UNCIVIL SERVICE

municipal forced labor in New York City

On March 19, 2006, world famous British supermodel Naomi Campbell was ordered by the New York County Criminal Court to report to a "community service" assignment at the New York City Department of Sanitation's Manhattan 7 district garage on Pier 36 in the Lower East Side.

Campbell had beaten one of her servants over the head with a cell phone, and, thanks to her expensive lawyers, her mild punishment for this serious crime was five days of sweeping and mopping at a DSNY district garage.

Of course, her fame and wealth brought special treatment - the chinchilla jacket clad Campbell reported to the garage in a limo, escorted by her chauffeur, bodyguard and personal photographer, and a DSNY enforcement lieutenant carried the expensive leather overnight bag that housed the famous model's designer work clothes.

Approximately 31,000 other New Yorkers shared Campbell's experience last year (without the photographers, bodyguards or fur coats, of course).

Unlike the famous model, who actually committed a felony, the so called "crimes" of most of these community service participants, almost all of whom were young and poor Black or Latino males, were far less severe.

Typically, they committed what the City of New York calls "quality of life crimes" - things like sneaking onto the subway because they didn't have the money to pay the fare, smoking a joint on the corner, drinking a beer on the street, urinating in an alley because they couldn't find a public restroom, begging for change on the train or, the most common offense, "trespassing" (which usually means they were hanging out on the street in front of the apartment house where a friend or relative lives without permission from that building's landlord!)

Basically, these "criminals" are typically arrested for the "crime" of being poor!

Unlike Campbell, these individuals typically can't afford to make bail or hire a private attorney and the assistant district attorney offers them a "choice" - sweep the streets for 3 days without pay, or spend a month locked down in a cellblock at the city's huge municipal penal colony, Rikers Island, until trial.

After they make their "choice" to do forced labor, they are mandated to do this so called "community service" by a court order issued one of NYC's 9 criminal courts (either Citywide Summons in downtown Manhattan, or the borough Criminal Courts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island, or Bronx Arraignments & Summons or one of the two privatized courts - Midtown Community Court in Manhattan or Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn).

Incidentally, New York City's Criminal Courts here only handle petty legal violations - real crimes like murder, rape, arson, burglary, robbery and kidnapping are handled by each borough's State Supreme Court.

Despite the fact that, due to the end of the city's massive gang and drug wars of the 1980's and 90's, real crime has fallen by over 70% in the city over the last 15 years, arrests for these so called "quality of life crimes" have skyrocketed - going up by 68% since 1993.

Besides maintaining a climate of police terror in the city's Black and Latino working class neighborhoods, the arrests also channel a steady stream of forced laborers - enabling the city to simultaneously maintain world class public services and eliminate high paying unionized civil service jobs (among the last good blue collar jobs left in the city).

The army of forced laborers created by the mass arrests in the ghettoes has also given the city replacements for the dwindling forces in it's other forced labor program - the so called "Work Experience Program" which forces welfare recipients to work 3 to 5 days every other week in return for their checks.

Back in the late 1990's, right after President Clinton abolished the federal requirement that states have welfare programs, there were over 35,000 WEP workers at any given time, but that number has fallen to 12,000.

There are couple of reasons for that decline.

Part of the story is the fact that WEP workers organized to improve their conditions.

As we'll see below, the unions, left wing political parties and community service agencies that tried to lead the WEP workers did a truly awful job.

Be that as it may, those struggles still had an impact, and made it very dangerous for the city to have a large permanent pool of forced laborers.

By contrast with the WEP workers, who have permanent work assignments and are almost always with the same crew and work side by side with the same city workers, the forced labor of community service participants is temporary - usually 2 or 3 days, and there is a constant turnover of participants, which makes it far more difficult for them to organize themselves (or be organized from the outside) and for them to carry out organized jobsite protests or strikes.

But the main reason for the partial dismantling of WEP is the fact that the New York City Human Resources Administration has agressively forced poor people off welfare. The City has cut the welfare rolls from over 1.2 million in the early 1990's to less than 330,000 today.

Ironically, the city's working class has actually gotten poorer over those years, despite rising employment levels, thanks to falling wages and skyrocketing rents!

But HRA has forced anybody they deem "employable" off the rolls - particularly those who had a job, even if it was a temporary, casual or part time job, or if their wages were so low that they were actually eligible for assistance.

Since most folks on welfare back in the 1990's actually had jobs - mostly part time, casual or seasonal work (they collected welfare to suppliment their unliviably low wages) it was easy to claim that they were not eligible because they had a job and, supposedly, didn't need assistance.

