The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [109]
Improved productivity also assumes worker cooperation. City officials may hatch ambitious schemes and mechanize their flow charts, but workers are not machines. They need to be motivated, to get a sense of satisfaction from their work, to maintain their morale. But workers have reason to be insecure. The job security they expected from a government job is no longer there. For the first time since the Depression, they are being asked to give back benefits won at the bargaining table. They feel (inaccurately) that their pay was frozen for the first three years of the fiscal crisis. They feel (accurately) that compared to the banks or politicians or managers, workers have born a disproportionate share of what sacrifices were made. Workers know that their pension funds are threatened if the city goes bankrupt. They feel the press portrays them as slothful. “Every time they read the press,” says labor consultant Jack Bigel, “they see it’s the city workers who are overpaid and underworked. They feel they’ve been held up to ridicule.” It’s worth noting, in this regard, that one-third of the 36,000 workers lost through attrition resigned rather than retired.
Recognizing the obstacles to productivity is not the same as saying it can’t be done, as city and union leaders tend to. A 1977 audit of Martin Lang’s Parks Department by State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, for example, highlights what remains to be done. Loafing by Parks employees, Levitt said, cost the city more than $18 million that year. Crews were averaging less than 50 percent of their workdays in productive efforts, routinely taking seventy-five-minute breakfast breaks, arriving at work sites ninety-five minutes late; forestry and maintenance crews were idle 61 percent of the workday; half of the supervisors were assigned to cushy desk jobs. A 50 percent Parks productivity improvement, the Comptroller said, would totally compensate for the personnel cuts imposed by the fiscal crisis. In short, a reduced work force could improve—and at least maintain—services. A similar Levitt audit of city pothole repair crews found that if they “had been fully productive, they could have filled 700,000 more potholes than the 1.2 million which the department reported it had filled” in 1977. The audit concluded that repair crews spent more than one-third of their time not filling potholes. That’s the day shift. The night shifts were “unproductive” 52 percent of the time. The average age of the asphalt crewmen was fifty-seven years—a backbreaking job for a man that age.
The major impediment to productivity is not definitional; it’s managerial and political. The city lacks both a managerial ethos and management know-how. And it lacks the political will, as Beame demonstrated, or political clout, as Koch was learning, to change union work rules which impede improved services. The minutes of a September 27, 1976, meeting between Deputy Mayor Zuccotti and Sanitation Commissioner Anthony Vaccarello are instructive. The city was pressing the union to allow two rather than three men to work a sanitation truck in certain districts. The union contract is silent on the subject, but the city dared not unilaterally alter a longstanding practice. The minutes simply read: “Union won’t negotiate with Department on this issue.… Issue to be raised with Office of Labor Relations.” Asked whether he had raised this issue, Labor Relations Commissioner Russo replied, “One of the things labor leaders and their people argue is that at the productivity table we should not try to get back their benefits. That, they say, must be reserved for collective bargaining. Yet when we bring it up at collective bargaining, they tell us, ‘Go to hell!’ ”
Not to press that issue was a political decision, as Beame’s stance when seeking reelection in 1977 was political. Like most incumbents, Beame boasted