'371' After 26 Years
Ensley Not Going Gently

By RICHARD STEIER

When Charles Ensley became president of Social Service Employees Union Local 371 of District Council in 1982, it wouldn't have figured as a long-term gig.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow NO REGRETS ABOUT LEAVING: Charles Ensley, who had decided to step down as president of Local 371 of District Council 37 even before he lost his second bid for DC 37 executive director 15 months ago, says that when he visits the parent union staffers tell him they are demoralized and say, 'Charles, you can't retire.' He added, tongue slightly in cheek, 'I understand their feelings, but it's like Ed Koch used to say: the people voted against me - now let them suffer.'

Incumbent presidents tended to be an endangered species at what was then a notoriously fractious local: even Alan R. Viani and Stanley Hill, who would go on to become DC 37's chief negotiator and executive director, respectively, found themselves quickly voted out of office.

Mr. Ensley had other ideas, and 26 years later, he is finally retiring as Local 371's president at the end of this week.

'Planned to Leave Voluntarily'

Asked during an April 23 interview whether he anticipated holding power for that long, he said, "We certainly intended to leave voluntarily. We were convinced we had the ability and the intellectual resources to make this union great again."

In a way, he said, the problem prior to his election was that Local 371's intellectual resources were being squandered in dubious ideological battles while members' needs received less attention.

"You had four or five versions of Marxism and you had conservatives," was how he recalled the makeup of the executive board. "We were convinced if you delivered services to the members, if you listened to them and treated them the same way regardless of their politics, it would work. Most people just want their union to work for them."

A Hairshirt At DC 37

But if he owes his longevity to the relative content he was able to bring to the local while delivering services, Mr. Ensley's dealings with DC 37 and its international union were hardly a primer in how to win friends and influence your superiors. For more than a decade he has been at odds with them while playing a key role in the reform movement within DC 37; four years ago he came close to being elected executive director of DC 37, only to find himself outmaneuvered by the incumbent, Lillian Roberts, who persuaded some delegates who had pledged their loyalty to Mr. Ensley to change sides when it came time to vote.

He challenged Ms. Roberts one more time in January 2007, but that one he knew was a futile quest from the time he launched it. What he hadn't figured on was that she could sway enough delegates to wrest away the control reformers had of the DC 37 executive board, winning an overwhelming majority of the seats.

The first time he lost, on a snowy night in January 2004 that ended with him coming home to an apartment with a power outage, "We were stunned," he said. "Intellectually we could not understand how people who knew how good we were and the changes we would make would vote against us."

Personalities or Perks?

There were those within DC 37 who believed Mr. Ensley's sometimes caustic comments about the union and its operations had alienated enough presidents at other locals and the delegates who were loyal to them to cost him valuable support. He insisted, however, that the election pivoted not on personalities but on patronage, with Ms. Roberts offering committee positions and other titles that carried stipends to fortify her base.

"We underestimated the value of giving jobs and perks to people," Mr. Ensley said. "Council 37 particularly has created a system built on perks and privileges that has unfortunately hurt the [labor] movement."

During that 2004 election, he and Ms. Roberts both pledged to push for direct election of the union's leadership through a change in the DC 37 constitution. Once she gained her first full term in office, however, Ms. Roberts backed away from that promise, saying she would abide by the will of the delegates. A majority of those delegates were controlled by her political allies who apparently believed that membership elections could jeopardize their power, and delegates subsequently rejected the change for the second time.

During his early years in office, Mr. Ensley had been a loner in questioning how business was done at DC 37. But after the union's 1996 wage contract was approved in suspicious circumstances - a huge vote in favor of it by members of Local 1549 even though it included a two-year wage freeze at its outset - he sent a letter about his concerns to Gerald W. McEntee, the head of DC 37's international, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Mr. McEntee didn't respond to the letter, but in November 1998, the president of another local, Joseph DeCanio, revealed to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office that the vote on the pact had been rigged not only in Local 1549 but in a sizable number of smaller DC 37 locals.

Joined Reform Group

By that point Mr. Ensley had joined with other local presidents and activists in the reform movement within DC 37. As AFSCME took control of the union to deal with other problems including massive embezzlement, kickback schemes involving numerous local presidents and widespread fixing of local elections, Mr. Ensley argued that Mr. Hill had ignored earlier signs of corruption because much of it concerned DC 37's two-largest locals, 1549 and 372, which represents non-pedagogical school employees such as cafeteria staff.

Between them, those locals controlled enough delegates to virtually exercise veto power over any candidate for executive director. Unless that changed, Mr. Ensley insisted repeatedly, the possibility of new corruption involving those locals was never far away.

When Lee Saunders, the top official Mr. McEntee deputized to serve as DC 37's administrator, declined to either impose a system of direct election or support it prior to a delegate vote, Mr. Ensley famously declared, "Different ringmaster, same circus."

Old Guard Also Uneasy

Members of DC 37's old guard also chafed under Mr. Saunders's reign; Veronica Montgomery-Costa, who had become president of Local 372 after its longtime leader, Charlie Hughes, was removed and later jailed for embezzlement of several million dollars, bristled when he responded to a critical column in this newspaper by forcing her to rescind a $36,000 raise her board voted her after just four months in office.

