“We want a fair contract!” city workers called up to Mayor John DeStefano’s window.
The mayor’s reply: Maintaining workers’ current benefits will “bankrupt taxpayers.”
That argument became public Tuesday, as at least 250 union workers stormed City Hall for a face-to-face confrontation with the mayor. The workers marched to the Green from the High School in the Community, shouted chants outside DeStefano’s window, then met him for a chaotic conversation from the banister overlooking the main staircase from the first to second floors of City Hall.
At issue is the city’s quest for cutbacks in health and pension benefits in new labor contracts. Declaring that a “ruthless” City Hall has a awakened a “sleeping giant,” union leaders decried what they called bad faith in negotiations and vowed not to force working families to give back in tough times. The mayor said the city can no longer afford to offer some benefits far superior to those in the private sector, at least not without raising taxes.
The protest came as the city renegotiates with six city unions whose labor contracts have expired. The most contentious of those is the custodians contract, which recently landed in binding arbitration after both sides failed to come to agreement after a year. DeStefano has threatened to privatize workers’ jobs if they can’t strike a deal.
Dozens of workers from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and UNITE HERE filed into City Hall around 5 p.m. Tuesday for the beginning of Mayor’s Night In. They held up signs that read, “Show Some Guts — Stop The Cuts,” “Keep Good Jobs In New Haven,” and “Privatize DeStefano.”
Standing at the banister outside his office, DeStefano heard angry words from school custodian named David Pellino, who wore a large sign around his neck that read “Privatize DeStefano,” with an unflattering photo of DeStefano framed by a green dollar sign. Pellino accused the mayor of asking the union to open up its contract six months before it expired and asking for concessions, calling it an “olive branch,” then turning his back on the union by pursuing privatization.
“You’ve taken that olive branch and you’ve snapped it over your knee,” he said. “You never bargained in good faith.”
Drowned out several times by “boos” and cries from the crowd, DeStefano sought to defend his side.
“That was not what happened,” DeStefano said. He said he has reached more agreements with unions than any mayor in the Connecticut. He said though the custodians contract has been sent to binding arbitration — where a panel of three arbitrators will consider both sides’ offers and determine the final terms — he hasn’t given up on negotiating a deal. Private talks continue between the city and custodial unit, he said.
“We are still engaged at the table in genuine discussions with six bargaining units at this time,” he said.
The mayor added a note of caution.
“It’s also clear what world we’re living in now. There are people who live here who can’t afford a tax increase.”
His further remarks were interrupted by an unruly crowd. When he went back into the mayor’s office, he was escorted by a chorus of “boos,” followed by a chant of “We’ll be back!”
Faces in the crowd came from a variety of unions.
AFSCME, which represents 1,400 city and Board of Education workers, has several bargaining units whose contracts just expired on June 30. They include Local 3144, which represents 400 management workers, Local 884, which represents about 500 clerical workers, and Locals 3429 and 1303, which represent school paraprofessionals and daycare workers. The contract for Local 287, which represents 200 custodians, expired June 30, 2009.
UNITE HERE Local 217, which represents 200 New Haven school cafeteria workers, is also in negotiations, which prompted workers to storm the mayor’s office last month. Two others whose contracts are up — Local 68 (public works employees) and Local 71 (parks workers) — belong to UE Local 222 CILU/CIPU, an independent union.
As they gathered on the New Haven Green, they joined together in union chants: “We’re working families under attack. What do we do? Stand up, fight back.”
Ron Hobson, president of Local 884, carried a sign that said “Show Some Guts. Stop The Cuts.” He said it referred to cuts to benefits. His union has been negotiating with the city for four months, with little progress, he said. The city wants to cut longevity pay, reduce the number of paid sick days, and switch workers to a cheaper health plan. He said those cuts would hurt his members too much. Asked about the state and city’s financial crisis, Hobson said the mayor is “using that as a scapegoat.” He advocated cutting city spending without cutting into workers’ benefits. He didn’t offer specific cuts.
The crowd then moved across the street to City Hall.
“Storm the castle!” cried one worker, as they crossed the Church Street crosswalk.
In remarks via megaphone outside, the unions pulled in top statewide leaders for the occasion.
John Olsen (pictured), president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, called on the mayor to “negotiate in good faith” and help unions “fight the war on poverty.”
Bobby Proto, president of UNITE HERE Local 35 at Yale, called on the mayor to “give us the benefits that you have.”
Sal Luciano, statewide leader of AFSCME Council 4, blasted the mayor for proposing privatization, which he amounted to “turning over work to faceless privateers whose only interest is corporate greed.” When the mayor “threatens to tear at the fabric of the city — its workers,” Luciano said, “we’re angry!”
City Hall workers could be seen peering out the windows, watching the large assembly of people, some texting messages to the mayor’s office via cell phone.
Eyeing An $82M Hole
After the crowds subsided, Mayor DeStefano gave a longer rebuttal in a conversation with reporters.
He said all the messages he heard from the crowd were about “process” — who missed a meeting, and whether a contract was being sent to binding arbitration. He said no one addressed the real issues: the ballooning costs of municipal pensions and health care.
