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Absender : meisenscher@igc.apc.org (Michael Eisenscher) Org.-Empf. : LABNEWS@CMSA.BERKELEY.EDU Weiterleiter owner-labnews@CMSA.BERKELEY.EDU Antwort an : LABNEWS@CMSA.BERKELEY.EDU Betreff : Workfare and the NY unions Datum : Mo 13.04.98, 21:12 (erhalten: 15.04.98) Groesse : 18083 Bytes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Nachricht am 15.04.98 archiviert ## Ursprung: /labnews@also.ol.ni.schule.de
April 13, 1998
Many Workfare Participants Are Taking the Place of City Workers
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
In the dimly lighted basement of 125 Worth Street, three blocks north of City Hall, Maurice Simmons, a broad-shouldered 21-year-old who attends accounting school at night, spends his days hauling sacks of garbage and unloading trucks carrying office supplies.
On the seventh floor of the building, which houses the New York City Health Department, Cecilia Mathis mops, sweeps, dusts and cleans bathrooms.
And in an office on the second floor, Evelyn Price, a stern but understanding supervisor, coordinates the schedules of dozens of workers, processes time cards and keeps tabs on no-shows.
Notwithstanding the differences in their tasks, these three workers have one big thing in common: workfare. They are required to do their jobs to obtain their welfare checks, and they are doing work once performed by civil servants.
By filling a spectrum of jobs -- from feeding hospital patients to painting park benches to translating at welfare centers -- workfare participants have quietly become an important, but unofficial, part of New York City's municipal work force.
These unheralded workers do much of the grunt work that makes city government run. Workfare participants and welfare experts say many New Yorkers fail to understand a significant fact about the program: the 34,100 people in the city's Work Experience Program constitute a low-cost labor force that does a substantial amount of the work that had been done by municipal employees before Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani reduced the city payroll by about 20,000 employees, or about 10 percent.
Giuliani has repeatedly declared that his program, by far the nation's largest, was not meant to replace regular workers and has in no way done so.
But interviews with more than 50 workfare workers and visits to more than two dozen work sites make it clear that many participants have taken the place of city workers. Not only are many doing much of the work once performed by departed city employees, but in many instances, they are doing the same work as current ones. Some union leaders contend that the workfare program violates a state law barring public employers from replacing regular workers with workfare participants. Two unions have sued the city on this issue.
"We're doing the same jobs as regular workers, but we're not getting paid for it," said Ms. Mathis, the Health Department cleaner, who works 24 hours a week and receives not wages but a $124 welfare check every two weeks and Medicaid coverage.
A decade ago, 20 salaried city employees did the Health Department's maintenance work, but as a result of attrition and buyouts, their number shrank to 3 by 1995. Now the building uses 50 part-time workfare participants.
The same story holds true for maintenance workers in other municipal buildings downtown, including the Criminal Courts building, Family Court, the Surrogate Court and the headquarters of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
In many municipal agencies, the city has shrunk its regular work force and increased the number of workfare participants. The Sanitation Department's work force slid from 8,296 in 1990 under Mayor David N. Dinkins to 7,528 in early 1994, when Giuliani took office, then down 16 percent more last year, to 6,327. Today, the department employs more than 5,000 workfare laborers, who wear bright orange vests, sweeping streets and doing other tasks around the city.
Probably the best example can be found in the Parks Department, where, because of a mixture of layoffs and attrition, the nonadministrative work force fell to 1,925 in early 1994, from 2,786 in 1990. Under Giuliani, park employment has dropped 40 percent more, to 1,156. The void is filled by more than 6,000 workfare participants, who rake leaves, pick up trash and do other tasks.
But if situations like these raise the ire of many union leaders, Giuliani's efforts to expand workfare have been greatly helped by the acquiescence of the labor leader with the most potential to create a storm. That official, Stanley Hill, executive director of District Council 37, the umbrella group representing 120,000 municipal workers, is a close Giuliani ally and has often said he can stomach the program as long as the city does not lay off any civil servants.
There are significant political dividends for Giuliani in this new work force. During past administrations, mayors often reduced the municipal labor force in times of fiscal trouble, only to anger the public, which complained about dirtier streets and deteriorating services. In fatter times, mayors would expand the work force again.
Giuliani, too, cut the city's payroll to hold down spending, but he was able to use workfare to pick up the slack. And now, with the economy strong and the city's coffers full, he can maintain services while holding the line on labor costs.
For many New Yorkers, though, there is a downside to the Mayor's policy: expanding workfare while shrinking the municipal work force means fewer opportunities for the many New Yorkers who traditionally viewed civil service jobs as a springboard to the middle class.
While a small number of participants -- about 1,000 -- have ended up in city jobs, workfare laborers often complain that the program is not a path to civil service. As Winona Cruz, who does clerical work at the city's housing agency, said, "It's good working here, but they don't want to hire us."
