NYC Fights Back
The Workers Take Manhattan
CHRIS MAISANO
Even in an age of widespread austerity, New York City Mayor Michael M. Bloomberg’s FY2012 executive budget proposal is breathtaking in its depraved ambition. If adopted in its current form, Bloomberg’s $65.7 billion proposal would cut hundreds of millions in spending from last year’s budget and destroy core public services like education, the fire department, and public libraries. Over 4,000 teachers would lose their jobs. 20 fire houses would be shuttered. 40 public library branches would be forced to close their doors – and this brief but dismal catalog does not begin to capture the devastation this budget would leave in its wake. All told, the mayor’s executive budget would eliminate almost 10,000 public sector jobs in New York City. The Bloomberg administration’s standard rhetorical maneuver is to deflect responsibility for the savagery of its budget proposal onto the state legislature and Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Albany. To be sure, these parties share a significant degree of responsibility for the dire situation confronting New York City, especially when they have killed the millionaires’ tax and capped property tax rates at an absurdly low rate, sources of revenue that could potentially have been used to help plug the city’s budget gap and fund public services.
Still, the “common sense” notion that there is “no money” to adequately fund public services is little more than a smokescreen for Bloomberg’s budget bloodbath. There is plenty of money to be found in New York City. This week, DC37 – the city’s largest union of public employees (full disclosure: I am a member) – released a report finding that New York City could generate close to $850 million in revenue by collecting over $500 million in uncollected taxes and over $300 million by cutting spending on outside contracting with non-union firms. Outside contracting costs the city more than it would spend by employing unionized workers to do the same jobs, and has provided shady operators with the opportunity to eat their fill from the public trough. In the most egregious example of corruption in outside contracting, the contractor awarded the job of creating a new municipal payroll system called CityTime has been accused of defrauding the city of $80 million since 2005. The city is also sitting on a $3.2 billion surplus that it could use to fill the gaps. There’s no question that the money is out there for the taking, and that not a single layoff or service cut needs to take place. What’s in question is whether public sector workers, students, and the millions of New Yorkers whose core public services are under attack can generate a fightback powerful enough to stop the drive to austerity and force the city to tap into these alternative sources of revenue.
That fightback may have begun this week. On Tuesday, DC37 organized a mass protest rally of thousands of public sector workers outside City Hall. After it ended, hundreds of activists (including myself) set up a 24/7 protest encampment next to City Hall called Bloombergville; the idea is to emulate the examples provided by the struggles in Wisconsin, Tunisia, Egypt, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere and use the power of continuous mass mobilization to defeat the cuts. On Wednesday, we were joined by tens of thousands of union workers, primarily from the local building and construction trades unions, who marched over the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall.
DC37 rallies against budget cuts
Bloombergville begins
That’s when things began to get interesting. After the march arrived at City Hall, a small detachment of workers spontaneously decided to take a stroll down Broadway. They were joined by a group of protesters from Bloombergville as well as a growing number of workers, who for a short time filled the street next to City Hall, chanted slogans against Wall Street and the mayor, and impeded the flow of rush hour traffic. In that moment, a palpable sense of excitement and anticipation moved through the crowd. As a rather motley crew of construction workers, students, and community activists took the street it seemed as if anything might be possible, that the working class majority of New York would finally stand up to the relentless class war from above and harness its power to shut the city down. The police, however, quickly slammed this open window shut. In an indication of how intensely the Bloomberg administration intends to police the crisis, the NYPD engaged in a massive display of force. They cordoned off sidewalks, blocked intersections with motorcycles and officers on Segways, rolled out the paddy wagons and called out a phalanx of riot police to prevent even more workers from taking to the streets. In the face of this naked display of force, the crowd’s spirit quickly dissipated and the workers began to disperse.
Workers on Broadway
The class rage of a Giants fan
I made my way back to Bloombergville, where protesters marched twice around City Hall and spoke out against the cuts. Subsequently, the police began to threaten the encampment with mass arrests unless it received permits from the city, even though sleeping on the sidewalk is a protected form of political speech in New York. In the small hours of this morning, the police forced the encampment to move from its original location to the other side of City Hall, along Broadway, where police have set up barricades designating the “free speech zone” – a particularly grotesque innovation of the post-9/11 New York security apparatus that has been used to stifle public protest under Rudy Giuliani and now Bloomberg.
The "free speech zone"
Even though the police will attempt to clamp down hard on any manifestation of discontent, it seems clear that there is a significant fraction of workers, students, and activists in New York City who are willing to engage in mass mobilization and disruptive protest to fight the cuts. It’s no surprise that such militancy would emerge from a layer of building and construction trades workers, where extended bouts with unemployment is widespread and construction jobs are at their lowest level in 13 years. These workers aren’t just concerned with their own jobs and livelihoods, but with stopping the attack on public sector workers and core public services as well. Many of them denounced cuts to schools, fire companies and libraries. A popular chant even called for police officers to get a raise.
There are approximately 400 local unions and 1.3 million union workers in New York City. If even a fraction of these workers are mobilized, the austerity drive can be stopped. The question, however, is whether the leadership of the local labor movement will opt to put its members in the streets or rely primarily on lobbying and backroom negotiations to cut face-saving deals that don’t adequately defend workers’ interests or the public services that New Yorkers rely on. So far, the prospects are not particularly encouraging. As local labor activist Sandy Boyer observes:
The many union leaders who spoke at the [Tuesday DC37] rally were long on militant rhetoric, but short on concrete plans to stop the layoffs and cuts. Many urged the crowd to lobby the New York City Council. Raglan George, executive director of AFSCME DC 1707, said that Bloomberg should be recalled. Unfortunately, New York City has no provisions for a recall.
The featured speaker was Lee Saunders, the International secretary-treasurer of AFSCME. He led the crowd in chants of “Tell me what democracy look like–This is what democracy looks like.”
Saunders castigated Bloomberg for “talking about taking away our pensions and our jobs,” and declared that “We say, ‘Hell no.’” He urged the crowd to “Stand up and make our voices heard” and “Keep on rallying, keep on marching.” But AFSCME hasn’t called another rally, and Saunders didn’t say what unions should do if the marches and rallies don’t stop the layoffs and cuts.
The labor leaders who spoke likewise didn’t say if the unions are going to hold firm against any cuts, or look to negotiate a compromise. Earlier in the day, a top union official in the Municipal Labor Committee announced a proposal to avoid layoffs by letting the city raid the unions’ Health Insurance Stabilization Fund, which is meant to protect city workers from the brunt of health care cost increases.
The local labor movement has not endorsed Bloombergville or turned out its members to go to it, and the Coalition for the Homeless, a prominent social service agency, pulled its support at the last minute. As Boyer concludes, such “distancing from the Bloombergville protest shows that many unions and non-profits remain focused on a strategy of negotiation and compromise, rather than confrontation,” even though the former strategy has long since succumbed to the law of diminishing returns.
In the last few days, we have caught a glimpse of the power that workers, students, and committed activists can wield if they are willing to use it – not just here in New York City but around the world. By confronting a new round of austerity measures with mass protests and general strikes that have shattered the power of their nominally socialist ruling party, the Greeks have shown us the way forward. New York City took baby steps in that direction this week – but we need to step up the pace before it’s too late.
