[gangbox] "THEY SAY CUTBACK, WE SAY FIGHTBACK"

"THEY SAY CUTBACK, WE SAY FIGHTBACK!" race, taxes and billionare NYC
Mayor Mike Bloomberg's city worker layoffs....

By Gregory A. Butler, local 608 carpenter

Friday, May 2 was just another day for the men (and a handfull of
women) who drive garbage trucks for the Department of Sanitation out of
the Manhattan West 9 garage, out by the Hudson River on West St in the
Chelsea section of the boro. 4PM was supposed to the the start of the
evening shift for the members of the Uniformed Sanitationmen's
Association, local 881 of the Teamsters, who drive out of that garage.

But, that day ended up being layoff day for several of those workers,
along with 450 other of "New York's Strongest"..and a very high profile
layoff day at that. Since MW 9 is very near the TV studios of New York
1 news and several other cable and broadcast stations, these folks got
the dubious privilige of being laid off on live TV.

Most of the guys who got the axe were young fathers..their wives got to
hear the bad news on the evening news, even before their husbands got
home from what ended up being their last day of work.

They wern't the only city workers to get cut from their jobs that day.

And, as it happens, 150 sanitation workers are already back on the job,
with the remaining 300 to be recalled by the end of the summer. This
was reportedly due to $ 90 million dollars restored to the New York
City budget by the State Legislature.

$ 90 million bucks or not, other groups of city workers wern't so
lucky..their layoffs stuck..

I hat to say this, but the fact that some city workers got recalled,
but others didn't may have had something to do with the race and gender
of the particular groups of workers affected.

As it happens, sanitation worker is an overwhelmingly male and heavily
White civil service title..

The other titles that had layoffs are overwhelmimgly female, and
heavily Black and Latino.

Apparently, permanently laying off White men is unacceptable to Mayor
Bloomberg and his administration ...but, permanently laying off Black
and Latina women is OK.

For example, the NYC Department of Education laid off 1,800 school
aides.

These aides, mostly African American or Latina mothers, are the workers
who patrol the hallways, keep discipline in the lunchrooms and perform
assorted clerical tasks. They also serve as a cultural bridge between
the largely White and Jewish teacher workforce, and the students and
their parents, most of whom are Black or Latin.

In a real way, the aides, who are members of local 372, District
Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees, (AFSCME) are the backbone of the public school system here.

That backbone got broken that same Friday, when these women got told
their contracts would not be renewed when the school year ends in June.


They will soon be followed by over 1,000 paraprofessionals, or "paras"
as they are commonly known.

The paras are teachers aides who actually work in the classroom
alongside public school teachers.

Like the school aides, they are largely Black and Hispanic moms from
the same neighborhoods where the schools are located. They are
represented by the same union as the teachers, the United Federation of
Teachers, local 1, American Federation of Teachers...and, in fact, up
until the time of the layoffs, many of them were going to college to
become teachers themselves.

Also, these layoffs are happening at a time when the school system,
like the city's population, is expanding, and, if anything, the city
needs MORE paras and school aides, not LESS.

The UFT actually filed a racial discrimination lawsuit on behalf of the
1,800 school aides and the 1,000 paras..charging, correctly, that the
city decided to lay off workers from the most heavily Black and Latin
title in the entire Department of Education.

However, according to reports in the "New York Times", the UFT
leadership may privately welcome the layoffs of the paras.

Paraprofessionals have long been stepchildren within the union..the
Zionist oriented UFT leadership, which has an ugly anti-Black racial
history dating back to the 1960's, apparently may not really want a
large number of African American and Hispanic mothers working in the
public school system. The UFT leadership, if the "New York Times"
coverage can be belived, apparently looks down on the paras because of
their race, and the fact that they live in poor neighborhoods.

It was only due to the political struggles of the 1960's that the
paraprofessional title was created in the first place, in large part
because the then overwhelmingly White teacher workforce were often
hopelessly out of touch with the minority neighborhoods they worked in.

Today, a high proportion of the teacher workforce are Black and Latin
professionals, many of them having come into the system as paras...But,
the Department of Education, despite having a student population that's
over 80% Black and Latin, still goes out of it's way to hire White
professionals to work in the system..even going so far as to import
teachers from Austria, a country which just happens to be the Whitest
country in Europe.

Those aren't the only racially charged cutbacks in the public schools.

Many after school programs are being cutback too. Many of those
programs are staffed by employees of "not for profit" anti poverty
agencies, most of whom, like the paras, are Black or Latina women.

Some of those workers are union members too..they're in District
Council 1707 of AFSCME, and many of them will lose their jobs at the
end of the school year.

The school aides were the largest single group of city workers to get
cut on that ugly Friday afternoon.

Other DC 37 workers got the axe too..with the largest single group,
after the school aides, being 100 civilian payroll clerks in the NY
Fire Department.

The city's massive jail system saw layoffs too.

Folks also lost their jobs out on Rikers Island, the city's huge
complex of correctional facilites on an island in the East River off
the coast of La Guardia Airport in Queens (the world's largest
municipal penal colony, with a population of 14,000 men, women and
children awaiting trial in the Manhattan, Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn or
Staten Island state supreme courts).

350 corrections officers (or "COs" as they are commonly referred to by
inmates and co workers alike), members of an independent union called
the Corrections Officers Benevolent Association, lost their jobs.

The prisoners are still well guarded, of course..