The Scope: The Range of Jobs Is Large and Growing
he range of workfare jobs -- and displacement -- is vast. Welfare recipients are repairing the Coney Island boardwalk, while at a public housing project on the Lower East Side, workfare participants polish floors, wash windows and remove graffiti.
At a welfare center in Brooklyn, not only do workfare participants interview recipients to see if they have filled out forms correctly, but they serve as translators, messengers, receptionists and filing clerks. And at Bellevue Hospital Center, workfare laborers like Eva Simon serve lunch to staff members, move patients between floors and occasionally transfer bodies to the morgue.
Before going on welfare, Ms. Simon worked for 14 years as a nurse's aide at Harlem Hospital Center but quit two years ago when her daughter was dying of sickle-cell anemia. Workfare has pushed her back into the job market, and her hope is that by working in two departments at the hospital, she will be offered a permanent job.
Whether the new state welfare law allows workfare participants to do jobs like Ms. Simon's is the subject of growing debate.
The law, enacted last summer, prohibits communities from using workfare participants to perform "a substantial portion of the work" normally "performed by regular employees." It also bars assigning workfare participants to positions created when a public employer dismissed workers or "otherwise reduced its work force."
Giuliani and his aides have refused to be interviewed for this series. But in responding to the unions' lawsuit, they have vigorously denied that the program violates state law. The workfare participants, they say, are in different job categories from city workers and do not perform much of the work ordinarily done by current city employees.
Over the last couple of years, the Mayor has also addressed the issue in an effort to reassure municipal workers. The jobs performed by workfare employees, he argues, either were never done by city workers or had not been done for several years.
"We fill positions that haven't been filled in some time by people who were working for city government," Giuliani said in September 1996 in attacking a Metropolitan Transportation Authority plan to replace transit employees with workfare participants. "We don't take jobs away from people. We try to use the workfare program to expand jobs."
The Mayor and his aides say workfare participants should be viewed as a pool of low-cost laborers available to perform services that might otherwise not get done. New Yorkers can thank workfare, they say, for making parks, streets and municipal buildings cleaner.
Many union officials give Giuliani credit for not laying off anyone to make way for workfare laborers -- such layoffs are not allowed under Federal law. Even so, the painters' and carpenters' unions suing the city charge that workfare has taken jobs from regular city workers.
"They're absolutely doing our work," said Stephen Melish Jr., president of the Civil Service Painters Union. "I don't see why a person on welfare ought to perform a job for the equivalent of $3 an hour when the prevailing wage is $20 an hour."
>From the painters' perspective, the overriding reason behind workfare is to slash labor costs.
Workfare participants typically receive $5,000 to $12,000 a year in benefits, depending on their rent and the number of children they have. In contrast, a civil service janitor or clerk earns about $20,000 a year, and a civil service painter, $40,000.
While it is probably impossible to estimate how much money the city might be saving through workfare, the labor leaders say the extent of displacement is illustrated by the staff cuts in some agencies and the way workfare participants have picked up the slack. According to union officials, the number of salaried carpenters in the Parks Department has dropped from 54 in 1990 to 22 today, while the number of civil service painters has fallen from 30 to 5. In the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which maintains municipal buildings, the number of carpenters has fallen from 15 to 4.
In the breach, the union leaders complain, people on workfare have been performing a variety of carpentry and painting tasks: erecting bleachers, repairing benches, putting Sheetrock on walls and painting park buildings and benches around the city, as well as the swimming pool at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
The unions' position has found support from several quarters.
In a recent report, the labor committee of the City Bar Association found that in certain agencies, workfare participants performed a variety of jobs once done by civil servants. Last May, in a lawsuit in which some workfare workers sought to be paid the prevailing wage for their jobs, Justice Jane S. Solomon of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan rejected the Giuliani administration's contention that workfare participants were not doing the same work as many city employees. She said it was "absurd" to suggest that workfare participants who, in the words of the city's lawyers, were doing "simple" clerical filing, were not performing exactly the same work as full-time workers doing "complex" filing. While her ruling on the pay issue was overturned on appeal over legal issues, her factual findings stand.
For his part, Hill, the chief of District Council 37, has lent his outspoken support to the Mayor's contention that workfare has not displaced municipal workers.
"No W.E.P. worker has replaced a city worker who's working," Hill said.
While he has grumbled recently that workfare has deprived some union members of highly prized overtime work, Hill has some kind words for workfare, noting that the Parks Department has promoted many District Council 37 members to supervise the sea of workfare participants.
But Jim Williams, a lawyer with the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit legal center that represents the poor, took a different view. "The assertion that W.E.P. workers are not doing the work of city employees is a complete fiction," he said. "It's not true."