WEP was one of the other instruments the City used to drive the working poor off of welfare.

WEP wokers labored under harsh conditions and were often treated very shabily by their supervisors - this drove many to organizing and carrying out resistance on the job, but it also pushed many others to individually lash out at their supervisors, or to refuse to report to their work assignment.

This led to those folks getting an FTC - getting sanctioned by HRA for Failure To Comply, and kicked off of welfare.

Needless to say, almost all of these folks who were FTC'd off of welfare are still poor - over 1.1 million New Yorkers still collect food stamps (one out of every 8 people in the city) and most of those people also get Medicaid or state insurance for themselves or their kids.

It's also not unusual to see these folks lined up in front of church or mosque food pantries, because even with food stamps they can't get enough food to feed their families.

Those 870,000 former welfare recipients have actually been driven into deeper poverty, at a time when the cost of living in the city - especially rent - is higher than ever - which has led to a sharp increase in evictions, and has flooded the homeless shelters with an army of newly homeless families.

It's also led to a legitimate increase in one catagory of misdemeanors - domestic violence offenses.

This is because the NYC Department of Homeless Services, as a matter of policy, denies homeless people who have family in the city access to the shelter system and forces them to live with relatives.

This requirement is imposed even if the family member's apartment isn't big enough to house the extra people, or if the family member with the apartment has a longstanding dispute with their homeless relative.

The consequences of this are sadly predictable - fights, beatings, child abuse, (even sexual abuse and attempted murder in some cases), 911 calls, ambulance runs to the emergency room and court appearances.

Ironically enough, Mayor Mike Bloomberg (a man who has a net worth of over $ 13 billion dollars and is one of the 500 richest people on the face of the earth) calls this his
"poverty reduction program".

HRA hasn't been able to force all of it's welfare recipients off of the rolls - there are still 330,000 people collecting - and 12,000 of them are still forced to work in the WEP program.

DSNY is one of the biggest employers of WEP workers - at peak, there were over 2,000 WEP workers at the Department of Sanitation's 57 district garages and there are still over 500 WEP workers in Sanitation.

In recent years, community service participants have been increasingly used in place of the declining number of WEP workers at DSNY - basically, the entire DSNY street sweeping workforce are forced laborers.

Up until 1981, DSNY's manual street sweeping work was done by the same unionized sanitation workers who drive the collection trucks and mechanical street sweepers

Along with the city's other uniformed workers - police officers, firefighters and correction officers, sanitation workers are the highest paid nonsupervisory civil service workers in the city - their base salary is currently $ 57,000 a year .

Most sanmen earn far more than that $ 57k/yr base salary - due to mandatory 12 hour a day 7 days a week snow emergency overtime during the winter months.

Today, work that once paid middle income level wages is now performed by unpaid chain gang labor - and the city has reduced the number of sanitation worker jobs from over 15,000 to under 6,600.

Sanitation also has numerous low paid non union workers doing street cleaning work once done by sanitation workers.

This includes the 500 plus emergency step street snow laborers hired during every major snow storm.

And the employees of the city's 60 odd "Business Improvement Districts" - semi-official local chamber of commerce type bodies run by local merchants and funded by special private taxes the city lets them levy on business owners in their districts.

Many BID's also have their own private police forces, made up of low wage security guards, doing neighborhood anti-crime patrol work once done by police officers.

And the workers employed by Ready, Willing and Able, a private not for profit social services corporation that operates a homeless shelter and uses it's clients as low wage street cleaners.

The snow laborers make $ 10/hr.

The street cleaners and security guards for the BID's make far less - in many cases, they are so poorly paid that they have to live in the shelter system, since they can't even rent a room on their subpoverty incomes.

In Ready, Willing and Able's case, all of their street cleaners are homeless men who live in the company's own private shelter on the Upper East Side of Manhattan - and don't make enough money to be able to afford to move out.

Another major user of WEP workers is the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation.

At the peak of the WEP program, they had over 5,400 WEP workers (allowing the agency to reduce it's full time workforce from 5,900 unionized civil servants to only 850).

Today, they only have 493 WEP workers at the Parks Department - but many of the former WEP workers at Parks have been channeled into a low wage so called "job training" program.

Basically, former welfare recipients are given $ 8/hr no benefits part time maintenance jobs at the Parks Department.

Despite the fact that virtually all of these workers have had jobs before, with many having years of work experience, and some even having college degrees, the program is supposed to teach them "employability skills".

The job also immediately disqualifies them for cash welfare benefits, even though they only get 5 days of work every two weeks and their $ 320 every two weeks paychecks can't even support a single person in this high cost city.