There are still 10,000 other COs on the job, along with several hundred
corrections captains, scores of assistant deputy wardens (known as
"ADWs" in Department of Corrections jargon - they're unionized too,
represented by, of all things, a local of the International
Longshoremen's Association - hey, the jail is on an island, right?) as
well as a couple dozen deputy wardens, and, of course, the dozen or so
wardens of the various men's, women's and juvenile jails out on The
Island.

Unlike the 80% White New York Police Department, the Department of
Corrections has a heavily Black workforce, with large numbers of Latino
officers as well.

Which kind of makes sense..since the NYPD disproportionately arrests
Blacks and Latinos, and judges will frequently remand minority
prisoners for offenses that would get a White prisoner RORed [Released
on Own Recognizance - that is, let go without bail], and also,
considering the fact that high poverty and unemployment levels among
New Yorks' Blacks and Latinos leads to high levels of petty crime in
the ghettoes, the Island's prisoner population is almost entirely
composed of African Americans and Hispanics.

Apparently, the DoC has long felt that it's easier to control prisoners
of color with guards of color...which explains the racial composition
of their workforce.

Again, it's entirely possible that the city was a lot more willing to
lay off Black CO's than they were to lay off White police officers.

All told, 3,000 employees got laid off...with possibly upwards of
15,000 other city workers facing layoffs.

There was only one department that was exempt from the cutbacks..the
NYPD.

That agency, who's 40,000 uniformed police officers make up the largest
city police force on the planet, has not had one layoff.

Not only were the department's overwhelmingly White force of police
officers, detectives, sergeants, leiutenants, captains, deputy
inspectors and inspectors immune from the layoffs, but even the PAA's
(police administrative aides), the Black women who work as secretaries
in precincts, were immune from losing their jobs, as were the TEA's
(traffic enforcement agents) the unarmed but uniformed $ 22,000 a year
Black men and women who write most the the NYPD's traffic tickets.

After all, there are still lots of jobless Black and Latino men who the
system needs to be harassed and jailed for petty offenses...if
anything, the job of repressing poor people of color is more important
in these hard economic times.

Beyond that, the city makes a LOT of money from tickets for petty
offenses, (littering, public urination, traffic violations ect)...and
the police are under orders to write lots and lots and lots of tickets,
a minimum of 20 per officer per shift, to raise more money for the
city.

The city's written so many harassing tickets for bullshit nonexistant
"violations" that the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, the
union that represents the city's 30,000 livery cab drivers (who operate
the taxis that serve the city's Black and Latino neighborhoods)
actually called a one day strike on Wednesday, June 11th, over the
excessive number of summonses that their members have been recieving.

The city police officers union, the independent Patrolmen's Benevolent
Association, fearing a backlash from the public against their members,
has also taken out adds in the newspapers, urging citizens to blame the
city, rather than the cop on the beat, for all the tickets that the
officers have been ordered to hand out.

This is the first layoff the city has done since 1990.and the largest
mass layoff of municipal civil servants since the great "Fiscal Crisis"
of 1975, when the city almost went bankrupt and the financial affairs
of the Corporation of the City of New York (that's the city's official
name) got taken over by an unelected banker's junta called the
Municipal Assistance Corporation.

The bankers of the MAC have the final say on all New York City
budgetary matters. These unelected financiers, who are appointed by the
big Wall Street banks that underwrite the city's muncipal bond issues,
can overrule both the mayor and the city council on any and all
questions of money.

Back in '75, the city went broke by subsidizing real estate developers.
The city borrowed short term at high interest rates..and lent the money
out long term, at low interest rates, to enable developers to build
hirise luxury apartment buildings in Manhattan..

Now, you don't need an M.B.A. to figure out that this was not a sound
business pratice. If you're paying out high interest rates, but only
collecting low interest rates, you're losing money every day...losses
that only get deeper and deeper and deeper over the term of the loans.

Of course, the bankers who gained from these deals never had to endure
the pain of the financial crisis that the real estate loans caused.

On the contrary, the Fiscal Crisis was resolved on the backs of city
workers. Tens of thousands were laid off, and city workers were even
forced to give the city a week's wages as a long term, no interest
loan, to be paid off at the end of their careers when they retired.

The general working class population of the city suffered from the
service cuts that resulted from these layoffs..subway lines were closed
and dismantled, streets got dirtier, school class sizes increased and
even some entire schools were shut down.

The impact was magnified by the fact that the Fiscal Crisis came on the
heels of "The Burning of New York", the systematic destruction by
landlord-financed arson of hundreds of low income apartment buildings
in predominantly Black and Latino parts of Harlem, the South Bronx,
Central Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens between 1970 and 1975..

That wave of businessman-sponsored urban terrorism displaced hundreds
of thousands of working class minority New Yorkers, destroying their
lives and personal belongings in the process. Thousands of these
working class residents, along with hundreds of New York City firemen,
were injured during the fires and hundreds of them died, along with
dozens of firemen.

And worse yet..nobody ever did time for those murderous fires, besides
a few low level "torches" (professional arsonists).

The landlords, who burned the buildings because they could no longer
profitably rent them, along with the insurance companies and mortgage
bankers who looked the other way and let fradulent insurance claims be
filed and paid out, never got touched, even though they laid waste to a
huge portion of the city.

That chapter of city history has been all but erased from "official"
histories of our city, as if it never even happened. Unlike another
infamous firestorm (that is, 9/11) there's no monuments to the
thousands of dead, or special benefit programs for the folks who were
hurt or had their personal belongings burned up.

This current financial crisis was also born in fire and financial
mismanagement. but it had a slightly different root cause.

The city's economy, and consequently it's tax revenue, have been in a
slide ever since the end of the dot.com IPO bubble in 2000.