In the past five years, rising health care and pension costs amounted to a $36 million increase in the city budget, which was about 40 percent of the budget increase during those years, according to the mayor’s office.
The costs keep going up, the mayor said, and are leaving the city hurtling toward an $82 million budget hole in five years, according to one draft report.
The mayor said the city’s health care and pension plans are “far more generous” than the private sector.
Workers in AFSCME have a Bluecare preferred provider plan where they pay 10 percent of the premiums, according to Kevin Murphy, the labor advocate from AFSCME on the binding arbitration panel for the custodians union.
Workers contribute about 8 percent of their salaries toward pensions, he said. The amount the city pays fluctuates each year. After meeting the rule of 80 (the number of years worked plus the worker’s age must equal 80), workers can retire with a pension for the rest of their lives.
“Who gets these kinds of benefits?” DeStefano asked. He said the benefits were created at a time when public workers were “less well-compensated.”
He said workers are calling for a fair contract, but “what is a fair contract?”
“Is a fair contract the existing pension and health care [plans]? That’ll bankrupt taxpayers,” he charged.
He accused Local 287 of “unwillingness to engage” in discussions about changing medical and pension plans. He said the city needs to change custodians’ work rules, too.
On a given day, DeStefano said, a quarter of the school custodians are absent. On Tuesday, a third were missing on the job, he said. That meant there was no one to clean the Barnard magnet school, and because of work rules, he can’t switch workers from another school to fill in.
“I’m not asking for pay cuts. I’m not asking for layoffs. I’m asking them to show up for work, for God’s sake,” DeStefano said. “The point of privatization is to show them that if they don’t show up for work, someone will.”
He said unions need to be willing to consider “health care and pension plans that are affordable and balanced,” that don’t allow pensions after 20 – 25 years, that provide free diagnostic screenings, and “incentives to employees to carefully shop.”
Of the conversation outside his door, he said it had “no message.” “I don’t know what the dialog was about.”
He said he could only conclude that by taking that method of approach — storming City Hall and yelling at the mayor — the unions don’t want to settle their contracts at the bargaining table.
Meanwhile, “after stirring this up, they’re going to create expectations” about the contracts that can’t be met, he argued.
AFSCME’s Murphy later replied that the union is willing to reconsider health plans — including changing workers to the Sustinet health care plan, and making use of a new law that allows municipal workers to buy prescription drugs at the rate the state pays, which could save the city $2 – 3 million.
“Union-Busting”
DeStefano also answered a complaint from the two heads of the city’s managerial union, who charged his administration is trying to bust the union through a petition it filed with the state.
The petition asks the state to “clarify” which jobs in the city should be classified with Local 3144. If successful, the petition would reclassify 300 of the 400 jobs in Local 3144 — including that of its president, Cherlyn Poindexter, and its vice-president, Elaine Braffman (pictured, left to right) — into Local 884.
“That would decimate our union!” Poindexter charged Wednesday. She said the petition intends “to break the union.”
In a formal complaint to to the state Board of Labor Relations, Poindexter claims the petition is a retaliation against her filing union grievances against the city. She claims the city has refused to bargain in good faith, in violation of the Municipal Employee Relations Act.
Click here to read her complaint.
Poindexter said the city can tackle budget problems by freezing hiring. She said the city has hired 370 people since January, at a cost of approximately $8 million a year.
Braffman joined Poindexter Tuesday in blasting the mayor’s reclassification move..
“He’s heartless. He’s ruthless. He’s union-busting,” Braffman said. “The mayor can try to transfer us to any union that he wants, but we [Braffman and Poindexter] will still be here. Because he woke up a sleeping giant.”
DeStefano later said the petition simply aims to move to a “coherent” ordering of job titles. Local 3144 is a managerial union, he noted. “There are clearly people who should be reclassified as [Local] 884.”
His chief of staff, Sean Matteson, said a quarter of Local 3144’s grievances have dealt with jobs in Local 884 that it argued should be in 3144. The state only allows petitions for reclassification in a certain window of time, and the city used that window of time to seek clarification, he said.
DeStefano said the reclassification issue won’t get the city any closer to solving its budget problems. “It doesn’t deal with the fundamental issues,” which are health care and pension costs, he said. He said he’s not asking that those benefits be “eviscerated” — “it has to be a reasonable plan.”
How many of these workers actually live in New Haven? Last time I checked, only about 10% of police officers lived here. Is it the same for custodians?
Why should our property taxes and apartment rents have to be raised in order to subsidize suburban families?
If more of these families lived within the city, we'd be up for the shared sacrifice. But we're not up for being robbed, again, by suburbanites. That happens too often.
Almost all of the Federal stimulus money ended up there, in the suburbs, for example, thanks to DeLauro's policies.
How about the city giving back some of the benefits to the Union, but only to workers who choose to live in the city?
Since property tax reform is unlikely, it is time for drastic measures. We can't afford the current level of benefits. Instead, we should make even larger cuts to salaries and benefits, across the board for all workers at City Hall, and combine that with generous homebuyer and other incentives for workers who actually live within our city.
City taxpayers are sick of being robbed by the suburbs. The Union isn't going to get sympathy until they address this.