The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [107]
At first, there was a sharp difference between City Hall’s and the Emergency Financial Control Board’s definition of productivity. The city’s 1976 agreement with the municipal unions provided new cost-of-living pay adjustments, called COLA II, if funded by productivity savings. The unions objected, saying productivity was often impossible to measure. “I teach a course on it,” said labor leader Victor Gotbaum, “and I can’t define it.” The city agreed, and prodded the Control Board to amend its COLA policy to allow funding from one of three sources: “productivity,” “other savings” or “other revenues.” The Board relented, permitting cost-of-living increases when the city corralled new state or-federal aid, or cut the budget. In March 30, 1978, when I asked Basil Paterson, Koch’s Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations, to define productivity, he responded, “In the fiscal four-year plan that’s been projected by this administration, you’re talking about a 10 percent attrition rate.… That is increased productivity.” By that definition, if the city encouraged its entire work force to retire or resign, there would be improved productivity.
The city’s definition of productivity was—and is—both confused and political. Strictly speaking, productivity is improved, says Raymond Horton, former staff director of the Temporary Commission, if one of three conditions is met: (1) services are increased while costs are held level; (2) services are maintained while costs are reduced; (3) services are increased while costs decline.
The city, however, devised its own definition, increasing costs while simultaneously decreasing services. Though the city said it decreased its work force by 61,000 or just over 22 percent in the first three years of the fiscal crisis, its total labor costs decreased by only less than 1 percent. Fewer workers were earning more money and providing fewer services. The city’s budget continued to expand, admittedly more slowly than in the past. The workers got more money. City officials got peace and continued cooperation. The public got reduced services.
Former First Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti, in March 1977, defended the city’s efforts. “First, we have introduced—and we haven’t invented the wheel—a systematic approach that allows an ongoing review of an agency’s performance,” he said, pacing to and fro across his City Hall office. “We have been able to minimize reductions in personnel in the delivery of services.” He ticked off areas in which he felt the city received improved services: the Fire Department had a 25 percent greater work load and 2,500 fewer men—yet maintained the same level of service. (A spokesman for the Department said the Commissioner refused to claim the same level of services, preferring to say service was “adequate.”) “And take the police,” said Zuccotti. “They’re down 6,000 cops—yet this year there are more men on patrol than in the previous year.” Day care: “We have defunded seventy-five day-care centers—yet we are serving roughly the same number of children.”
Few deny that the city had improved its management. But the degree of progress depends on where one is standing. If you were John Zuccotti, a talented, hard-driving man struggling to push the rock 200 feet, 20 feet of progress was reason to be grateful—particularly since you knew the obstacles only too well, especially the five-foot two-inch obstacle in the adjoining office.