Venture capitalists pumped billions of dollars of other people's money
into internet companies that were valueless shells with wildly
overoptomistic business plans and no real way to generate a profit,
artificially pushing worthless penny stock shares into the hundreds of
dollar a share range.

When the bubble burst, and the hyperinflated $ 100+ a share stocks fell
back to their 25 cents a share true price, there was nothing
left...except thousands of laid off computer professionals and clerical
workers (some of whom are still out of work, and have had to go into
debt to go back to college to make themselves employable in other
industries ), a lot of empty office space..and a lot of people who lost
their life savings.

And things only got worse when < al Qaeda > blew up the World Trade
Center on September 11th..which cost the city in excess of $ 40 billion
dollars.

The city didn't really have that $ 40 billion to pay out..but, there
was no question that the money would be paid out, one way or the
other.

Remember, unlike the Burning of New York in the 1970's, which mainly
hurt working class people, The Bombing (or, to use the official name
used by the insurance companies, "The Events Of September 11th") burned
up the property of RICH PEOPLE..so, there was no question that the
millionares and billionares would be fully financially compensated with
a truly astonishing quickness..even if the City of New York had to go
broke to do it.

And go broke the city did...which is why the city is now laying off
workers.

This is a big problem for the working class of the City of New York.

After all, The City is the largest single employer in NYC. The
municipal government, along with it's varous authorities, employs
somewhere in the neighborhood of 330,000 of NYC's 4 million workers.

And almost all these 330,000 jobs are union jobs....in fact, 30% of the
city's 1 millon union members are in fact municipal civil servants. The
city's second largest union is a civil service union..the 125,000
member DC 37 of AFSCME.

City jobs have also been a route to middle income status for many of
the city's African American and West Indian workers... Middle class
Black neighborhoods like Co-Op City and Parkchester in the Bronx, or
Queens Village, Hollis, Rochdale Village and Cambria Heights in Queens
are largely populated by city employees and their families. Many middle
income Black suburbs in Long Island, Westchester, Rockland, Orange,
Putnam and Dutchess counties, and across the river in places like
Englewood and Teaneck, New Jersey, are also populated largely by NYC
municipal workers.

Many Latino, Chinese and Indian workers have also followed the path
that Black workers blazed in using city jobs as a path to upward
mobility.

This is because, unlike the private sector, the city, for the most
part, hires based on merit, rather than color.

There are some exceptions to that, of course (like the predominantly
White NYPD, and the overwhelmingly White FDNY, city agencies that go
out of their way to hire Whites instead of people of color,
irregardless of merit), but most city agencies pratice racially neutral
hiring pratices virtually unknown in private industry.

Now, as it happens, many these jobs are not the best paying jobs in the
world.

City cafeteria workers and school crossing guards only make $ 15,000 a
year. The traffic enforcement agents employed by the Police Department
and sanitation agents employed by the Department of Sanitation only get
$ 22,000 a year. The typical clerical worker employed by the city only
sees $ 25,000 a year.

Some other jobs are a bit better paying..the typical transit worker
makes around $ 30,000 a year, and some of the higher paying secretarial
titles are in that range too.

But, some city jobs pay very well.. Cops and correction officers earn
about $ 50,000 a year after 5 years on the job. Firefighter see around
$ 60,000 after 5 years. And, the city's public school teachers start
out with the moderate salary of $ 40,000 a year..but, if they work for
the system for 16 years, they will get $ 81,000.

But, high paying or low, all these jobs have really good benefits.
These jobs have great pension plans (some city workers, like cops and
firemen, actually get to retire after 20 years on the job, irregardless
of age), full family medical, dental, hospitalization and prescription
coverage, with minimal co-pays, as well as an elaborate system of
supplimental benefits, such as life insurance and pre paid legal
services coverage. City employees probably have the best benefit
package of any workers in the state.

Those benefits didn't get handed to city workers on a silver platter,
of course...they were won through 75 years of struggle by city workers
unions.

And now, that might all get taken away. In fact, the city workers
unions had an ugly choice earlier this year, accept layoffs..or let
everybody keep their jobs, but with less pay and a much weakened
benefit package.

They elected to preserve their standards, and keep union conditions for
the folks who still had jobs.

A hard decision to make..but probably the right one.

These aren't even the first city workers to face layoffs.

At least one city authority, the New York City Health and Hospitals
Corporation, the entity that operates the city's 8 public hospitals,
has been laying off workers for years.

HHC has laid off over 7,000 of it's 15,000 workers, decimating the
ranks of DC 37 locals 420 (hospital service workers) and 768 (nurses)
and causing siginificant job loss for members of social workers local
371 and clerical workers local 1549.

HHC has also laid off lots of middle management personnel represented
by Communications Workers of America local 1180 and hospital police
represnted by City Employees local 237 of the Teamsters.

The only reason that Health and Hospitals isn't participating in this
round of employee cutbacks is very simple..they've run out of workers
to lay off!!!

Needless to say, this has led to substantial service cuts for patients
in the city's public hospitals.

Similar deep service cuts are in store for other city agencies as
well..4 closed firehouses, numerous after school and educational
programs cut, 69 token booths closed in the subway system ect.

And, along with service cuts come increased taxes and fees..in
particular, the subway and bus fare went from $ 1.50 to $ 2, property
tax went up a whopping 18%, and the sales tax, already the highest in
the nation at 8.25%, is being increased to 8.45%.

But, the question is, where do the city workers go from here?

