Chair's Message: Mayor Sings ‘My Way’ in Labor Talks
The Mayor does not care to work with unions.
by Neil Lefkowitz
The ink wasn’t dry on the NYS budget before Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued to attack the benefits of working New Yorkers. This time around, he could point to the reduced aid coming from Albany as the impetus for his demands. But that’s just an excuse to once again blame the economic woes of the city on the middle class rather than take aim at his fellow billion- and millionaires who continue to reap huge profits despite a reeling economy.
Instead of increasing taxes on the wealthy, some of whom continue to make multi-million dollar bonuses while their employees must take unpaid furloughs, the Mayor would rather eliminate cost-of-living increases for former city employees, reduce the rate of return provided by the TDA Fixed Return Fund and make current employees and retirees contribute to paying for health insurance.
The recession caused a decrease in the city’s tax revenues but according to the NYC Bureau of Budget, revenue estimates for next year “support the premise that the city has emerged from the recession and is in a period of slow but noticeable growth. It is estimated that total FY 2011 revenues will exceed the pre-recession levels.”
At present, that means there is no reason to go after retirees on fixed incomes. I know I mention this often, but no one seems to remember: After the major fiscal disaster in NYC in 1975, many of CSA’s current retirees gave up a salary increase to help save jobs. We never recouped that lost income or the money that would have been in our pensions as a result. Mayor Bloomberg is not interested in the past, obviously, nor is he interested in having a meaningful discussion with the city’s municipal labor unions to get our cooperation and help. Unlike some past mayors, who have understood that we all had to be part of the solution – a unifying technique, I might add – Mayor Bloomberg believes in top-down, unilateral orders that have a divisive effect.
He is also one of those lawmakers who wants to balance budgets on the backs of the middle class by eliminating defined pensions. And of course, his real goal is to castrate unions and return us to the days when we were associations with little or no power.
Many of us at CSA hope that these attacks will re-energize the labor movement to work to prevent the wholesale destruction of the gains we have made in the last 100 years.