Since most of the workers in this "training program" are single mothers with kids, $ 320 every two weeks is basically a starvation wage.

And, after 6 months on the job, they are automatically laid off and replaced by other former welfare recipients. It doesn't matter how well they performed on the job, or if they desired to get a full time job with the Parks Department, they still get the axe.

Despite the fact that the only "job training"these workers get is Parks Department maintenance work-specific (painting park benches, fixing playground equipment ect), virtually none of the program participants are given full time civil service Parks Department jobs.

The Parks Department has also privatized many of it's parks - including the core of the system, Central Park - and those private "conservancies" have their own low paid non union workers and unpaid middle class and college student volunteers doing what was once civil service work.

Parks also has community service participants working in their facilites too.

The New York City Housing Authority also has large numbers of WEP workers and community service participants in it's 300 housing projects.

Also, NYCHA has it's own in house community service program.

Every single non disabled unemployed adult living in NYCHAs 130,000 apartments is required to do unpaid maintenance work for the Housing Authority at least 2 days a month, on pain of eviction if they fail to comply.

Since 750,000+ people live in the projects, and many of them are out of work, this creates an enormous army of forced laborers.

Housing also has a Parks Department-style low wage "training program" too, with similar policies - take the job, earn meager pay, get "trained" to do unskilled cleaning work, lose your benefits, then lose the job in 6 months, with almost no hope of being hired by NYCHA to do the job they "trained" you to perform for full pay and benefits.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority's New York City Transit also has a forced labor program in it's subway system. Initially largely composed of WEP workers, today it mainly consists of community service participants, forced to clean train stations as a condition of their sentences.

And, of course, New York City's welfare system - HRA and DHS - have the largest concentration of WEP workers. Most of their WEP workers do either clerical work or are used as"institutional aides" (building maintenance workers), jobs which were once done by unionized civil servants - many of whom were formerly homeless people.

Ironically, many former HRA and DHS clericals and institutional aides actually ended up doing their old jobs for no pay - after they got laid off, and their unemployment ran out, and they had to go on welfare, HRA assigned them back to their former jobs, but this time for no wages or benefits!

HRA is also involved with the community service programs too - they use a contractor called Wildcat Services, which supplies HRA, DHS and the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation with a steady supply of recent parolees who have to participate in "job training" programs as a condition of their release (with that "job training" consisting of learning how to mop floors in city offices!).

They don't get paid, and if they fail to comply, their Parole Officer writes them up for violating their parole, and they get put in handcuffs and shipped back upstate without trial.

Parolees call this "getting violated".

Basically, over the last decade and a half, the City of New York has created a vast interlocking network of forced labor programs.

Their form has changed a bit - when the City first started using forced laborers, they envisioned a permanent pool of unpaid welfare recipients as their workforce of choice - Mayor Giuliani at one point envisioned over 100,000 permanent WEP workers and at the program's peak the WEP program enrolled over 35,000 forced laborers.

That didn't work out too well for the City - partly because of workplace resistance by WEP workers, which I'll describe in more detail below.

So now they use a constantly changing pool of community service participants, none of whom get to stay long enough on the job to organize resistance or demand paying jobs, like WEP workers did.

The big question here is, in a city with a vast unionized civil service workforce (there are over 330,000 unionized city, state, federal and public authority workers in the city, the largest concentration of unionized workers left in this country) why did the unions do so little to fight for working class interests?

Why didn't they try and lead a serious fight for the WEP workers?

For that matter, why didn't they even fight for the narrow interests of their own members?

And, most importantly, what can we do to change this?

To really make sense of how New York City ended up with one of the biggest forced labor programs in modern American history, side by side with the largest unionized workforce left in the country, we have to take a look back.

We have to look at the great crisis of the 1970's, which made New York City what it is today.

Around 1970, the great post World War II prosperity, which had made New York City the wealthiest municipality in the most affluent country on the face of the planet, was coming to an end.

It hit here first - the rest of the country didn't feel it until the Oil Embargo of 1973, and from that day to this working class Americans (and in particular the working class here in New York City) have faced almost continuous downward mobility.

The first symptoms of the crisis was New York real estate developers and mortgage bankers increasing need for public subsidies.

Liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay met that need with a massive program of long term low interest loans, to enable the developers to build luxury housing in Manhattan.

Unfortunately, Lindsay borrowed the money for those long term low interest loans from the Wall Street banks - short term, at high interest (a financial time bomb that would blow up in his successor's face just a couple of years later - as we'll see below!)