Some union officials assert that the combination of a smaller civil service and a larger workfare force will weaken municipal unions by reducing their ranks. They fear that the city will undercut labor's bargaining leverage by threatening to replace city workers with workfare participants.
"It has to weaken unions," said Arthur Cheliotes, president of Communications Workers Local 1180, which represents 7,500 city workers. "It has to weaken entry-level workers. There aren't enough jobs at the lower rung, so it has to drive the poor into deeper poverty by putting them at each other's throats, competing for jobs."
The Workers: Not Always Separate, But Always Unequal
he workfare program has had many unintended, even surprising, consequences. Many low-level city employees have found themselves promoted to supervise workfare participants. Occasionally, some workfare participants are supervisors themselves. And in many cases, participants are placed in the innards of the welfare bureaucracy, helping move its huge gears forward.
For 13 years, Edwin Hargrave has worked as a janitor at Health Department headquarters. When he began, there were 20 full-time janitors. Now Hargrave, who earns $20,000 a year, is one of three.
"The others took the buyout, they retired, and now these people are doing the work," Hargrave said, gesturing to several workfare participants having lunch alongside him in a basement locker room.
Together, they unload boxes of toilet paper and copying paper from trucks, and they carry large plastic sacks of garbage to the street. They also run up and down stairs to change light bulbs and carry supplies.
Perspiring from all the lifting, Hargrave said, "We could use some more male W.E.P.'s."
He means more workfare participants like Maurice Simmons, who is attending night school in the hope of becoming an accountant next year. To support himself in the meantime, he has turned to welfare. For a year, he has been assigned to janitorial tasks, working from 8 A.M. to 3 P.M. three days one week and four days the next.
"I like it, but I'm not really getting paid for it," Simmons said. "It would be great to earn as much as the regular janitors. We're being exploited. There's no question." Every two weeks he receives a $100 welfare check and $122 in food stamps, but in no way does he view this as regular pay.
Among workfare participants there are two common refrains: if only they earned as much as the regular workers, and if only the city would hire them as permanent workers.
That is certainly the dream of Evelyn Price, who is in the unusual position of being both a workfare laborer and a supervisor -- she helps oversee Simmons and 50 other workers. Ms. Price, who has been a workfare participant for three years, carries a clipboard as she keeps tabs on her subordinates.
Ms. Price, 53, who spent 10 years as a clerk at a Long Island City garment factory before it closed, has repeatedly applied for jobs, but she said employers are loath to hire people her age. Assessing her current post, she said, "The work is all right, it just doesn't have the money to go with it."
At the welfare office in downtown Brooklyn, more than a dozen W.E.P. workers find themselves in the odd position of helping keep the city's welfare leviathan running. They assist caseworkers and act as their right hands and, sometimes, their surrogates. The workfare participants sometimes interview welfare recipients, help run the records room, enter data into computers and translate Spanish or Russian. Occasionally, when caseworkers do not want to deliver bad news to recipients -- no emergency check to cover the rent, for instance -- they ask their workfare assistants to do it.
One workfare worker, who insisted on anonymity because he feared being kicked off welfare, said: "I'm doing more work than some of the regular case workers, so I ask, 'Why can't I get a job here?' This job is so unfair. I'm not getting paid, so why are they heaping so much work on us?"
Workfare participants seem to have an uneven, and often uneasy, relationship with regular city employees.
Some civil servants see workfare participants as a threat to their jobs; some others view them as a welcome crutch to lean on so they can take it easy or take long lunches. Workfare workers at some agencies complain that city workers look down on them and push them around. But at other offices, participants say, municipal employees treat them as equals and bend over backward to teach them what they can.
Adam Simpson helps manage the elevator system at Bellevue Hospital Center, one of 18 workfare participants there. Eva Simon serves lunches and transports patients, and Sonia Marcus works in human resources, answering phones, filing records and processing time sheets.
Despite Hill's general denial that workfare participants have replaced laid-off workers, the leaders of the hospital workers local within his local, District Council 37, say that assignments like those at Bellevue show that displacement has occurred.
Sarah Kennedy, executive vice president of the local, said that more than 500 workfare participants were performing tasks once done by some of the 1,000 employees laid off in 1996. Her local wants the city to hire hundreds of full-time workers.
"We're against using W.E.P. workers for the same jobs that people are being paid for," Ms. Kennedy said. "We have nothing against them. We want them to work and get paid. This is a way to bust the union. They're trying to use slave labor."
This issue was given new urgency last month when the hospitals agency said it would lay off 800 more workers. Under pressure from Ms. Kennedy's local, Hill issued what was for him an unusually stiff warning to the Giuliani administration: the city should not go through with its plans at the same time it is increasing the use of workfare participants.
"I'm not going to let workfare people replace our people in the hospitals," he said.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
Index of Welfare-Workfare-State Archives
Last Modified: July 1998