Hundreds March On City Hall To Protest Budget

Toni Daddio’s husband couldn’t come to Monday’s pro-labor rally downtown, but she made sure he could listen in as she marched for both of them.

For Daddio, a cook at Fair Haven School, and her husband, who’s a custodian at Worthington Hooker School, the fight over the city’s budget is personal.

“What happens to us? I have a home,” Daddio said, cell phone to her ear, as she adjusted the AFSCME sign around her neck. ​“If I go on welfare, I’d be a burden on the state.”

Daddio (at right in photo) was one of hundreds of labor supporters who gathered Monday at First and Summerfield United Methodist Church, then marched down Elm Street to City Hall to protest Mayor John DeStefano’s proposed cuts to city union benefits. Many wore AFSCME green — the union represents 1,500 city workers — and were either New Haven city employees or family and friends of workers. Others came because they’re members of other unions, such as the contingent of Teamsters from Stamford, or just because they support the cause.

DeStefano wants to close New Haven’s projected long-term budget gaps through increased city worker contributions to pension and health care plans, as well as, this coming year, through privatizing school custodial work.

He’s seeking concessions from 11 unions that represent city workers, asking them to give ground on health and retirement benefits. Last month, the city cut 96 positions, including 16 police officers. More layoffs are looming.

In a statement issued Monday night, DeStefano said he ​“continues to seek modest changes” to labor contracts ​“that are fair to the worker and more in line with what the taxpayers of New Haven have.”

Daddio argued that if he lays off people like her and her husband, not only will there be more people in the unemployment line, but local schoolkids will lose out.

“He doesn’t just clean the floor — he wipes their noses,” Daddio said of her husband. ​“I didn’t see not one person in [DeStefano’s] office get laid off, and he wants to lay us off?”

Betty Alford (at left in photo above), who’s been a cook at the Truman School for 19 years, also had choice words for the mayor.

“What he’s doing is not right,” she said. ​“We need our jobs. We want a contract — a fair contract.”

Alford said DeStefano needs to balance the budgets on the backs of the wealthy, not people like her.

“There’s other ways he could do it, instead of going to the little people,” she said.

An ​‘Old-School’ Rally

The Rev. Al Sharpton and national AFSCME Treasurer Lee A. Saunders fired up the labor supporters at the church on the edge of the Green, but most needed little encouragement. There was plenty of homegrown anger at DeStefano.

Holding signs of a grimacing mayor emblazoned with ​“Privatize DeStefano,” Conte/West Hills Magnet School custodians Tom Howard and Dennis Tondalo said they feel like the first wave of potential casualties in a long battle.

“We’re just stepping stones,” Tondalo said. ​“That’s what he’s trying to do, take us down one at a time.”

They said they don’t think the city will actually save money by handing the custodial work over to a private contractor — and those contractors won’t help kids in trouble the way the current workers do.

Andrea Barros, a teacher at Barnard School who’s been with the district for 14 years, said she honestly doesn’t know how DeStefano should deal with the budget problems. But so far, his proposals just aren’t fair, she said, and that’s why she came out Monday.

“My friends are getting laid off,” she said. ​“It’s kind of old-school to do this, but I think more people should come out.”

Although the city’s police union declined to join the rally, Nikki Britton, a police dispatcher, turned out to support her union brothers and sisters — and send the mayor a message.

“I wanted to let the mayor know that we’re not all right with that, and we will fight him,” she said. ​“In my opinion, I think he should take it from the wealthier people.”

Michael Boyd, a facilities steward at Yale, said his motivation was solidarity, as well as personal concern.

“I wouldn’t want that to happen to me,” he said. ​“I’m trying to stop the domino effect.”

That was a theme for Sharpton and AFSCME’s Saunders, who cast New Haven as a key battleground in the escalating war over public workers, benefits and pensions. (Click the play arrow to watch Sharpton’s speech on the steps of City Hall.)

“They took our voices away from us in Wisconsin,” Saunders said as he whipped the crowd into a cheering, foot-stomping frenzy. ​“We will not let them take our voices away in New Haven … New Haven, this is the time to take a stand and say we won’t take it anymore!”

Sharpton said if workers can’t get a fair shake in New Haven, they can’t get one anywhere. He said it’s time for a ​“national showdown” and promised to return to march again.

“It’s a whole lot easier to get from New York to New Haven than to Wisconsin,” he joked.

The national civil-rights figure said he’d help press DeStefano to restart negotiations with city workers.

“We will stay in the streets until they come to the table,” he said.