Lindsay even gave the developers a whole island - Welfare Island (which, for obvious marketing related reasons, was renamed "Roosevelt Island" by the developers).

Welfare Island, which lies underneath the Queensboro Bridge in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, had housed a city jail, the city TB sanitarium and other public institutions - all that was torn down to build a luxury apartment building complex on the rechristened "Roosevelt Island".

But that wasn't enough - the developers and the bankers needed more.

So, Lindsay repealed the city's Rent Control Law, a 1948 municipal ordinance, passed by the city in the wake of postwar labor strife.

Rent Control placed very strong limits on rent increases in the city and had made it possible for working class people (even those with very low incomes) to have a decent life here.

Lindsay replaced Rent Control with the Rent Stabilization Law, which set up the Rent Guidelines Board, an "impartial" mayorally appointed tribunal - made up of five politicians, two landlord representatives and two so called "tenant representatives" - which would meet every two years to decide if landlords deserved a rent increase.

For the record, every 2 years from 1972 to date, the RGB has given landlords every rent increase that they have demanded. The board, conscious of mass public outrage, usually goes through the motions of modestly reducing the rent increases by one or two percentage points, but the rents go up nonetheless.

In a city where over 80% of the population were renters, the end of Rent Control was a disaster.

And it was soon to get worse.

There was a grandfather clause in the new Rent Stabilization Law, which allowed folks who'd lived in their apartment prior to 1970 and their descendants to keep their Rent Control restricted rents forever - as long as they did not move out of that apartment.

That loophole (and landlords attempts to evade it, by any means necessary) led to the unleashing of 5 years of mass landlord terrorism on working class tenants in this city.

Landlords needed to force out low income working class tenants who's rents were still frozen by Rent Control, to bring in more well off workers, middle class people and/or wealthy folks who's leases would be written under the new law, and who could afford to pay the inflated Rent Stabilization rents that would be included in those leases.

This process came to be known as "gentrification" - a name originally invented in London, England, where a similar process of mass eviction of working class tenants was in process at the same time.

The landlord terrorism took two forms.

In predominantly White working class neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn within easy subway commuting distance of Midtown Manhattan and the Financial District, landlords tried to terrorize their tenants into abandoning their Rent Control apartments.

This was done by a number of means.

One common method involved firing supers (skilled maintenance workers who lived rent free in the building and were on call 24 hours a day to do repair work) and porters (non resident unskilled janitors who worked as super's helpers, took out the garbage and kept the hallways swept and mopped).

Without supers and porters, routine maintenance would cease, roofs would start to leak, boilers would start to fail, leaks would no longer be fixed, elevators would no longer run, apartments would no longer be painted, rats and roaches would no longer be exterminated, broken mailboxes would go unrepaired, garbage would begin to pile up ect.

If that didn't get results, criminals would be allowed to move into the vacated supers apartments.

They would wreck boilers, elevators and other building systems.

They would also break the locks on the front doors, so muggers and burglars would have easy access to the tenants and their apartments.

And they'd beat and rob the tenants themselves too.

In many cases, the social security checks of retired and disabled tenants were stolen directly from the mailboxes, some of which were deliberately broken to make it easier for the thieves to take the checks.

Once an apartment house had been cleared out, it would be either renovated or torn down and replaced with a new building - and the new tenants would pay much higher Rent Stabilization rents

In many cases, the now gentrified building would be "coop converted" - the apartment dwellers would be expected to buy their apartments outright.

In place of rent, they would have to pay a "maintenance fee" every month to the "sponsor" (the former landlord).

Those maintenance fees are unregulated, so they could be raised at will by the landlord without Rent Guidelines Board consent.

On top of the maintenance fees, coop owners, like any other homeowner, also had to pay a monthly mortgage to the bank that lent them the money to buy their apartment - and they would have to pay to do repair work on their apartments themselves, unlike renters who could get the super to do the work free of charge.

In Black and Hispanic working class neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens that were too far for easy commuting and too heavily minority for the comfort level of affluent Whites - and in the working class White neighborhood of Far Rockaway, Queens, which was White enough for gentrification but 2 hours away from Midtown Manhattan by subway - the landlord terrorism took a far more brutal form.

These apartments couldn't be gentrified - for racial and/or commuting time reasons.

So the landlords simply struck a match.

They hired "torches" (criminals who specialized in arson for hire) and had them burn the apartment buildings down, destroying the homes of their tenants. The landlords would then collect the fire insurance and abandon the burnt out shell of the building.

