DC 37 Crisis Response: Silence Not So Golden

It was not until more than four hours after Mayor Bloomberg completed his budget speech Jan. 30 threatening to lay off thousands of city workers unless the unions made concessions on pensions and health benefits that District Council 37 mustered a response.

What made the delay particularly remarkable— beyond the fact that releasing the statement at 5:25 p.m. reduced the chance that it would make it into the stories of reporters whose deadlines were fast approaching— was that the union did not respond to anything specific in the spending plan. It was the kind of boilerplate release that could have been handed out even before the speech, talking of the value of the union's members, stating that the fiscal crisis was not their doing, and concluding, "Layoffs are not the solution."

DC 37 Members Most Vulnerable

This is significant because, notwithstanding the Mayor's threat to lay off close to 15,000 school employees unless the state and Federal Governments provide more education aid, DC 37's members are the ones most vulnerable to actually losing their jobs. Mr. Bloomberg doesn't want to send the public school progress he hopes will be a major part of his legacy sailing down a hill in reverse; the dire Department of Education forecast was intended primarily to get the United Federation of Teachers to put a rocket in Governor Paterson's pocket.

NOT EXACTLY LEADING THE CHARGE: District Council 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts has yet to fully engage in the public debate over whether the city's precarious financial state requires either employee layoffs or union concessions, even though her members' jobs may be most at risk.

The lack of urgency displayed by DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts might be chalked up to there being a long way to go until the budget is finalized in June. But she has had notoriously bad timing in her dealings with the Bloomberg administration. She scuttled talks on a Department of Education buyout proposal in November 2002, then changing her mind too late to save the jobs of 330 employees who were laid off the following January, and later in 2003 killed a negotiation to represent welfare recipients in the city's job-training program by holding out for an extra 25 cents an hour.

And on one front, the moment of truth is coming up fast: next week one of her largest locals, Social Service Employees Union Local 371, is scheduled to have 165 of its members who are employed at Housing Authority community centers laid off, and she has yet to raise her voice on their behalf. While that local's president, Faye Moore, is not a favorite of Ms. Roberts—the man who groomed her to succeed him, Charles Ensley, challenged her re-election as executive director in both 2004 and 2007—those cuts represent the kind of privatization the DC 37 leader has long criticized.

As one union insider noted of the HA, "They're not eliminating the centers, they're eliminating the workers—that is absolute privatization."

Ms. Moore said Feb. 5 that she wasn't sure what accounted for the inaction by DC 37 to this point on both the HA situation and the Mayor's budget plan.

"I don't know why it doesn't have a morefocused response—I think the membership deserves it," she said. Referring to the 1,000 union members who could be laid off if the Mayor's proposal was adopted by the City Council, she said, "More than half of them are mine, which may have accounted for DC 37's lack of response. I'm not sure if people are understanding the gravity of what the Mayor is saying."

Didn't Return CBC's Fire

When the Citizens Budget Commission released a dubious report last month stating that the average civil servant cost taxpayers $107,000 in salary and benefits, Ms. Roberts—whose members are paid on average about $31,000 and fall way below that average in total compensation—told her union's executive board that she didn't plan to rebut the report. It fell to Claude Fort, the president of DC 37's Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375, to respond to the findings in a letter to this newspaper, one in which he also pointed out that the CBC is a business-funded organization whose board members include executives employed by some of the firms that are at the root of the international financial crisis.

The irony of Mr. Fort's firing this broadside on behalf of the entire 120,000-member union is that he probably wouldn't have done it if he was still part of the leadership group supporting Ms. Roberts. His fall from grace— Ms. Roberts has brought charges against him for allegedly allowing a loyalist to hold what amounted to a no-show union position and he has countered that it is a trumped-up case that originated from a political dispute and was followed through on only because he pressed for an accounting of a DC 37 party where as much as $300,000 may have been spent—has freed him from having to toe the party line.

It's not really clear what that line is these days, other than the Mel Brooks one about "we gotta protect our phony-baloney jobs." While the budget situation is making the union's rank-and-file sweat, the leadership is like a glacier drifting farther and farther out to sea.

"I think there is a huge vacuum, with nobody at DC 37 being able to engage," one union veteran, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said last week. "There's an undercurrent of concern, but it's sort of like when Stanley [Hill] was there—we've got a lot of people feeding at various troughs, so their feeling is that mediocrity is okay as long as the members don't burn down the building."

He was referring to Ms. Roberts's predecessor as executive director, who was removed a decade ago following revelations of widespread looting of the union by numerous local presidents and the fixing of a wage contract vote. There was suspicion that a key motivation in rigging the ballot box was concern that if the pay deal— which began with a two-year salary freeze—with the Giuliani administration was rejected, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani would have responded to this blow to his budget-balancing by shining a light into many of the corners DC 37 did not want scrutinized.

