The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [187]
The productivity requirement on all outstanding 1978 COLA II payments. For many workers, this came to a bonus of $567, since they had already earned $105. The remaining workers received a full $672 cash bonus. Being “new” money—no longer requiring “productivity” savings and amounting to $628 more than they received the two previous years—this sum could be, but was not, counted when City Hall computed the percentage raise.
The productivity requirement and the need for Control Board approval of 1979 and 1980 COLA II payments (now dubbed “bonuses”). “COLA under the new contract no longer is ‘if’ money,” wrote Frank J. Prial II, publisher of The Chief. “The $750 a year, effective July 1, is fixed, certain and unrelated to productivity. While this sum is not counted for pension purposes, it will be used to compute overtime, night shift differential pay, and other fringes. In a real sense it is a new benefit.”
$24 million of the union’s 1976 “give-backs.” Meter maids and many other outdoor workers or those in non-air-conditioned offices would again get their shortened summer hours (thirty-hour weeks). New employees would get back one week’s vacation, again giving them four weeks a year. New employees would no longer be required to start at a 10 percent lower salary and would now be eligible for cost-of-living adjustments. The reduction by 50 percent in the cost of meals to hospital and other institutional employees would be restored. Workers would again be able to credit vacation and sick leave toward the forty hours per week in excess of which there is premium pay for overtime. The original reason for the give-backs was to ease the city’s budget woes. Presumably, the fiscal crisis was now over.
The city also agreed to “give in” and:
Increase holiday and night differential pay, which is tied to base pay. Detectives, for instance, will receive several hundred dollars more each year—totaling about $1,200 annually.
Agree to binding arbitration to determine whether the city would continue to owe its workers the one-year wage deferrals of 1975, totaling between $180 and $200 million. (In July 1978, the arbitrators ruled in the workers’ favor, declaring the city owed this money to its employees.)
Include COLA I payments in the wage rate in the second year.
Agree to raise COLA I payments from an average of $395 to $441. Some employees whose contracts expired at different times, namely, teachers, would receive their $441 in the second year.
Continue to pay increments for teachers, Board of Higher Education professors and uniformed employees. Most uniformed employees receive increments for just the first three years on the job. After the first year, for instance, cops, firemen and corrections officers receive pay increments of $2,443, in addition to their regular wage hike and cost-of-living adjustments. In year two, they receive $675 more; in year three, an additional $671. Sanitation men get about 10 percent less. Teachers receive about $1,000 annually in pay increments over their first eight years. All increments also become part of the base pay, being counted for future wage hikes, overtime and pensions.
Agree to grant pensions to all part-timers who work for the Board of Education. These 10,000 paraprofessionals were now to be paid on an annual rather than hourly basis.
Restore the three increments (about $1,650) teachers did not receive in 1977 and 1978 because of the “fiscal crisis.”
Cede to the teachers’ union the right to grant larger than 8 percent raises to those with seniority, and smaller raises to junior teachers. This deed was done when the Koch administration agreed that once they decided how big the pie would be—$757 million of city funds for raises over the two years of the contract—the unions, not the city government, could