The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [132]
No other city offered the same range of services. None had a city university bigger than most state universities, with free tuition and open enrollment.* None has a vast municipal hospital system or provides similar housing subsidies. Only one other state—Rhode Island—has a law requiring companies to pay unemployment compensation to their striking workers; if there’s a strike, the affected company subsidizes it. No other city pays such high taxes. No other city was allowed to borrow so much. Few states have New York’s constitutional prohibition against amending employee pensions. Only nineteen offer full collective bargaining rights to public employees. Unlike most cities, New York has operated with less actual state control of its affairs, removing a potent check on fiscal abuse. In neighboring New Jersey, for instance, since 1938 a constitutional ban has forbidden local deficits and required each of the state’s 558 counties and municipalities to submit detailed budget estimates to a special state agency. Borrowing is strictly limited and monitored. By law, New York budgets are supposed to be balanced, but unlike New Jersey they had not been carefully checked.
New York’s labor relations have been, well, unusual. Like forty-two other states, New York prohibits strikes by public employees. However, when city employees strike, the penalty provisions in the law have rarely been invoked. Unlike Texas, New York has not treated its workers as serfs. New York has a different tradition. Labor is the good guy, the aggrieved party fighting management and bosses. John Lindsay became a hero to the country—but a leper in New York—when he proposed that the National Guard be called in to break a 1968 sanitation strike. Lindsay was forced to cave in. A similar strike in Atlanta in 1977 was handled very differently. Mayor Maynard Jackson acknowledged that fairness would dictate a rise in the average sanitation man’s $7,400 salary, but the city couldn’t afford it. He pleaded with the 943 sanitation workers, many of them black like their mayor, to return to work. When most refused, he fired them. “I’m not going to be the first mayor since 1937 to take us to the bank,” he vowed. “Before I take the city into a deficit position, elephants will roost in the trees.”
In New York, to grant teachers a pay raise in 1975, the Board of Education agreed to shorten the school week, sacrificing the children to the demands of organized teachers. New York’s municipal workers in 1975 chose layoffs of less senior workers and service cuts over substantial cutbacks in benefits. Some of their members—a disproportionate number being women and minorities—were laid off so that the survivors could continue their benefits and pay increases. Neighboring Yonkers, with its own Control Board, followed New York’s example. Sidney Hillman would twist in his grave, as would most true Socialists. In Pittsburgh, former Mayor Peter Flaherty promised voters he would reduce city employment, increase city services and reduce city taxes. He did. Blithely ignoring the fiscal crisis, in early 1978 New York cops demanded 22 percent raises. A few years ago, New York’s 4,000-member bricklayers’ union agreed to a 14 percent wage cut to save jobs and construction companies from bankruptcy. Why? I asked a major construction union leader. “The difference with my workers and city employees,” he said, “is that we know that if the contractor goes under, we lose our jobs. In the city, they think their job is a right.”
A perspective on New York’s unusual political culture was given by Newark’s Mayor Ken Gibson at a 1975 New York Affairs symposium. For years, people have worried aloud that New York might become another Newark. A jobless city, a poor city, a black city. Yet Newark—just sixteen miles from New York—has a balanced $220 million budget and a very tough-minded black mayor who doesn’t have to prove anything. Newark doesn’t have free tuition or open enrollment, extensive housing subsidies, or seventeen municipal hospitals. Gibson would like these, no doubt, but