In his statement, DeStefano called the notion that the city won’t keep negotiating ​“categorically untrue.” DeStefano also reiterated his commitment to ​“build our middle class” by boosting the city’s schools.

“Our strategy to support the middle class is to hold the line on taxes and invest in our young people — not support unaffordable pension and health care plans,” DeStefano said.

An Olive Branch

Sharpton extended an olive branch to police union leaders earlier Monday, during a rousing speech to New Haven clergy and union activists at a prayer breakfast in the basement of Community Baptist Church on Shelton Avenue.

Sharpton invited them to march with him in New Haven — as ​“unusual allies.”

He called that ​“the smart thing to do.”

The breakfast was a warm-up for the rally. AFSCME invited Sharpton to town to lead it..

The police union did not attend the breakfast. And despite Sharpton’s words, its leaders did not attend Monday afternoon’s rally.

“He advocates violence toward cops. Tell him to get out of New Haven,” police union Local 530 President Louis Cavaliere said Monday upon hearing about Sharpton’s remarks. ​“He’s the last person I would stand in a room with.”

In his remarks to 30 assembled ministers, labor activists, and city aldermen at Community Baptist, Sharpton referred to similar sentiments Cavaliere expressed last week. Sharpton — who came to national attention in large part from protests against alleged police misconduct in the 1980s and ​‘90s — noted that union leadership called him ​“anti-police.”

“I am not anti-police,” he said. ​“I am anti-police brutality.”

And that reputation should serve as an added reason for the police union to join the Sharpton-AFSCME march, Sharpton argued.

“If I had somebody that you would think traditionally wouldn’t be with me, standing up for my job, I would welcome it,” he said. ​“To see that everybody is with me for my job.

“The smart thing to do is to use that to your advantage … The fact that unusual allies come together puts more pressure on the mayor and the governor. It was just the usual suspects, you could ignore us.”

Cavaliere said later Monday that he considers Sharpton ​“our enemy,” not ​“a friend to law enforcement.”

“The man has made a statement to college students to kill police and ​‘off the pigs,’” Cavaliere remarked. ​“Al Shaprton should get on a train to New York and embrace the police department if he is that sincere … When’s the the last funeral he attended in New York for a cop that was lost in the line of duty? What noble issue has he done for policemen in his career other than tell people to kill them? He’s a phony loudmouth.”

AFSCME spokesman Larry Dorman said that while he ​“respects” Cavaliere’s decision not to participate in the march, ​“we’re going to move forward. We’re going to keep fighting and raising our voices. In the end we all the want the same thing: a better, safer New Haven.”

Coalition Politics

The olive branch to the police union fit into the larger theme of Sharpton’s remarks Monday: the need for different groups to unite to fight budget cuts and layoffs of public workers at the national, state and local levels.

He specifically called on church leaders to work alongside unions and civil-rights groups. He noted that on the day of his assassination, the Rev. Martin Luther King was in Memphis supporting sanitation workers who sought collective bargaining rights.

“You can’t hang Dr. King’s picture on the wall and be silent about what Dr. King stood for,” Sharpton said.

“The members of your churches and your mosques and the members of our civil rights groups are the members of the union. They’re not different people. … We are fighting for our members that go to our churches …

“There’s no mystery how we got in the mess. The problem is they want those that didn’t cause the mess to pay the tab for those that did. Those that did don’t want no tax cuts, no tax breaks, no kind of regulation on them. They recovered; they got stimulus money. Now they want to cut the middle class and lay off municipal state and county workers to pay for their restoration off the mess they caused for us. Let me get this right. We didn’t cause the mess. We had to help pay for stimulus and the recovery. And now ​‘cause there’s still a deficit, we’ve got to pay that too! And we’re not supposed to say anything?”

After the morning event, Sharpton was asked about Mayor DeStefano’s response when other union leaders have made similar points. DeStefano agrees that the wealthy should be taxed more, he says; he’d join a protest line to call for that. But in New Haven, a poor city reliant on the property tax, he doesn’t have that option, and he feels he can’t raise taxes on people who live here — including people who work for government.

Sharpton responded that DeStefano should join with other mayors to push harder for higher taxes on the wealthy at the state and federal levels and for more aid to cities. He also criticized DeStefano for breaking off talks with AFSCME in February.

DeStefano said he walked out of the room at that negotiating session because the union wasn’t taking a serious approach to the city’s $20 million-plus budget gap and the rising costs of health and pension benefits. Union negotiators responded that they had brought $5 million in concessions to the table, including a willingness to pay more toward their pensions. DeStefano responded that the amount proposed was still less than police and firefighters contribute toward their pensions, and those pension funds still will run out of money this decade without concessions.