The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [93]
“Summer hours”—a 30-hour week—are granted clerical and other workers in non-air-conditioned offices. This does not apply to workers hired after 1976, when their union, D.C. 37, sacrificed this benefit for all new employees.* They also sacrificed “summer hours” for all employees working in air-conditioned offices. Still, a union leader muses, “When we gave back summer hours the city couldn’t account for $5 in savings. Call up your friends at 4 P.M. on a Friday in the summer and see how many you find.”
Three “heat days” off are granted certain workers in non-air-conditioned settings. This benefit applies only to those who’ve worked at least 1 year and, usually, only when the temperature reaches 90°. In the summer of 1977, 14,000 hospital workers received either this benefit or shorter summer hours.
Employees are paid for special time off, including “administrative,” “maintenance,” “wash-up” and “check-cashing” time, “rest periods,” “preparation periods,” coffee breaks and lunch hours. Officers in the fire department daily receive a half-hour of “administrative time” to wash up and write reports. Firemen get a half-hour a day for “maintenance of personal firefighting gear.” Sanitation men end their work day 15 minutes early for paid “wash-up time” and receive 2 daily “rest periods” totaling 25 minutes. Transit workers get “wash-up” and “check-cashing” time. High school and junior high school teachers receive five 45-minute “preparation periods” a week—eight if they work in the 50 percent of city schools that have a majority of “disadvantaged” students. The average academic high school teacher, according to a 1978 audit by Comptroller Goldin, spends 64 percent of his or her work day in the classroom; a vocational high school teacher, 66 percent; a junior high school teacher, 67 percent. An additional 27,000 periods of classroom instruction could be provided each week, concluded the audit, by having non-teachers perform the administrative and other “in lieu of instruction” activities currently performed by teachers. “This would have the same effect,” they found, “as increasing the instruction budget by 1,080 teachers, or $23.1 million.” All police and housing patrolmen, plus all transit workers, enjoy a paid lunch hour each day. Sanitation men have a half-hour paid lunch. All other city workers are not paid for lunch. If police received the same half-hour as sanitation men, the city would gain 2,600,000 additional hours of police coverage a year—the equivalent of hiring 1,500 police officers.
Social service employees are excused for 480 minutes of lateness before being penalized. Commissioner Russo’s office calculates that a policy of “cash docking for lateness” could save the city about $10 million.
The civil service and collective bargaining system effectively guarantees a city job as a right. Termination procedures are so difficult that employees often feel independent of their “boss.” According to the city’s personnel manual, “the employee attains permanent status” after a brief probationary period (usually 6 months). He or she may “be discharged only after a formal hearing,” and the grievance procedure invokes 6 to 8 steps and consumes about 9 months (21 months in the federal government). If an employee is promoted and fails in the new position, it is required that “he must be restored to a