Hundreds of tenants and dozens of firefighters died in the flames, thousands of tenants and hundreds of firefighters were hospitalized (many of whom were scarred for life by third degree burns), over 100,000 people lost their homes and everything they owned - and landlords filed insurance claims and got promptly paid, despite the fact that they had destroyed their own buildings.

Despite the multiple felonies involved, (breaking & entering, arson, felony murder, attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, insurance fraud ect) none of the landlords, and only a few of the torches, ever got locked up.

The media blamed "crazy Puerto Ricans who burn down their own houses" and the real criminals went unpunished.

And the displaced tenants found new apartments - and struggled to pay the higher Rent Stabilization rents that were imposed under the new law.

The city didn't help matters at all - they'd stopped expansion of the NYCHA's housing projects for the poor and the middle income Mitchell Lama privately owned but state subsidized middle income apartments, so there were few vacant low cost apartments for the hundreds of thousands of working class New Yorkers displaced by the Rent Stabilization-inspired landlord terrorism.

The housing shortage artificially created by landlord terrorism led to a permanent crisis of ever increasing housing costs for working class New Yorkers that continues to this very day.

That worked out great for the landlords, but accelerated the pauperization of New York's working class.

Alongside the attacks on workers' homes, there was a simultaneous assault at work.

New York City was still a major manufacturing center back then.

In 1969, 825,000 New Yorkers worked in factories - mainly in the printing, garment, food processing and small appliance industries.

Most of those plants were unionized...kindasorta.

Some of these factories had been organized back in the 1890's, while others became union shops during the 1930's and 40's and a few were organized in the 50's - and very few of them were non union.

Unfortunately, a lot of these shops had sweatshop unions, that were very cozy with the bosses.

In some cases, like the Production and Industrial Workers or the Allied Industrial Workers, the unions were gangster-dominated company unions, totally under the thumb of the bosses.

In other shops, particularly in electrical manufacturing, plants were organized by locals of legitimate unions like the Teamsters, United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, International Association of Machinists, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers or International Union of Electrical Workers - but they still had wages and benefits that were below national standards for their industry.

In the food processing industry, again, most of the factories were organized by affliates of legit international unions like the Teamsters, Brewery Workers, Bakery Workers, Packinghouse Workers or Amalgamated Meatcutters.

They had somewhat better standards than the other plants - but even here, the unions tended to have a double standard.

Low seniority, seasonal and casual workers (most of whom were Black or Latino) had lower pay, inferior benefits and less adequate representation than the high seniority permanent workers (who were largely White).

The city's leading manufacturing unions were in the garment industry - International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Fur, Leather and Machine Workers, Boot and Shoe Workers, Hat, Cap and Millenery Workers and Textile Workers Union of America.

Those unions allowed a medieval wage payment system in their plants (piecework - that is, workers got paid based on how many garments they sewed, rather than how many hours they worked) - which kept wages low.

The only garment workers who made decent money were the handfull of male workers (porters, cutters, mechanics, steam boiler operators ect), who, unlike the women at the sewing machines, got paid by the hour.

The unions did have decent benefits though - the ILGWU even had it's own Mitchell Lama apartment complex for it's retirees, just west of the Garment District.

The garment unions were also very racist and sexist - despite the fact that almost all of their workforce were Latina or Chinese women, the unions were run by White men.

In many garment unions, actual garment workers were barred by union constitutions from running for office and only union lawyers - none of whom had ever been factory workers - were permitted to hold union leadership positions.

The city's best paying manufacturing unions were the Allied Printing Trades Council unions. Even in those unions there was a double standard - full time printers and delivery drivers at the newspapers had the best pay and benefits, and there was a far lower wage and benefit scale for the casual printers and delivery helpers hired by the shift at the newspaper plants and for the workers at the commerical printing plants.

But, even the worst of these unions had to fight for their members at least once in a while. And if they didn't - New York factory workers were quick to go out on wildcat strikes or carry out work slowdowns on their own to win their demands. Manufacturing workers here had a tradition of workplace struggle that went back over a century (of course, that's how those plants got unionized in the first place!)

Many companies with plants in New York were looking to move out of the city - to places like Upstate New York, Northern New Jersey, rural Eastern Pennsylvania, Long Island, rural Quebec, the South, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong or Mexico - places where unions were weak or nonexistant - and where workers didn't have such a long history of struggle.

There had been a trickle of plants leaving the city for over a decade (129,000 factory workers lost their jobs here during the 1960's - including the 20,000+ Metal Trades Council members who lost their job in the city's biggest single plant closing, the US Navy's decommissioning of the 188 year old Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1969).

