Had Mayor Bloomberg paid attention to his own news organization, he might have called a snow emergency on Dec. 26. Had Mayor Bloomberg not eliminated 400 Sanitation Workers, there might have been a larger and more-effective response to the Blizzard of 2010, or had Mayor Bloomberg not counted on privatized snow removal firms to answer the call (they didn’t), a full complement of city workers might have been able to do the job.
Broadway MikeHad Mayor Bloomberg not sneered at the city’s residents, telling them things weren’t so bad—“Broadway shows were full last night...There are lots of tourists here enjoying themselves”—or blamed the public: “We asked the public to do two things. Don’t call 911 unless it was a serious emergency...And don’t drive. Unfortunately, too many people didn’t listen”—or suspected Department of Sanitation workers of sabotaging snow removal, perhaps he might have gotten through this failure of leadership more successfully.
Mayor Bloomberg wanted to get rid of the “politics-as-usual” model and replace it with a business, or corporate, one. More efficiency; less waste. More with less. The blizzard response turned out to be less with less. The reality is that we don’t even know who was in charge as the 50-mph winds swirled snow and covered the streets, blocked people in their homes, and left cars, trucks, ambulances, and buses in the middle of streets, immobile. The city relied on snow plows with chains that snapped when the truck was gaining traction and, according to the Daily News, snow shovels that came disassembled without bolts to put the handles and heads together.
We have a budget crisis being blamed on public-sector workers when the culprits are the hedge-fund managers and stockbrokers and Wall Street banks that take but do not give. The Mayor, like the Governor and the Governors before him, believes that our millionaires and billionaires will leave New York if they have to pay their fair share of taxes. Where are they going to go? Ohio?
New York is an exciting city; it is still the Mecca for young people from across the nation and, indeed, from around the world looking for success. New York is also a solid city with middle-income people who own homes in solid neighborhoods; solid people who send their children to public schools that get short shrift because privately funded charter schools, according to our Mayor and other officials, are so much better (the statistics say they’re not); who use the services that public-sector workers provide for less cost and with more efficiency than the outsourced services the mayor favors—also a matter of record.
And now the ultimate kick in the face: DCAS (Department of Citywide Administrative Services) has decreed that city workers who could not get to work on Monday and Tuesday, Dec. 27 and 28, will, because of no fault of their own, be docked those days, having to give up annual leave or comp time they have earned. Will be docked because of a failure of leadership that left neighborhoods stranded, that made them islands surrounded by water with no way to leave.
CWA Local 1180 has filed a group grievance seeking restoration of the leave time we have been forced to use. We will fight to have our members’ days returned to them.