Should they do what the leaders of Teamsters local 237, District
Council 37 of AFSCME, the United Federation of Teachers and Transport
Workers Union local 100 are doing now..that is, follow behind the
leadership of Democratic politicians like Brooklyn Boro President Marty
Markowitz, Councilman Charles Barron or State Assembly Speaker Sheldon
Silver?

Or, should city workers take the suggestion of a number of left wing
organizations, and fight for various finance reform schemes, like the
stock transfer tax and a repudiation of the public debt of the City of
New York?

Or, is there another way...one that would involve city workers uniting
with the rest of the city's workforce, and with the privitized public
service workers at the "not for profit" social service agencies, as
well as the city's private sector workers, to demand an expansion of
services, and a program to actually INCREASE the number of workers on
the city payroll.

Let's take a look.

First of all, following the Democratic Party is a dead end.

It's easy, especially in an overwhelmingly Democratic city like NYC, to
blast Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a certified billionare, (know
the Bloomberg computer terminals that sit in every bank and brokerage
house on the planet? Mayor Mike gets a cut from each and every one of
those hundreds of thousands of computers) as a greedy fat cat
Republican who doesn't care about the working person..

Except for the fact that, until he was mayor, Bloomberg was a
DEMOCRAT..he only became a Republican because the Democrats had too
many mayoral candidates in the last election..by running as a
Republican, he had an easier primary race, and the Democrats cancelled
each other out.

Beyond that, we have to talk about the 30 years of Democratic
Party-sponsored privitization initiatives which have really weakened
the city workers.

Back in the 1960's, as riots swept Black and Latino neighborhoods in
the city, the Democrats began encouraging community activists to set up
501 (c)(3) "not for profit" community service corporations.

The Democrats then turned around, and got funding for these
corporations to run social service programs which, up til that time,
had been run by the government.

In return for the government grants, the directors and board members of
the agencies would help to keep a lid on tensions in the inner city, to
diffuse any future urban uprisings. They would channel inner city
dissent into safe channels like lobbying and social service casework.

In return, the agenices would get a lot of money..and the city would
turn a blind eye to their mismanagement and, quite frequently, to their
nepotism, corruption and misappropriation of funds.

This, in effect, created a patronage machine out of these "Community
Based Organizations", a modern day Tammany Hall that is the mass base
of the Democratic Party in this town today.

These agencies provide jobs and services in very poor
neighborhoods..with a hidden pricetag.

That is, folks who work for these agencies, and, in some cases, even
the clients the agencies serve, are expected to assist the Democratic
Party.

Unfortunately, for the most part, both the jobs and services provided
by these agencies are sub par.

I've written previously on GANGBOX about the low pay and inferior
working conditions suffered by workers at these agencies, at :

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583

Even unionized anti poverty agency workers are grossly underpaid... For
example, the teachers at the day care and after school programs run by
these agencies, members of DC 1707 of AFSCME, only have a starting
salary of $ 18,000 a year, and top out at $ 35,000. Non union teachers
get it even worse..some make as little as $ 12,000 dollars a year.
These agencies also frequently expect their teachers to work a 52 week
a year schedule, with only a limited amount of vaction time.

Worse yet..a lot of times, the workers are not paid on time. In one
case, day care workers who had not been paid in months were told by an
agency director that they should "get a husband" to support them,
rather than demanding the wages they were owed.

By contrast, city teachers in the UFT have a starting salary of $
40,000/yr, and top out at $ 81,000 after 16 years on the job. City
teachers also have a shorter work day and work year, and get the whole
summer as a paid vacation.

Building service workers employed by these agencies, represented by
local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union, are also
grossly underpaid. Porters only recieve $ 6/hr for a 25 hour workweek,
and supers get $ 20,000 a year for being on call 24 hours a day.

By contrast, 32bj private sector building porters get $ 17 an hour for
a 40 hour workweek, and supers get a salary of $ 35,000/yr.

And, of course, the non union construction workers who renovate these
agency's buildings are grotesquely underpaid. The average daily pay is
only $ 80, with some workers recieving as little as $ 20 a day.

Unlike city workers, who are provided with ample health, pension, life
insurance, and supplimental benefits, many employees of the anti
poverty agencies don't have benefits of any kind. Even the workers who
do have benefits are far less well provided for than city workers.

Also, city workers are selected by means of an impartial civil service
test. Once hired, they can only be fired for cause, and cannot be
punished for their political views.

And getting fired from a city job generally involves two things...

1) REALLY fucking up on your job

and

2) the agency you work for being able to PROVE that you REALLY fucked
up on your job to a city tribunal known as the Office of Administrative
Trials and Hearings [OATH]

Not so the anti poverty agencies.

In that world, hiring is a patronage-ridden and often racially biased
process, (that is, Black run agencies, for the most part, only hire
Blacks, and Latino run agencies mainly hire Latinos - the racism can
get a bit more specific than that..Dominicans hiring Dominicans only,
Puerto Ricans hiring Puerto Ricans only ect) and you can lose your job
at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

And, of course, if you don't "volunteer" for particular Democratic
Party candidates supported by the management of the agency, you might
very well find yourself jobless.

These agencies were supposedly set up to fight against Black and Latino
poverty...but, in actuality, due to the low wages they pay, they are a
major CAUSE of Black and Latino poverty.

Besides low wages, the programs run by the anti poverty agencies often
provide inferior services than comparable city run programs...and, they
actually cost the taxpayers more money than equivilent services
provided by the civil service workforce. Remember, city agencies can
operate at a loss, and they don't have expensive executive perks to
finance..

Basically, these anti poverty agencies prove a lot of the arguments
that AFSCME, the Teachers Union and other civil service labor
organizations often make about privitization, that it leads to inferior
services at a higher cost to the taxpayer.

