The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [94]
Managers, or bosses, are a privileged class, almost immune from layoffs. Under civil service seniority requirements, a laid-off employee has the right to bump any non-civil service worker (provisional) or any civil service worker in their agency with less seniority. Since workers usually get to be managers by inching up the civil service ladder, they become untouchables. The city’s Director of Operations, Lee Oberst, identified 3,000 surplus city managers and supervisors. If they were terminated, Oberst said in early 1978, taxpayers would save about $90 million. Yet the mayor can’t fire them. Because of state civil service law and seniority requirements, workers must be laid off on the basis of seniority—last hired, first fired. Suppose, then, that in New York’s Wonderland the mayor or commissioner decides to terminate an administrative manager. They probably can’t. Because the administrative manager invariably inched up the seniority ladder, he or she has seniority. So the person below is bumped—a senior administrative assistant bumps an administrative associate, who bumps a supervisory clerk, who bumps a senior clerk, who bumps the most junior employee, a clerk. Result: The mayor aims to fire an incompetent or surplus boss and winds up hitting an innocent clerk. The city doesn’t save the $90 million because clerks earn less than bosses. Which is why, with the exception of a few civil service managers in the Sanitation Department, no civil service managers were laid off during a 3-year period (1975–78) when 25,000 city workers were severed. “It’s crazy,” complains Russo. “You end up with more Chiefs than Indians.”
Teachers are granted paid sabbaticals. The Board of Education unilaterally rescinded sabbaticals early in the fiscal crisis, but an arbitrator ruled that this was in violation of the teachers’ union contract. The sabbatical policy once offered 70 percent pay for 1 year off after 14 years’ teaching. Today, after 7 years, all teachers receive 6 months off at 60 percent of salary. In February 1978, 1,225 teachers won this benefit. The cost, according to the Board’s Personnel Director, Frank Arricale, was $3 million (which does not include the cost of substitute teachers).
Secretaries who work in schools and are members of the teachers’ union also receive paid sabbaticals. For the winter-spring 1978 semester, 45 secretaries were off on sabbaticals.
THE PUBLIC PAYS for these work rules in two ways. They impede productivity—reducing the delivery of city services. As we’ve seen, the Koch administration estimated, for instance, that if all city employees worked a forty-hour week—as federal or California state employees do—taxpayers would potentially receive 20 million extra hours of service. The public also pays because these work practices cost money.
But that’s not all the public pays for. According to the Temporary Commission on City Finances, in 1976 the average annual cost of employee fringe benefits (including leave benefits) was $4,640—almost three times the average cost of other municipalities and private corporations. Municipal union consultant Jack Bigel disputes this conclusion, contending that health insurance benefits are more generous in three or four other cities and that, unlike New York, other governments often provide cost-of-living escalators in their pension plans. Comparative pay and benefit analysis among governments is primitive—the Urban Institute, in 1978, was in the process of wrestling with this monster. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said city wages were “not particularly out of line” but “what little reliable evidence there is seems to indicate that New York City provides its employees with considerably more in the way of fringe benefits—pensions, health insurance,