stalled in the Council is a political embarrassment to DC 37. It indicates that the union failed to sound out key Council Members before negotiating the residency break to see whether they might have problems with the change and then try to address those objections during the bargaining.

And the fact that the Council Members, several of whom have large minority constituencies that include DC 37 members, are lining up against the bill so publicly raises questions about the union's clout. Once upon a time, DC 37 was strong enough to bring legislators into line by hinting that it would mount a primary challenge against those who opposed one of its key bills.

During the 1980s, the union proved it had the muscle to make such threats credible even when the incumbents could count on the backing of their party organizations: it helped Mario Cuomo defeat Mr. Koch - who had the support of much of the Democratic establishment, unions included - in the 1982 primary for Governor, and narrowly missed unseating Bronx Borough President Stanley Simon three years later when it strongly backed challenger Jose Serrano.

Safe and Soft

These days, DC 37 plays it safe, almost always backing incumbents for reelection, though that doesn't stop Ms. Roberts from boasting about the success of its choices, as if upsets were lurking if the union hadn't rushed to the rescue. The residency battle highlights two problems in this realm: the union is being bucked by incumbents who clearly don't feel beholden to it for their victories, and there is no recent track record to suggest DC 37 could mount a scary challenge to them. The most it's done in response was to last week approve a resolution to withhold contributions from Council Members who don't support the bill.

Unless either DC 37 becomes newly persuasive or Mayor Bloomberg brings the Council's leadership around, the deferred residency break is a mark against Ms. Roberts.

The wage terms of last year's deal - 9.42 percent over 32 months - still look solid, particularly with inflation low during the past six months. But that part of the deal, which was reached with heavy input from her chief negotiator and the local presidents on the union's bargaining committee, offers a striking contrast to the April 2004 contract that was largely her call and was almost universally derided by other municipal union leaders.

At that time, Ms. Roberts, despite her re-election less than three months earlier, was reeling from battles with the Ensley-led majority on her executive board, which had launched a pre-emptive strike by curtailing her powers and cutting her pay from $250,000 to $175,000. She proclaimed herself "desperate" for a contract and then proved it by accepting wage hikes that were inferior to those negotiated by DC 37's state counterpart, the Civil Service Employees' Association, a month earlier, and with givebacks affecting new employees that the CSEA averted.

Misjudged Her Enemies

The internal strife was largely of Ms. Roberts's making, some of it the residue of the bitter election campaign, with the rest prompted by her attempts to punish those perceived as not sufficiently loyal during the campaign. Just as Mr. Ensley had underestimated her political wiles during the campaign, Ms. Roberts failed to reckon with the reformers' determination not to be broken by her victory.

She had directed her harshest pre-election attacks not against Mr. Ensley but rather Mark Rosenthal, who was seeking re-election as treasurer on his ticket. She went so far as to dispute what even his critics believed Mr. Rosenthal deserved credit for: his role in rooting out corruption within DC 37 six years earlier. Her most blistering attack concerned a negotiation on behalf of city Work Experience Program participants that Ms. Roberts had sabotaged by insisting that they be paid 25 cents an hour more than Mr. Rosenthal - who as president of Local 983 was seeking to represent them - was willing to accept. When city negotiators balked, the WEP participants were left hanging.

Anti-Semitism or Fury?

In a flyer that made much of his compensation as treasurer, Ms. Roberts stated, "While Rosenthal goes to the bank, poor single mothers pay the price. Rosenthal sold out the WEP workers."

Some of Mr. Ensley's supporters charged that this was thinly veiled anti-Semitism meant to rouse African-American delegates against Ms. Roberts's opposition. It seemed at least as likely, however, that this and other shots at Mr. Rosenthal were the product of an obsessive hatred that took root when he sided with DC 37's then-Ethical Practices Officer after she found that Ms. Roberts engaged in a conflict of interest by steering a $180,000-a-year no-bid legal services contract to her nephew's law firm.

The acrimony manifested itself even among those celebrating Ms. Roberts's election victory. A couple of hours after the results were in, the director of DC 37's Blue Collar Division, Jose Sierra, grabbed a golf club and, while screaming about Mr. Rosenthal's defeat, smashed it repeatedly against the door of Danny Ambrosini, the deputy director of the division, who was a friend of Mr. Rosenthal's.

Ms. Roberts in talking to reporters had earlier indicated she had no plans to reach out to the other side to try to reach a truce, even though Mr. Ensley's faction had gained enough seats to take control of the executive board. "If they don't want to be healed, they won't come to me," she said.

During the first week of her new term, she cut the amount of release time allocated to one of Mr. Ensley's supporters, and instructed department heads to prepare for staffing changes because of complaints that some individuals either were performing poorly or had been improperly involved in the election.

Board Attacked First

Before she could begin settling more scores, however, the majority on the executive board froze the allocation of release time and cut her pay and that of Mr. Uddin, with the treasurer's salary being reduced from $180,000 to $140,000. Mr. Ensley's supporters said this made sense given how she had questioned the compensation for the position when Mr. Rosenthal held it, but it was clear that they were going tit for tat, flexing muscles that had gone unused by the executive board for decades.