Which is why it's puzzling why nobody in the civil service union
movement is seriously calling for the municipal takeover of the
services these private agencies provide.

Actually, it's not that hard to understand at all...the leaders of DC
37, DC 1707, TWU local 100, the UFT and the Teamsters are tied to the
same wing of the Democratic Party that these Community Based
Organizations are..so the leaders of the civil service unions don't
dare attack the folks who are the core of the Democratic Party
patronage machine in this town. After all, they both answer to the same
political masters.

This is also why the city unions haven't done as good a job of fighting
for profit privitization as they could have. The Department of
Education has hundreds of contracts, not only with "not for profit"
agencies, but also with for profit corporations like Edison and Sylvan
Learning Systems.

The workforce at these for profit providers are non union, and peform
the same work that United Federation of Teachers-represented teachers
and paraprofessionals do..but for far less pay.

Also, the city has dozens of "Business Improvement Districts" or BID's.


These are private corporations that have quasi governmental authority
in the city's major shopping and industrial districts (Hunts Point BID,
125th St BID, 14th St Union Square BID, Times Square BID ect..). The
BID's get to levy taxes on all the merchants in a given area.

The BID's use those special levies to operate their own private police
forces, composed of unarmed security guards. Their main targets?
Homeless Black and Latin men who beg on the streets, and Black and
Latino teenagers who hang out on the streets after school, on weekends
and when school is not in session.

The BID's also run their own private sanitation departments, composed
principally of Black and Latino homeless people and recently released
ex offenders. They clean the streets and collect the garbage for
minimum wage, instead of the $ 40,000 a year that city sanitation
workers get.

And yes, all those jobs used to be unionized civil service jobs. The
BID's didn't cause any police layoffs, of course..because the city
always needs extra armed personnel to keep the Blacks and Latinos in
line. But, the city sanitation workforce has fallen from 11,000 to only
6,000, in part due to the BID's minimum wage non union cleaner
workforce..and, of course, the city's workfare program, WEP.

But, what can civil service workers do?

Writing letters to the Assembly and picketing City Hall, while useful,
have their limitations...especially if there is no attempt to fight
against the Democratic Party machine.

Also, a lot of the tax proposals that have been floating around are
useful too (like a restoration of the commuter tax, or a 1% stock
transfer tax on securities transactions, or a supplimental income tax
on extremely rich New Yorkers).

There is also another proposal, being pushed by some left wing
activists, that calls for repudiating the municipal debt. The city,
like most communities in America, pays out an enormous amount of money
in debt service..most of which goes straight to the Money Center banks
of Wall Street, who underwrite and sell most municipal paper.

The Corporation of the City of New York is actually still paying off
debt from the building of the 8th and 6th Avenue Subway lines back in
the 1930's!!! And there is also a mountain of debt based on the "Big
MAC" bonds that the Municipal Assistance Corporation issued back in the
1970's to bail the city's finances out.

Now, cancelling all that debt service would free up an enormous amount
of money..but, it would also require a head on fight with the money
men, folks like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, Cantor
Fitzgerald, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter,
Credit Suisse First Boston, Lazard Freres and the other financial
bigshots who are the holders of a lot of that municipal paper.

Remember, these folks can seize all of the city tax revenue if their
bonds don't get paid off..

And, of course, don't ever forget that these are the dudes who RUN THE
COUNTRY....when they snap their fingers, presidents and governors snap
to attention, and bow to their every whim.

Nor should we forget that Mayor Bloomberg, a man who's personally worth
in excess of $ 5 billion dollars, and is the owner of the second
largest financial news agency on the planet, Bloomberg LP, is himself
one of these titans of finance, a personal representative of Wall
Street sitting in Gracie Mansion.

Unlike most politicians in this country, Mayor Bloomberg is NOT a mere
servant of Corporate America...

He IS Corporate America....

Consequently, fighting the Wall Street moneymen for their money would
require a major struggle in the streets. To succeed, debt repudiation
would probably require something along the lines of an ultra militant
municipal workers general strike, supported by massive rallies and
riotous civil insurrectionary protests from the rest of the workforce.

And when I speak of protests I'm not talking about you're everyday
legalistic rally..which, as important as they are, still basically boil
down to a few thousand workers standing around an empty City Hall at
5PM listening to speeches..When I speak of "insurrectionary protests"
I'm talking about something along the lines of the riots in the streets
during the urban uprisings of the 1960's....

I don't think we're quite ready for that yet..it would be like a 16
year old Golden Gloves kid fighting against Roy Jones, Jr, very quick,
very ugly, very painful and a very fast defeat..

But, if we sparred against some of the weaker capitalists first, we
might just be ready for that fight against the corporate heavyweights
at a future date.

So, instead of fighting the ultra poweful Wall Street moneymen who hold
the bonds at this, we have to instead go after the small time players,
the 501 (c) (3) anti poverty agencies and local merchant-run BIDs who
get that money.

If we beat the BIDs and the anti poverty agencies, we'd then be able to
go after corporate privitization firms, like Sylvan Learning Systems
and Lockheed Governmental Services Division..which would actually be an
attack on the rear echelon of Wall Street itself, and a prelude to a
head on fight about the bonds.

I'd start with the BIDs and the not for profits because they're
smaller, they're more divided (by race, among other things), many of
them are weak, corrupt and badly managed, and, in a pinch, the moneymen
would abandon them to avoid a wider fight with the working class of New
York.

