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By Root 1027 0

(a worker earning $11,000 pays an additional $300 annually) or the roughly $40 million in fringe benefits City Hall and the unions claim were sacrificed by workers; nor does it compare these raises against increases elsewhere, which have often grown faster; it neglects those low-paid city workers, mostly represented by Gotbaum’s union, whose pay is below that of comparable jobs in the private sector and, in some cases, even below the official poverty level. And it does not account for the perceptions of city workers, who blame their low wages for low morale—knowing or feeling they are slipping in the race with inflation.

But the scorecard is also incomplete from the taxpayer’s point of view. It does not include other parts of a worker’s compensation package: paid overtime, which cost the mayoral agencies $46 million in 1978; night-shift differentials ($45 million); pay increments, which are based on length of service ($30 million); pay differentials, which are based on education degrees ($5.5 million); and pay hikes due to promotions, which have been plentiful with the attrition of 36,000 senior employees. Counting longevity pay, night-shift differentials, uniform allowances, holiday pay and cost-of-living adjustments, the base pay of detectives, for example, jumps by more than $4,000. Yet union leaders exclude these benefits when moaning about their base pay.

“If we count increments and overtime and differentials and promotions, most city employees will have kept ahead of the cost of living over the last three years,” the Control Board’s Sidney Schwartz told me in December 1977. According to an Economic Development Council study, the 33,000 transit workers—who unlike other workers did not defer any of their pay or benefits—averaged a 16.6 percent hike in their compensation over the three years. According to a 1978 unpublished City Comptroller’s study of the W-2 forms of 171,398 city employees on the payroll from January 1975 through December 1977, the average worker’s pay jumped 9.8 percent—from $16,600 in 1975 to $18,276 in 1977. But this figure is somewhat understated, as the Comptroller’s Office concedes. It does not include the bulk of the workers’ COLA I and II payments; or the overtime and other benefits received from January to June 1978.

After a Koch-ordered study, the Budget Bureau certified that labor costs over the three years had indeed dropped by less than 1 percent. But there were complex reasons for this, including increased Social Security, pension, and fringe benefit costs beyond the city’s control; the axing of mostly lower-paid workers; and the city’s policy of supplementing the pay of many CETA workers. True, actual payroll costs declined by an estimated 9 percent. Yet in a March 1, 1978, response to Senator Proxmire, Koch declared, “Roughly 10 of the 20 percent decrease in the work force was offset by increased payments to city employees approved by the Emergency Financial Control Board.” A confidential memorandum, prepared by a Koch ad hoc task force from the Bureau of the Budget, the Office of Labor Relations and Deputy Mayor David Brown’s office, startlingly revealed: “Even during one of the most austere periods in the City’s history, municipal workers were able to keep relative pace with the general rate of inflation.” They found, for instance, that a senior clerk received an annual increase of 5.5 percent over the three years. This contrasted with an average annual increase of 6.2 percent in the pre-“crisis” period.

New York was thus left with a smaller, better-paid work force. Unlike labor leader Sidney Hillman, who during the Depression urged his brothers and sisters to share equally in the sacrifice, early in the “crisis” municipal labor leaders vetoed proposals to avoid layoffs of some of their members by asking that all share in the sacrifice of fringe and other benefits. Because of the state law mandating that layoffs be based strictly on seniority—which, it is worth recalling, no leading union or city official protested—a disproportionate number of blacks, Hispanics, women and young