And so Mr. Ensley joined with the old guard to regain DC 37's autonomy, choosing Ms. Roberts as a compromise candidate for executive director and requiring AFSCME to end its administratorship in February 2002, nearly 40 months after it began.

It quickly became clear that the marriage of convenience would not last. Ms. Montgomery-Costa soon after winning re-election that spring got her board to raise her pay again, this time by $76,000. A joint power-sharing arrangement between reformers and regulars became one-sided, and although Mr. Ensley had been led to believe that Ms. Roberts did not intend to stay long as executive director, she made clear her plans to seek another term. Given what he believed were her blunders in two negotiations with the Bloomberg administration, he felt compelled to challenge her.

Even before those breakdowns, he said, he had doubts that she would be the strong leader DC 37 needed and, in his opinion, had been missing since Victor Gotbaum retired as executive director more than 21 years ago.

Near the outset of Ms. Roberts's tenure, he said, there had been a Municipal Labor Committee meeting at Gracie Mansion to discuss contract negotiations with Mayor Bloomberg, who was early in his first term. When she tried to make a case that her members deserved more money than some other employee groups to make up for ground lost during wage freezes in both the Dinkins and Giuliani administrations, according to Mr. Ensley, the Mayor cut her short, saying, "I've studied the history of collective bargaining [in the city] and you always get less."

"That was supposed to end the discussion," Mr. Ensley said, making clear he believed that it shouldn't have.

Dining At Members' Expense

"I know people," he said without identifying union leaders by name, "who put more value in having dinner at the White House or lunch at the Governor's Mansion or breakfast at Gracie Mansion than the interests of their members. That's a real problem."

Referring directly to DC 37, he remarked, "A lot of people understand that if members do come first, you don't have to incorporate it into a slogan - the members know it."

Ms. Roberts issued a statement in response to those and other critical comments of her leadership by Mr. Ensley in which she said, "Critics, detractors and stone-throwers have a way of adapting history to suit their needs, but seldom does their version of events jibe with reality."

She continued, "DC 37 has achieved contracts our members applaud and others seek to emulate ... We've created housing programs that protect members during the worst housing crisis in our nation's history, education programs that prepare members to take civil service tests or pursue lofty academic goals ... Yet, even as Charles Ensley prepares to retire he does what he has always done and that is to stand on the sidelines and throw stones while the labor movement marches on."

Evaluating Mayors

His tenure as Local 371 president has overlapped that of four Mayors. He had few direct dealings with Ed Koch, but he credited Stanley Brezenoff, who rose from running the Human Resources Administration to First Deputy Mayor, and the late Harry Karetzky, one of Mr. Koch's top labor-relations officials, with having sometimes been more helpful to him than his superiors at DC 37. There has been considerably more contact with the three Mayors who followed, and Mr. Ensley quickly dispels any easy assumptions about how he regarded each of them.

As he described it, "we put a lot of time, energy and money into the election of David Dinkins." Mr. Ensley's pride at having helped elect New York's first black Mayor soon turned to chagrin, however, as a mix of politics and a budget problem produced policies that damaged his local.

Early on, he said, the new Mayor contracted out senior citizen centers that had long been city-run and staffed by municipal employees, often "to his friends, particularly a group of ministers. What is happening now is what we predicted at the time: that the centers would eventually be shuttered, services reduced and seniors would suffer."

Dinkins Flipped in 'Salvage'

He continued, "We also lost the fire salvage workers," with the civilian employees represented by Local 371 having their duties taken over by firefighters. The irony of this, Mr. Ensley said, was that Mr. Koch had attempted to disband the civilian program a few years earlier, and Mr. Dinkins, who was then the Manhattan Borough President, joined the union in suing to block him.

"By the city's own numbers they were saving millions in relocation costs," said Mr. Ensley, who insisted then and now that firefighters because of both the nature of their work and their exhaustion after extinguishing a blaze would not devote the same effort to the salvage work.

There was also anger over the layoff of a couple thousand DC 37 employees in mid-1991 for budgetary reasons, but Mr. Ensley's biggest battle with Mr. Dinkins came the following year over a promotion list for Supervisor III jobs.

HRA: 'Too Male, Too White'

The HRA Commissioner at the time, Barbara Sabol, complained privately that the list was "too male and too white." Mr. Ensley's local had long been multi-racial, but by this point an increasing number of his members were black. He had no use for ethnic politics, however; as he put it, "We believe in the civil service merit system, and we were able to convince members of that. Barbara Sabol and David Dinkins tried to divide this union along racial lines."

They failed, he said, because from early in his tenure he had sought to convince his members that it was part of their responsibility to get involved in the union's causes. Where once Local 371 rallies were made up primarily of local officers and staff, by that time "we were a thousand people, 2,000 people" when protests were held.

"Too little emphasis is put on energizing the rank and file," Mr. Ensley said, because union leaderships here don't want members so engaged that they ask too many questions about internal business.

"The irony," he continued, "is we had some of our biggest successes under Rudy Giuliani."