The Ensley faction also canceled a contract that Ms. Roberts's close ally, Associate Director Oliver Gray, had secretly reached with the lobbying firm Bolton St. Johns four weeks prior to the election. A prior agreement gave the union the power to cancel its retainer with the firm - one of whose principals, Norman Adler, was a former DC 37 lobbyist - on a month's notice; the new deal required that a year's notice be given. Despite Mr. Adler's denials, the Ensley forces believed the change was a reward for his suspected help in plotting Ms. Roberts's re-election strategy.

An AFSCME Wrist-Slap

Mr. Gray's action was so blatantly a violation of the union's bylaws that DC 37's international union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, reprimanded both him and Ms. Roberts and upheld the board's action.

AFSCME's handling of the matter, however tough it seemed, was a shining example of the double standard it displayed in meting out justice based on whether the offender was an ally of International President Gerry McEntee. Roy Commer, the president of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 and an outspoken critic of Mr. McEntee, had been removed from his job and banished from the union four years earlier for making about $11,000 in mailings without the authorization of his board and then failing to reimburse the local. Ms. Roberts, whose sweetheart deal with Bolton St. John's could have cost DC 37 10 times that amount if it canceled the contract, was not assessed any monetary penalty.

A more obvious example of AFSCME's readiness to back Ms. Roberts's poor judgment no matter how it affected the union came with the handling of the Sierra door-bashing incident. Ms. Roberts decided that the appropriate penalty for the drunken rampage in which he hammered his deputy's door and frightened another DC 37 staffer who witnessed the incident was to give him a 30-day suspension and require him to take an anger-management course. She cited Mr. Sierra's 24 years of service to the union in explaining her decision to be merciful.

Past Bad Acts

The Ensley supporters noted that among the bad deeds Mr. Sierra compiled over that period was being identified by Kroll Associates - the firm commissioned by AFSCME to investigate the rigging of the 1995-96 DC 37 wage contract - as one of those involved in suspicious activities to ensure that the pact was ratified. Mr. Rosenthal had accused him of helping to rig an officers election for Local 983 at about that same time.

That spring, the executive board fired Mr. Sierra - not for the door-bashing but for interfering in the business of two union locals. Mr. McEntee personally intervened to reinstate Mr. Sierra, ruling that the authority to fire staff rested with the executive director.

Mr. Sierra picked an unusual way to celebrate his reinstatement, given the circumstances surrounding the incident: after getting advance notice of the ruling, he met up with some allies at a DC 37 shop stewards conference for a few rounds of drinks in the lounge of the Rye Brook Hilton. Among the other signs that under Ms. Roberts, the road to redemption requires just a one-step program - loyalty - was that he wasn't forced to say he was sorry to either Mr. Ambrosini or Mr. Rosenthal.

'Shouldn't Have to Ask'

"I shouldn't have to ask for an apology," the latter gentleman said Jan. 10. "What's even worse is that Danny Ambrosini never got an apology for what they did to his door [A DC 37 local president and Roberts loyalist, Mike DeMarco, borrowed the golf club from Mr. Sierra for his own hack]."

Mr. Rosenthal continued, "It's an underlying issue of why the Council's been divided along racial lines. It's never been addressed by Lillian Roberts or AFSCME."

Later that spring, the executive board removed seven Roberts appointees from the DC 37 Benefits Fund Trust, arguing that they had not honored their fiduciary duty to eliminate a looming deficit caused by the rising cost of prescription drugs. The trustees had increased member co-pays, but not enough to deal with the long-term problem. Board members believed that Ms. Roberts, who was already on the defensive because of the lackluster contract she had negotiated, did not want additional heat for making the sizable boost in co-pays that was necessary.

Ms. Roberts countered by attempting to seize control of all appointments to the benefits fund. This move got slapped down in Federal court, where U.S. District Judge Denise Cote determined that she had violated her fiduciary duty by engaging in "an unlawful attempt ... to bypass the wishes of the board."

The DC 37 leader once again escaped real accountability for this maneuver thanks to the kindness of John Seferian, the head of the AFSCME judicial panel. He ruled last year that there was no fiduciary violation, and that Judge Cote would have realized this if she had read the amendment Ms. Roberts made to the agreement governing the union health fund. The fact that the judge specifically cited that amendment while ruling against Ms. Roberts made no difference to Mr. Seferian.

This was the man, after all, who misquoted the AFSCME constitution to spike a dissident's challenge to the 2005 re-election of Ms. Roberts's most-prominent DC 37 ally, Local 372 President Veronica Montgomery Costa, and cleared Ms. Roberts of the conflict of interest finding by the DC 37 ethics officer - a position created by AFSCME to give the impression that it genuinely wanted to reform its scandal-scarred flagship union.