I would recommend that city workers should demand:

- An immediate end to all city social, health, youth and educational
services contracts with "not for profit" anti poverty agencies and for
profit service providers.

- The municipal takeover of all the services previously provided by
anti poverty agencies, as well as for profit service providers, with
the workforce in those agencies provisionally granted civil service
status until such time as they can take and pass a civil service test
for the job they perform.

- Abolition of the Work Experience Program, the city's workfare
program, and the immediate granting of civil service status and city
worker wages and benefits to all of the 35,000 workers currently in
that program.

and,

- The use of the funds saved by abolishing these programs to save the
jobs of laid off city workers, to grant civil service wages to the WEP
workers, and to bring the wage standard of the former BID and anti
poverty agency workers up to civil service levels.

Those demands would not only keep city workers employed, they would
also substantially improve the jobs of social service workers in the
"not for profit" sector, as well as improving services for the city's
working class taxpayers. It might even prevent a tax increase, because
the city would get more value for it's tax dollar if the work was being
done in house, rather than by vendors.

There would also be a political benefit...the "not for profit" anti
poverty agencies are, as I mentioned above, the backbone of the
Democratic Party machine here.

Breaking that backbone might pave the way for political independence
for New York City's 4 million workers.

As for the money it would cost..on the real, that's really not our
problem.

The government never has a problem finding the cash when rich people
need something done.

Remember, when the US government needed $ 80 billion dollars to invade
Iraq, there was no question of "we don't have the money"..they found
the cash to drop the bombs, no questions asked.

But it's not just the feds.

When the downtown real estate interests and their contractors came
looking for $ 40 billion bucks on that horrible morning in September,
the city started writing checks while the gypsum dust clouds still
covered Lower Manhattan, hell, the first contracts were let while
people were still jumping from Tower 1!!!

The city didn't ask questions when they came for their money...so, we
need to take it to the streets, and force the city to show us the same
courtesy.

After all, the Corporation of the City of New York is a
government..that means they have the soverign power to levy taxes and
confiscate property.

So, let them figure out where the cash will come from...it's really not
our problem.

As I mentioned above, we need to deal with the WEP program. This
program has been used to slowly eliminate a lot of city jobs over the
last decade (in particular, 2,500 Parks Department jobs, and 2,000
Department of Sanitation positions). Also, because of the really bad
conditions that WEP workers are subjec to, many welfare recipients are
basically forced by WEP program abuses to drop off the welfare rolls
and take any minimum or subminimum or off the books jobs they can find.

At any given moment, there are 35,000 WEP workers..but, over the last
decade, about 600,000 welfare recipients have been funneled through the
program, and off of welfare, and into the bottom end of an already
glutted low wage job market.

Unlike the remaining 600,000 welfare recipients, who, for the most
part, have minimal job experience, the typical WEP worker over the last
half decade was a woman who had extensive previous employment
experience, and was merely using welfare to tide herself over a period
of long term unemployment.

I would demand that the workers currently in the WEP program be placed
on the city payroll, as provisional civil servants, and given the
opportunity to take the test for their title and get regular civil
service status.

Beyond that, there should be another demand...cutting the budget of the
New York Police Department and the New York City Department of
Corrections, and shifting their personnel and resources to useful
social services for New York City residents.

This town has a bloated police force...over 40,000 officers, the
largest municipal police force on the planet.

And most of that police force are focused on two anti working class
tasks...writing tickets for petty offenses, and harassing Black and
Latino youth. The NYPD's 37,500 uniformed police officers are subject
to strict ticket quotas...20 per shift, even if the "violation" is
totally fabricated. Also, the police spend a lot of time harassing
African American and Hispanic young people, for so called "quality of
life crimes"...

Just to make things clear, "quality of life" is, generally speaking, a
euphamism for "making rich White people feel uncomfortable".

Of course, it's very easy for a person of color to make a racist
Caucasian person feel "uncomfortable", "quality of life" provides the
cops with many excuses to harass minority young people, for "crimes"
that a White young person would, most likely, never be bothered for.

Out of all those 40,000 cops, only the 2,500 detectives are actually
involved in real crime fighting.

And even then, most NYPD detectives are tied up in investigating
victimless "crimes" like low level drug sales and small time
prostitution. That activity, of course, also involves arresting lots of
Blacks and Latinos..because, of course, big time (White) drug dealers
and big time (White) escort services hardly ever get investigated by
the police department, but Black and Latin street drug dealers on the
corner, and Black and Latin streetwalkers, get arrested by the
thousands.

There are also a huge number of officers involved in harassing self
employed workers such as vendors and taxi drivers. In particular, the
vendor harassment is driven by big time retailers, who use the cops to
persecute their low cost competitors.

There is absolutely no reason why the cops should be involved in
this..if the big corporations are worried about trademark infringement
and pirating, they should hire private detectives and lawyers on their
own dime, rather than using taxpayer financed police to do their dirty
work.

As for real crimes like robberies, burglaries, rape, domestic violence,
child molestation and murder, there are very few detectives available
to investigate these offenses.

Back in 1975, the NYPD only had 25,000 officers..and over 4,000 of them
were detectives.

I would propose that the NYPD be reduced down to 25,000 cops, with the
15,000 surplus officers either offered transfers to other city
departments, offered early retirement or, worst case scenario, laid
off. Of the remaining 25,000 officers, I would promote 1,500 of them to
detective..with the bulk of the detective force being assigned to
investigating violent crimes, sex offenses and domestic violence.