But that trickle turned into a flood in 1970 - wildcat labor unrest was at it's peak in the plants, and landlords, emboldened by the repeal of Rent Control, began to jack up the rents on industrial buildings as well.

These two factors caused a tsunami of layoffs - over 289,000 workers - 35% of the city's manufacturing workforce - lost their jobs in just 5 years.

Despite the fact that almost all of these workers were union members, New York's labor movement didn't carry out any organized resistance to this onslaught.

The unions didn't even bother to try and help their displaced members get extended unemployment benefits, job retraining or even severance pay!!

The only industrial union that did anything at all was the International Ladies Garment Workers Union - and all they did was make bosses pay them money for permission to leave town!

The ILGWU Welfare Fund sued garment shop owners who were moving their plants out of town, asking for "liquidated damages"...basically, they wanted the companies to pay them the welfare fund contributions they would have had to remit if they had not laid off all of their workers and moved out of town.

It was essentially a form of legalized bribery - in return for the liquidated damages payments, the ILGWU made sure that there was no resistance to the layoffs in the garment factories.

Worse yet, the women in those plants didn't get a penny of that money (even though it was supposedly being paid on their behalf) - all they got was their last paycheck, and that was it! A few months after their final wages were paid, their benefits would be cut off, and, if they had less than 10 years in ILGWU shops, they'd lose all of their pension fund contributions too!

The sudden massive job loss created an enormous amount of misery in the city's poorer working class neighborhoods - in particular, Black and Latino communities.

Combined with the effect of the landlord terrorism, it was as if a sociological hurricane had hit.

Some of the displaced workers, in particular young men with minimal job skills, ended up resorting to crime to support themselves. Some of these guys ended up committing burglaries and armed robberies to make ends meet. Others got involved in the drug trade - a growth industry in the city at that time, due to an influx of cheap high quality heroin from Southeast Asia. As a result, an unprecedented crime wave swept the city.

And if that wasn't bad enough, in June 1975, Mayor Abe Beame was forced to admit that, for all intents and purposes, the City of New York was bankrupt.

It was called the "Fiscal Crisis"

It was related to those government subsidized low interest loans to the real estate developers that I mentioned above.

The short term high interest loans that had provided the capital for those loans came due - and the City didn't have the money to pay the bankers back.

This was due to the simple fact that the developers hadn't paid the City back yet - and they wouldn't have to pay the City for another couple of years.

The Wall Street bankers were very upset that the City couldn't pay them back - especially since the whole economy had plunged into a recession and New York defaulting on it's loans would only make things worse.

Considering the sheer size of the City of New York's public debt, it would be a disaster for the entire American banking system if New York defaulted.

To prevent that catastrophe, the bankers, for all intents and purposes, took the City into recievership.

The bankers set up a committee, called the Municipal Assistance Corporation, run by Lazard Freres executive Felix Rohatyn, to make the City of New York pay back it's loans, by any means necessary.

Of course, Rohatyn had no intention of making the developers and bankers who'd profited handsomly from the loans return all that low interest cash.

Instead, working class New Yorkers, who didn't benefit one bit from the subsidized loans, would have to pay!

In particular, municipal workers would have to bear the brunt of the Fiscal Crisis.

25% of City workers - over 50,000 people - were to be laid off, a 2 year wage freeze was to be imposed and many other givebacks were to be crammed down the throats of municipal workers. And with less city workers, the City of New York would provide inferior public services to working class taxpayers.

Almost all of the city workers who were to be so brutally penalized were unionized (thanks to a wave of workplace militancy that swept New York City's civil service workforce during the 1950's and 60's).

But, that didn't mean that there was any organized resistance to the layoffs and service cutbacks.

Far from it!

The largest municipal union, District Council 37, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, openly supported the layoffs and cutbacks. DC 37 even went so far as to actively suggest to the city where even more cutbacks could be made!

DC 37's executive director, former CIA asset Victor Gotbaum (a man who never worked one day in life as a City of New York employee) happened to be a personal friend of Rohatyn, and of Citibank Chairman Walter Wriston.

Gotbaum, Rohatyn and Wriston had secret monthly meetings all during the fiscal crisis, and for at least 3 years afterwards.

Behind closed doors, the union chief and the two bankers planned in detail how DC 37 would help MAC and the City impose the cutbacks on City workers - and sabotage any worker resistance to those layoffs.

Since DC 37 was the largest single City workers union (representing 80,000 of the City's 200,000 workers) they set the pace for bargaining - and all union contracts for civilian workers (except for public school teachers) were based on the DC 37/City of New York agreement.