'She's Demolished the Place'

There is no reason to believe, yet, that a similar mentality is behind DC 37's barely-breathing response to the current fiscal pickle. It may simply be that those with a role in making a public response aren't up to it; as that union veteran put it, "Lillian has really demolished the place in a lot of respects. People who can leave will leave."

Among them is Mike Musaraca, who had been the union's assistant director of research and negotiations and its representative on the board of the New York City Employees Retirement System until he left recently for a private-sector job after marking the 20-year service point that qualified him for a full union pension. His departure came at a particular tough time because DC 37's chief negotiator, Dennis Sullivan, is on a lengthy medical leave. With one of them gone and the other one sidelined, it clearly hurts the union's ability to analyze and respond to the city's budget figures, not to mention the implications of the Federal stimulus package and the state budget.

Until Mr. Hill's departure under a cloud a decade ago, DC 37 served as the primary voice of the municipal labor movement, a combination of it being the largest union at the time (the UFT has since surpassed it) and its executive director's role—dating back to Victor Gotbaum's tenure—as chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee.

Platform Drifts Away

When Mr. Hill left, UFT President Randi Weingarten took his MLC post. Her own expanded duties as president of the American Federation of Teachers forced her to relinquish the job last year, but there never seemed to be a question of Ms. Roberts step- ping into the role; the job instead went to Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association leader Harry Nespoli.

Mr. Nespoli has issued lengthy press releases attacking the CBC report and questioning the Mayor's focus on employee job cuts and union concessions. But his own members are unlikely to face the threat of layoffs, and it's been decades since that union mobilized for the kind of City Hall rally that attracts widespread public attention through media coverage.

At a forum last month comparing the current fiscal crisis to the one of the 1970s, City University Professor of History Josh Freeman noted that three decades ago, Mr. Gotbaum used the MLC platform to step away from the larger AFL-CIO New York City Central Labor Council, and so he and Al Shanker of the UFT and Barry Feinstein of Teamsters Local 237 "became the faces of labor."

More than that, said political consultant George Arzt, who at that time was the City Hall bureau chief of the New York Post, they became the go-to people for reporters seeking information about the state of the city's finances and the tense negotiations aimed at rescuing it from potential ruin.

'Where is the Leadership?'

Then-Mayor Abe Beame, Mr. Arzt explained, was loath to talk about just how bad things had become, and would not answer questions that included the word "bankruptcy" in them.

"The media needs people who will talk to them," he said. "Where is the [union] leadership is the real question."

Ms. Weingarten is certainly visible enough, and Mr. Bloomberg seemed to be banking on her influence with both the Governor—whose father is the UFT's outside labor counsel—and President Obama to get the levers of power turning in response to his threat of massive Teacher layoffs. Teamsters Local 237 President Greg Floyd, who is filling out the term of his predecessor, over the last nine months has sought to raise his own profile by holding a rally against the HA cuts last May, calling newspapers unsolicited a month ago to blast the CBC report, and scheduling a mayoral candidates' forum in April.

Says Members Kept in Dark

Yet Ms. Roberts, whose union seems to have the most to lose, has been missing in action. During the fiscal crisis forum, a former Tech Guild president, Lou Albano, asked from the audience, "Where is the outrage? People aren't complaining" about the current crisis and the way in which the tab for it may be handed to the unions. "Why? Because they don't know what's going on."

And while DC 37 stays largely mute, Mr. Bloomberg continues to lay the groundwork for labor pain, in one form or the other. Addressing a conference of business leaders co-sponsored by Crain's and the New York City Partnership Feb. 3, he said, "We can probably get through, unless the economy softens more, without many layoffs, or without very many layoffs."

Unless, he added, the unions won't agree on health-benefit concessions and a reduced pension benefit for future workers.

That's hardly reassuring. The Mayor's proposed Tier 5, which was part of the Governor's budget package, seems unlikely to make much headway in Albany, where the chairs of the Senate and Assembly committees dealing with union issues have already stated their opposition. And health-benefit concessions are not terribly palatable to the unions, since making employees pay for part of their coverage amounts to a cut in wages that would offset the reasonable pay raises they secured from the Bloomberg administration over the past couple of years.

'2,000-Pound Gorilla' No More

And so DC 37 could be staring down the barrel of significant layoffs even if the economy stabilizes, which is hardly a sure thing at this point. In ordinary circumstances, it would have an uphill battle to rally public support, because aside from the Emergency Medical Service locals under its banner, the people it represents lack the visibility and/or popularity of uniformed employees and Teachers.

The problem is compounded by the lack of any clear public-relations strategy on the union's part, whether through rallies or making its case directly to legislators here and in Albany.

Back in the early 1980s, the union's then-chief lobbyist, Norman Adler, said DC 37's clout made it akin to the "2,000-pound gorilla that sleeps wherever it wants."

Now it just sleeps.