Ideally, I would also propose the decriminalization of, and imposition
of sales taxes on, narcotics and prostitution, along with a general
pardon of all the people currently locked up, on probation or on parole
for these victimless "crimes". Short of that, I would substantially
reduce the number of law enforcement officers assigned to investigating
drugs and prostitution (which would be sort of a back door
legalization).

Also, it almost goes without saying, I'd terminate all of the racist
"quality of life" enforcement programs, as well as all harassment of
vendors and taxi drivers.

This would also lead to substantial reduction of the city's 10,000
officer strong Department of Corrections.

Up until 1980, there were only 2,500 cells on Rikers Island..today,
there are over 14,000 beds out there. With the reduction of arrests for
"quality of life", drugs and prostituion, there'd be less need for all
those cells.

Which means that the city would need less CO's.. Basically, since the
city needs 10,000 officers to guard the current 14,000 bed system, a
2,500 bed Rikers Island would only require about 1,800 COs.

Now, considering the fact that the reduced prison system would be
disproportionately composed of real violent crimnals, (instead of the
down on their luck unemployed folks who fill the jail cells today),
there would be a need for a higher officer to prisoner ratio, perhaps
as high as 2 to 1.

But that still means that the city would have about 5,000 CO's too
many. The 5,000 surplus officers could be either offered jobs in other
city departments, offered early retirement, or, worst case, laid off.

These measures would do a lot to improve the "quality of life" of Black
and Latino New Yorkers, who are regularly subject to harassment by the
NYPD..if city workers were to fight for these demands, they would be
building a bridge between themselves and the majority of the city's
population. And they'd be helping themselves in the process, since most
city employees are Black or Latino, and are themselves frequently
subject to police harassment

Case in point, one Alberta Spruill, a DC 37 member who administered
civil service tests at the Department of Citywide Administrative
Services, who was killed by the NYPD during a "no knock" drug raid.

Spruill's apartment was raided based on the uncorroberated statements
of a snitch, who claimed a drug dealer sold drugs out of her apartment.


Since Spruill was Black, and lived in Harlem, the police didn't even
bother to investigate, they just got a warrant. If they had checked
with the landlord or her neighbors, the police would have known that
Spruill was an unmarried 54 year old church lady, who'd never touched a
drug or even a drink in life, and who didn't even know the snitch or
the dealer, or anybody else in the drug game.

Submachine and shotgun toting officers from the NYPD's ultraviolent
tactical unit, the Emergency Services Unit [ESU], smashed Spruill's
door down with a battering ram, threw a hand grenade in her apartment,
then several burly helmeted and flak jacket clad policemen tackled the
petite old woman, threw her down and handcuffed her on the floor. They
finally uncuffed her when it dawned on them that her apartment was not
a drug den, and the dealer who was supposedly there was not on the
premises.

Spruill, who was getting ready for work, had a heart attack from the
shock of the raid, and, despite the police's best efforts to revive
her, died on the way to Harlem Hospital.

This kind of thing happens every day in the city's Black and Latin
neighborhoods...even though most of the drugs sold in the city are
purchased by affluent Whites, many of whom don't even live in the city.

In this case, the victim was a city worker..all the more reason why
city workers should fight against the NYPD's abuses towards working
class Blacks and Latinos.

Here's the problem..those are all good ideas, but how do we get to that
place from where we are now?

First of all, I think a big part of the problem is in the unions
themselves.

The leaders of DC 37, DC 1707 , the UFT, TWU local 100, Teamsters local
237, Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association/Teamsters local 881, the
Uniformed Firefighters Association, the COBA, the PBA, and all of the
other city employee unions, like the rest of the AFL-CIO, are all
followers of an ideology called business unionism.

That is, they belive that workers and bosses have common interests, and
it's the job of union leaders to build "class partnership" between the
unions and management.

Since these unions represent government workers, business unionism here
means following behind the Democratic Party machine, as well as the
city administration.

Of course, the reality of the situation here is, city workers have a
conflict with both the administration and the Democratic Party machine,
just like all workers have conflicts with their bosses under a
capitalistic economic system. The city, and the Democratic Party, wants
to get more work done with less workers, for less pay, and, of course,
the workers want to have more workers doing less work for more pay.

There's another little wrinkle here..police officers and corrections
officers have a double conflict. On the one hand, the cops and CO's
have a conflict with the NYPD and DoC brass..and, on the other hand
they have a conflict with the rest of the working class, since their
job involves repression against the workers, in particular poor, Black
and Latin workers.

In either case, business unionism isn't able to deliver the goods for
these workers anymore.

Back in 1975, city workers were sold down the river by the "big three"
civil service union leaders, Albert Shanker of the UFT, Victor Gotbaum
of DC 37 and Barry Feinstein of Teamsters local 237.

Today, city workers are also being sold down the river by the current
crop of union leaders, Randi Weingarten of the UFT, Roger Touissaint of
TWU local 100, Caroll Haynes of Teamsters local 237, Lillian Roberts of
DC 37 and Arthur Cheliotes of Communications Workers of America local
1180.

The current crop of civil service union leaders aren't as horrible as
1975's "big three"... Shanker, Gotbaum and Feinstein were all arch
reactionaries.

Shanker and Gotbaum actually had CIA ties, and spent years helping the
State Department fight union militants from South Vietnam to Chile to
Indonesia to the Dominican Republic to several dozen other places.

If that wasn't disgusting enough, Shanker was also a rabid Zionist and
fanatical George Wallace-style anti-Black racist. He actually led 3
illegal strikes, and even went to jail in 1968, to prevent Black and
Latin parents from having any influence in how their children were
educated .

