The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [127]
Nor do comparisons usually take note of New York’s steeper cost of living or higher number of employees. Thomas Muller, who is preparing a comprehensive comparison of labor costs for the Urban Institute, has found that “an average declining city requires 10 percent more workers to maintain the same number of duty hours as in the average growing jurisdiction.” He also found that in 1973 many larger growing cities performed the same services as declining cities—yet used half the work force. “In 1972–73,” he said, “New York City spent $637 per capita for personnel; declining cities spent $240 or 71 percent more than the growing cities, which spent $141.” Boston averages 8.5 cops and firemen for every 1,000 citizens; Houston, only 3.5. In their formal defense to the SEC, Mayor Beame and Comptroller Goldin’s brief read, “In 1974, New York City had 517.1 employees for each 10,000 population. This compared with 140 employees for Chicago, 162.2 for Los Angeles and 434.1 for Baltimore. New York’s employees statistic was greater than all the major cities surveyed.” In April 1977, the federal General Accounting Office reported that New York City “has twice as many municipal workers per capita as its surrounding suburbs.…”
In counting employees, like computing pay, comprehensive comparative studies are nonexistent. Those that do exist fail to take into account employees doing city work but paid by some other level of government; they usually also exclude part-timers. In early 1977, for instance, I tried to pin down the number of city employees. According to the Department of Personnel, the number was 232,000. Yet when I went back to the Mayor’s press office in February 1978 for a number, they came up with 296,145. The discrepancy owed to the fact that this time the city counted all mayoral and non-mayoral agencies, all capital budget employees, all city workers paid by the federal government. They did not count parttimers. Counting these, Sidney Schwartz of the Emergency Financial Control Board totaled 332,000.
The perquisites, or “perks,” offered city workers are also astounding—particularly to the majority of citizens, who don’t enjoy them. As we saw with pensions, the trend in public labor negotiations has been to try to hold down salaries and award “hidden” increases. It is true that few public or private workers match the vacation days, chart days off, paid holidays and personal leave days enjoyed by city cops and firemen, though cops in neighboring Nassau and Suffolk counties do. But while New York’s perks are extreme, they are not unique. Members of the United Auto Workers receive up to seven and a half paid weeks off. The presidents of many corporations receive interest-free loans, the use of private jets, free medicine, free life insurance, free travel for their spouses on business trips, free limousines. Rock stars have been known to enjoy free cocaine. All of which encourages me-tooism, whetting everyone’s appetite for more, driving up costs ultimately passed on to the consumer. The answer to unemployment, many labor leaders and others clamor, is shortening the work week and hiring more employees. But since they usually don’t propose to reduce the pay of those who work a shorter week, labor costs would rise as productivity remains about the same. Guess who pays?
Whether New York City’s labor costs are unique or comparable may be the wrong question. Whether New York can afford them is more relevant. Comparability tells us what everyone is doing, not whether it should be done.
Fiscal Health
New York is not the first city or state to confront bankruptcy. In the 1930’s, 4,000 state and local governments defaulted. Today, like New York, other cities stare at expenditures expanding faster than revenues. A joint study by the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1975 said, “The cost of running cities is now rising at an annual rate of 11 to 14 percent, but the yield