A Show of Strength Matters

This Thursday, municipal unions hope to turn out tens of thousands of members for a City Hall rally to pressure Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council to preserve services and refrain from layoffs in balancing the budget.

Their success in doing so could play an important role not only here but in Albany, since state aid will be a key factor in determining how big a deficit must be addressed. There are veteran union officials who maintain that mobilizing the troops in a show of strength is often the difference between a successful contract negotiation and an unsatisfactory one, a merciful budget or one that sends some workers packing.

Any union members who doubt the urgency of making their presence felt March 5 only have to look at their less-fortunate brethren: the more than 200 Housing Authority community center workers who lost their jobs Feb. 20.

What should be particularly distressing is that two months ago, the closing of the community centers was averted under a deal reached by the Bloomberg administration and the Council that produced additional city funding. The problem was, it entailed transferring the jobs that have long been performed by in-house staff to private contractors.

Mayor Bloomberg has generally shied away from privatizing city services, in contrast to his predecessor, arguing that in many cases he believes city workers do their jobs better and more cheaply than outside providers could. In this instance, however, maintaining the service while getting rid of the public workers who performed it is indisputably privatization.

But aside from the two District Council 37 locals whose members got the ax, there has been barely a murmur about this significant job loss. That includes from DC 37 itself—when a spokeswoman for Executive Director Lillian Roberts was asked about the issue prior to the Feb. 20 layoffs, she responded that the union was employing "a variety of strategies, including pursuing legal action."

None of those strategies, however, included rousing the larger union's 120,000-plus members to take up the cudgel on behalf of those HA workers. It is not clear why. It might be politics—the union leaders whose members were laid off, Faye Moore of Local 371 and Fitz Reid of Local 768, are among the more-prominent internal critics of Ms. Roberts's regime. But there's another possibility, and it should be equally disturbing to DC 37 members and local presidents alike: that the union's current leadership has lost the ability to rally the rank and file in force. A union whose largest local—372—continues to hold elections at a single location in a maneuver designed to limit turnout is not generally well-equipped to suddenly engage its members to make their voices heard, even on issues like job security.

HA officials said last week that 17 of the community center workers had been rehired; Ms. Moore is hopeful that others will be reinstated in the future even before an improper practice petition that she and Mr. Reid brought challenging the privatization is ruled upon. But the affected workers are not particularly well-paid, and even a month away from their jobs could create major hardships.

What happened there is a cautionary tale, regarding both the importance of not waiting until the pink slips are at the door to try to counteract them, and of having union leadership that knows how to deploy its members to protect the interests of themselves and their colleagues.