Mercifully, two of the "big three" are gone from the labor officialdom.
Albert Shanker is in Hell (he dropped dead a few years ago from cancer)
and Victor Gotbaum is retired (his wife Betsy Gotbaum is now a
politican herself, she's the city Public Advocate)

Barry Feinstein is still with us, unfortunately. He was expelled from
the Teamsters for corruption and barred for life from local 237. But,
scandal or no, Barry now runs the New York City Central Labor Council's
501 (c)(3) not for profit educational arm, the Consortium for Worker
Education.

In complete contrast to the reactionary "big three" of 1975,
Weingarten, Touissaint, Haynes, Roberts and Cheliotes all have a
leftist public image..This is especially true for Touissaint, who was
was actually a member of the Communist Party (Marxist Leninist) for
many years, and Cheliotes, who has long flirted with the left here in
NYC. Also, demographically, they look a hell of a lot more like the
city workforce than the "big three", since Touissaint, Haynes and
Roberts are all Black, and Weingarten and Roberts are women.

But, despite the differences, and the great public show of militancy
put on by today's crop of civil service union leaders, at the end of
the day, in the absence of a struggle by civil servants, the unions
will make deep concessions to the city... Only time will tell how deep
those cuts will be, but it might end up being even worse than 1975.

Now, I've already outlined some ideas above about what city workers
could do to reverse this crisis.

To summarize, I suggested a fight to abolish all of the city's
contracts with the anti poverty agencies and the BID's, to be coupled
with the muncipilization of the services these agencies provide, and
the granting of full civil service status to the workforces of these
agencies.

Along with that, I urged a struggle to abolish the WEP program, and
having all 35,000 people currently in WEP to be hired by the city as
provisionals, and I urged a political struggle against the city's
racist "quality of life" law enforcement programs, along with a
reduction of the size of the city's police and corrections departments,
and an end to mass incarceration of individuals guilty of low level
victimless crimes such as street drug sales and prostitution..

I also said that, if this struggle was sucessfully carried out, then
city workers, along with the working class of the city as a whole,
would be in a position to go for all the marbles, take on the big Wall
Street boys and fight for the repudiation of the city's municipal debt.

Now, it should almost go without saying that the current crop of civil
service union leaders are totally incapable of leading this kind of
struggle. And not because they're bad people or anything like that, but
due to the fact that they're business unionists, and the system of
business unionism leads them to make deals with the city.

So, what's the alternative?

Simple..something that I like to call "revolutionary unionism".

What exactly is this revolutionary unionism?

I've previously defined the ideology of revolutionary unionism on the
GANGBOX website before, at :

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/csu1.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/downbylaw.html

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/contract2001.html

and on the GANGBOX listserv, at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/22

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/954

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2466

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/2659

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/4738

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/5059

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/7966

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8649

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/8770

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/9027

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11281

and

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/message/11583

Basically, what revolutionary unionism means is labor organizations
recognizing the fact that there is a fundamental conflict of interest
between management and labor. There is no room for "cooperation" or
"class partnership"...workers and bosses are enemies, and it's the
union's job to help workers fight back against their employers.

Revolutionary unionism also means unions that are accountable to the
members, and are controlled by delegates and officers that come from
the membership, and are accountable to the membership.

That would involve having the city worker unions being reorganized so
that their main administrative body was a Council of Delegates,
composed of rank and file workers on release time from their jobs,
elected to a single, 3 year, non re electable term. That body would be
assisted by union officers, who would also be on leave from their jobs,
and serve a single, 3 year, non re electable term of office, and would
draw a salary no higher than the one they got when they worked for the
city.

On the ground in the agencies, there is a need for a strong shop
steward system throughout the city's far flung offices and work
locations. These stewards would have to have the authority to resolve
greivances on the job, rather than being expected to passively transmit
greivances to union officials to take to arbitration, as is the present
pratice.

Beyond that, the unions would need to wage a coordinated struggle to
fight for the program I outlined above, which could be coordinated
through a reorganized version of the current Municipal Labor Committee.
Of course, this revolutionary unionist MLC, unlike the present version,
would be composed of elected delegates drawn from the ranks of the
membership, to 3 year, non re electable terms of office.

Considering the fact that carrying on this kind of struggle would
require the assistance of the entire working class of the city, as well
as the unemployed workers on Unemployment Insurance and Public
Assistance, the MLC would also have to reach out to other sectors of
the workforce, both union and non union, as well as the jobless
workers, in particular those in the city's poor Black and Latino
neighorhoods.

Beyond that, there would also be a need for city workers and their
unions to reach out to their clients, (that is, teachers, school aides
and paras reaching out to parents and students, transit workers
reaching out to riders, welfare caseworkers reaching out to PA
recipients and WEP workers ect).

Bottom line, there would be a need to organize an all around struggle
to fight these vital battles.

Now, I'm not saying this would be easy. Far from it, it would be hard
as hell to take on the anti poverty agencies, the Business Improvement
Districts and the Democratic Party machine.

Especially considering the fact that there would also be a need for an
internal struggle within the civil service unions themselves. And, the
fact that any struggle to dismantle New York City's police state
apparatus would be fought tooth and nail by the PBA, COBA and the other
NYPD and DoC unions.

But, if city workers DON'T step up and wage this kind of struggle..then
the future might be kind of bleak.

Like I said earlier, we may end up with budget cuts and layoffs that
are worse than 1975..and, unlike 28 years ago, the city's private
sector workforce is not in a position to absorb these workers.

Basically, it's put up or shut up time...and, for a lot of city
workers, it's a choice between fight or get fired.

Thats it for now.

Be union, work safe.


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