Gotbaum was also the chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee, the body that selected the two union appointed board members at the City's Office of Collective Bargaining.

So, Gotbaum was in a position to guarantee that his members would not be allowed to fight back in an organized way - and that his union would sabotage the fightback efforts of any and all other municipal unions.

As far back as 1969, when DC 37 gained it's status as the main civilian city workers union, Gotbaum had been pushing the idea of the union helping the City government get more work out of less workers.

Naturally, this idea was deeply unpopular among DC 37 members.

But that didn't matter - Gotbaum ruled DC 37 as an unelected dictator.

He'd been hand picked by his predecessor Jerry Wurf to run DC 37 back in 1964, when Wurf had been promoted to AFSCME general president.

Wurf had never worked for the City of New York either - before AFSCME President Arnold Zander appointed him as DC 37 executive director back in 1947, Wurf had been an organizer for the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union.

Wurf had never been a bartender or a waiter, of course!!

Far from it.

Wurf was a middle class Socialist Party member the Genovese family gangsters who ruled the HERE had hired as a faceman - to give their gangster-dominated sweatshop union a grossly undeserved air of respectabilty.

So, like his mentor Jerry Wurf, Victor Gotbaum was a professional union boss, who'd never ever actually been a worker.

He succeded Wurf as absolute dictator of a union he'd never been a member of.

And, under DC 37's constitution, the office of executive director was appointed so he'd never have to face election for that post from the workers he represented.

On paper, DC 37 did have a delegates assembly - composed of actual workers, who, unlike Gotbaum, actually were elected to office by the members they represented.

But Gotbaum maintained control over that body, essentially by legally bribing it's members (and coercing those delegates who were unbribable).

The patronage ranged from free sandwiches at delegate assembly meetings and free turkeys at Thanksgiving all the way through all expenses paid junkets to bogus "union conferences" held at Catskills resorts on up to union staff jobs.

Gotbaum's ties with the Democratic Party machine that controlled NYC's municipal goverment at that time also guaranteed that compliant delegates would have easy job assignments - and those who tried to talk back might face serious problems on their jobs.

And, for the delegates who still didn't take the hint and go along with the Gotbaum program, (in particular the delegates representing the laborers and other blue collar workers - the folks who's struggles had basically created DC 37 back in the 1950's) some of DC 37's locals - specifically the laborers, motor vehicle operators and high pressure plant tenders locals - had ties to Jerry Wurf's former bosses, the Genovese crime family.

Between the sandwiches and the wiseguys, by 1975 DC 37's 300 delegates had learned a hard lesson - it was either Mr Gotbaum's way, or the highway!

So, Gotbaum was able to cram these layoffs down his member's throats, with no organized resistance.

DC 37's blue collar workers bore the brunt of the job cutbacks - for example, the Department of Parks laid off 35% of it's workforce.

Parks got rid of 2,100 workers - reducing it's workforce from 5,900 to 3,800.

The remaining workers were removed from their fixed posts and assigned to pickup trucks and vans so they could cover the now unstaffed parks.

Of course, it was impossible for them to pick up the slack.

In many cases, park restrooms that could no longer be staffed with attendants had their hours of service reduced, or were closed outright. This caused much discomfort for women and children - and led to male park users relieving themselves outdoors, which made the now inadequately and infrequently cleaned parks even filthier.

Also, playground equipment, park benches and water fountains didn't get repaired, and when they broke, they stayed broken for long periods of time.

And, with the fixed maintenance posts unmanned for most of the day, and the park ranger force drasticall reduced, unattended parks became magnets for drug use, prostitution and other criminal activity.

Parks Department workers didn't fight back - which was suprising, considering that DC 37 was built on the back of their militancy back in the 1950's.

Back then, the Parks workers had stood tall and called illegal strikes against the powerful and autocratic Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, at the time the most powerful public official in the State of New York (he simultaneously ran City Parks, State Parks, Long Island Parks, the Triborough Bridge and the Transit Authority).

Of course, once they were unionized, DC 37 and the City of New York worked hard to help Commissioner Moses put the parks workers back in their place.

AFSCME divided the Parks Department workers into 9 different locals - Recreational Employees local 299, Laborers local 376, Lifeguards local 461, Lifeguard Supervisors local 508, Motor Vehicle Operators local 983, Park Attendants local 1505, Climbers & Pruners local 1506, Gardeners local 1507 and Uniformed Park Officers local 1508.

And two of those locals - 376 and 983 - also included workers from many other agencies, further diluting the influence of the Parks Department workers.

The leaders of locals 376 and 983 also had ties to the Genovese crime family.