AFSCME, like DC 37, functions less like a union than a political club. One of DC 37's biggest reprobates, former Local 1549 President Al Diop, rose to the position in which he was able to steal more than $1 million of members' dues and play a primary role in rigging the 1996 wage contract vote because DC 37 and AFSCME ignored his transgressions.

Malign Neglect

Early in his career as a union organizer, he failed to return a stack of membership cards meant to build up DC 37. When they were discovered, with mold from the inside of his desk rather than signatures on them, he was simply transferred to another assignment. His looting of Local 1549 went undetected until the Manhattan District Attorney's Office subpoenaed financial records from all DC 37's locals because AFSCME allowed him to go four consecutive years without submitting the required outside audits of his local's books.

The lesson that AFSCME and Ms. Roberts seem to have gleaned from Mr. Diop's career is that you can go to prison for stealing or rigging an election, but you won't be prosecuted for not signing up members. There is actually an advantage in such neglect: those who do not sign union cards are not permitted to vote in officer elections, which gives local presidents the latitude to sign up those they are sure will support them and not bother to enlist those about whom they have doubts.

Councilwide, about 1 in every 6 persons who pay dues to DC 37 are not actually members - they pay the agency shop fee that is required by state law of those who don't join the union. The Roberts loyalist who heads Health Service Employees Local 768, Darryl Ramsey, was recently re-elected by a two-vote margin when his hand-picked election committee disqualified ballots cast by eight persons who were deemed agency-fee payers, and just happened to work in the same unit and job title as his challenger, Fitz Reid.

Embarrassing Numbers

According to Mr. Reid, more than 20 percent of Local 768's bargaining unit consists of agency fee-payers. This percentage - and the one for DC 37 as a whole - should be embarrassing given that only about 4 percent of United Federation of Teachers dues-payers are nonmembers and the percentages are even smaller for uniformed unions.

Ms. Roberts doesn't embarrass easily, however. Mr. Ramsey's predecessor, Helen Greene, was an old-guard loyalist who was criminally convicted after using her union credit card for thousands of dollars of personal purchases, and so his transgressions are a relief in comparison.

During her last election campaign, Ms. Roberts wrote an article in this newspaper supporting an issue Mr. Ensley has long championed: the shifting of the responsibility for electing DC 37 officers from the delegate body to the members themselves.

'Need More Democracy'

She stated in that Dec. 19, 2003 piece, "We still need to do more to make sure that corruption can never return to DC 37. More democracy is the answer. We need to amend our constitution to provide for direct election of DC 37's officers by the members. We must truly make the leadership fully accountable to the membership."

When the issue finally came before the DC 37 executive board in August 2005, however, Ms. Roberts voted against a resolution to require a rank-and-file vote for officers. She said she was merely honoring the recommendation of the union's Laws and Rules Committee, although one Ensley supporter on that committee claimed that someone had influenced several members of that panel to change their votes.

By that time, Ms. Roberts had the support of not only Ms. Costa, whose local is DC 37's largest, but of Local 1549 President Eddie Rodriguez, who had backed Mr. Ensley in the 2004 election. The two locals account for close to 40 percent of the DC 37 delegate body, meaning that if their leaders can persuade delegates to vote in blocs for the same candidate, they can exercise veto power over who is DC 37's executive director.

Closed His Eyes

It was precisely that circumstance that many DC 37 officials believe led former Executive Director Stanley Hill to ignore clear signs of wrongdoing on the part of both Mr. Diop at Local 1549 and his Local 372 contemporary, Charlie Hughes, until the union was facing insolvency and on its way to the biggest city corruption scandal this side of the Police Department in the 1970s.

Any executive director acting against the head of one of those locals would do so at his or her political peril as long as a system is in place to allow those presidents to control their delegates through the kind of raw patronage exemplified by Mr. Diop when he took a party of 300 union officials to Hawaii for the 1998 AFSCME convention.

But the system favors Ms. Roberts, and so she has kept riding it, notwithstanding her past acknowledgment of its flaws. In an interview last week with this newspaper's Meredith Kolodner, she even proposed giving weighted votes to executive board members in the same way that they are given to delegates based on the size of their locals. If this occurred, she could be supported by a minority of her board but still get her way as long as she had the support of the bigger locals.

Began With Wurf

Ms. Roberts didn't invent the anti-democratic system that elects DC 37 officers; it was perpetuated by the late Jerry Wurf, who made the union a force to be reckoned with, and her mentor, Victor Gotbaum, who transformed it into the city's most influential union during the 1970s and early 1980s. They liked the delegate system for the same reason she does: it made it easier to control your own fate in elections.

But as much as it catered to their self-interests, Mr. Wurf and Mr. Gotbaum were able to provide a sort of justification by servicing their members well. Ms. Roberts hasn't delivered enough during nearly five years in office to make that argument convincingly.

Regrettably, all available evidence suggests that when the delegates cast their votes next week, that won't matter. That's also the reason that DC 37 itself doesn't matter nearly as much as it should in the life of this city and its labor movement.

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