A More-Open Rudy

Mr. Giuliani was able to use Local 371's battle with Mayor Dinkins over the Supervisor III list to bolster his claim that the incumbent was governing with a double standard. He did not win the local's endorsement, and when he attended its candidates' forum along with Mr. Dinkins, Mr. Giuliani got an "openly hostile" reception from some of his members, Mr. Ensley recalled.

"But he stayed and answered every question and at the end, he said, 'When I win I'm going to involve labor, whether you supported me or not.'''

During Mr. Giuliani's eight years in office, Mr. Ensley became disillusioned when he saw him deploy some of the same ethnic favoritism that he believed had marred Mr. Dinkins's tenure, and the Local 371 leader joined protests of Mr. Giuliani's policing policies following the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo and was arrested at a demonstration outside Police Headquarters.

"In spite of our disagreements," he said, "they always treated us professionally. We were able to access him and he would listen."

'Pay Them, Train Them, Pray'

After the child-abuse death of Elisa Izquierdo more than a dozen years ago, Mr. Ensley was appointed to a mayoral commission that produced an increase in salary for child-protective workers beyond those negotiated in regular bargaining by DC 37.

"When it comes to that work," he said, "I believe you have to staff the program appropriately, pay the people a decent salary, train them appropriately and then pray, because you can't be in the people's homes 24 hours a day."

He said he convinced Mr. Giuliani not to contract out the work to root out welfare scams that was done by the Fraud Investigators represented by Local 371. When Mr. Giuliani's Children's Services Commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, wanted to discontinue competitive testing for positions above the entry level job of Caseworker, Mr. Ensley said, "We were able to meet with the Mayor and continue [the promotion ladder] without fighting in court."

New Fight on 'Protective' Titles

Local 371 is currently battling a Bloomberg administration proposal to move all Child Protective Service titles outside the Competitive Class, believing the move would make employees more reluctant to speak out about life-and-death issues because it could stymie their advancement.

"If your entire career is based on the good will of management," Mr. Ensley explained, "it becomes difficult to organize these people on dignity and justice issues - they're jumping over each other for promotions."

That is just one of his gripes with Mr. Bloomberg and his Children's Services Commissioner, John B. Mattingly. Referring to the significant increase in staff that was spurred by the 2006 murder of Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old who was horrendously abused by her step-father and mother, Mr. Ensley said, "Now you have a staffing pattern that makes sense but you can't retain them because of the way they're treated. I've never seen a leadership this mean to our workers."

Mayor's Appeal 'A Mystery'

He said of Mr. Bloomberg, "We have not done well under this Mayor, and it's a mystery to me how many people in the labor movement seem to be so pleased with the relationship with him. Others have done better than we have, but nobody's really prospered."

On the one hand, Mr. Ensley continued, "He's such a gracious person, as opposed to Koch being confrontational. But his programs and initiatives have not been good, from my perspective, for the union movement, and in particular, for this union."

Mr. Ensley is among the few union officials who believed DC 37's last contract, which provided 6-percent increases during its final 20 months, was a disappointing deal. "I've come to the position that public service should not be partly volunteerism," he explained. "I'm willing to sacrifice in hard times, but when good times come you expect to be rewarded. If you can't negotiate a decent salary in that environment with a $5-billion surplus, when in hell are you going to?"

'My Workers Outearn Me'

Although his union's recent expansion to 18,000 members has left it just short of challenging Local 1549 for the second-largest group in DC 37, Mr. Ensley's own salary has lagged far behind those paid to the presidents of the two big locals. He is receiving the equivalent of his civil service title's salary, $59,000, plus a $5,400-a-year expense allowance and a stipend for unused leave time. "Many of our workers earn more than me," he said of his members, "because they do get overtime."

His battles against the DC 37 leadership eventually led to his losing an election to the late Joan Reed for his AFSCME vice presidency and the stipend that came with it, but on the other hand, "The international DC 37 executive board was one of the most torturous things I've ever sat through. People sucking up to the international president - it was brutal."

And so, he said, he never missed the perks that go with being DC 37 executive director. "I did not aspire to a $300,000 job," he said. "I always believed what Lenny Bruce said: that any minister who owns more than two suits is a hustler."

Cites Role in City Services

He spoke of his pride in withstanding attempts by three different Mayors to eliminate the Division of AIDS Services, and of helping to create a homeless diversion unit to assist families on the verge of being evicted. Aside from placing himself in a mental decompression chamber to "try to relax," he has no idea what he will do in retirement, as Faye Moore, the longtime Local 371 vice president for grievances who is just as outspoken as Mr. Ensley, steps up to replace him.

He did not sound, however, like someone ready to just fade into a life of leisure.

"When I moved to New York in 1965," Mr. Ensley said, "there was no doubt of what the major labor union was or the extent of Victor's power and influence. But now [DC 37 is] the laughingstock of the movement. And what hurts is that internally, not enough see it, which makes it that much less likely that change will come.

"One person, one vote would've been great," he continued. "The biggest disappointment was our inability to democratize Council 37. But that struggle continues, and it was never about me, anyway."