By contrast, at other departments with less militant workforces, like the Public Library or the Water Department, workers had one department-wide local covering all titles at their agency.

Of course, the City of New York's Office of Collective Bargaining had to sign off on having these workers, who worked side by side and did very similar jobs, divided into so many different locals.

OCB didn't have a problem with that - they knew that, by dividing the Parks Department workers, DC 37 would be able to control them (something that Commissioner Moses could no longer do).

And sadly, that worked out exactly the way it was intended.

By 1975, almost two decades of division and gangster rule had cowed the Parks workers and the massive layoffs were imposed without serious resistance.

Workers in other, non DC 37 represented, departments did try and fight back.

Like the sanitation workers.

They were also hard hit by layoffs - 3,000 out of a 15,000 worker department, and they were the first to fight back.

Right after the City got taken over by MAC in June 1975, sanitation workers forced their union, Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association local 831 of the Teamsters, to go on strike.

Unfortunately, the head of the USA, John De Lury (who had ruled the sanmen's union with an iron fist since 1938, and who had taken their union out of DC 37 and into the Teamsters in 1953), betrayed them.

De Lury tricked the sanmen into going back to work on the pretext that he would be able to use union funds to pay the laid off workers salaries and prevent them from losing their jobs.

That worked for about a month - and, in July, when the USA ran out of money, 1,500 of those sanmen got laid off.

This caused a wildcat strike by sanitation workers - and the sanmen who didn't strike only bothered to go to work so they could sabotage the collection trucks.

But, in the end, De Lury helped DSNY break the strike (and find and discipline the sanmen who'd led the wildcat).

The sanmen did achieve a partial victory - the workers who kept their jobs maintained their pay and benefit levels.

That was a pretty big victory, since DSNY sanmen are uniformed workers - that is, they have the same wages and benefits as police officers, firefighters and corrections officers, which means they make a hell of a lot more money than most blue collar civil servants, and they get to retire after only 20 years on the job.

The public school teachers followed the sanmen's lead when the school year began in September. 15,000 of the system's 50,000 teachers and paraprofessionals were going to lose their jobs, so they forced their union, the United Federation of Teachers, to call a strike.

But, after a couple of days, UFT chief Albert Shanker sent them back to work - and let the city impose the layoffs.

And, other than a few protests and sickouts by firefighters, that was pretty much it - all of the other City unions followed DC 37's lead and the layoffs were imposed without any further resistance.

DC 37's refusal to strike - and the fact that the union ordered it's members to work behind UFT and USA picketlines - had a lot to do with the defeat of the teachers and sanmen's strikes, and the fact that other civil service workers didn't even try and strike.

Thanks to Gotbaum, Rohatyn and Mayor Beame went even further - two subway lines were dismantled, a couple of public hospitals got shut down, and City workers had a 3 year pay freeze imposed on them.

City workers were also forced to work for two whole weeks without pay (with the unpaid hours to be paid to them when they quit, got fired, retired or died, whichever came first).

Gotbaum even used his union's benefit trust to buy worthless City of New York municipal bonds to prop up the City's bond rating.

And, workers hired after 1975 would have an inferior "Tier 4" pension plan and lower starting salaries.

Gotbaum's betrayal didn't just hurt municipal workers - it devastated the New York working class as a whole, at a time when they were already in deep crisis, due to the landlord arson, the mass layoffs in the factories and the crime wave.

Eventually, the city workers did bounce back - Beame's successor, Conservative Democrat Ed Koch, found that the mass layoffs had made the city unmanagable, and he had to launch a massive hiring wave to rebuild the municipal infrastructure.

Also, to prevent civil unrest, Koch had to create some jobs - especially in the inner city neighborhoods hardest hit by the factory layoffs and the arson fires.

The fires had stopped - but the layoffs hadn't - 46,000 more factory workers lost their jobs between 1976 and 1980. By the time Koch left office in 1990, another 158,000 industrial workers were jobless, and the city's manufacturing workforce was down to 337,000 workers.

Koch knew job creation was a do-or-die thing - the riots and looting during the blackout in the summer of 1977 had shown clearly what would happen if he didn't put some cash in the pockets of the poor very soon.

To maintain the city, and to keep the peace in the ghettoes, Koch had to hire 180,000 municipal workers - bringing total city headcount up to an all time high of 330,000.

Some of those workers were in the city's police apparatus.

This was partly because he had to deal with the crime wave and prevent a repeat of the '77 blackout riots.

Koch also had to deal with a wave of "blue flu" sickouts, ticket writing strikes and other wildcat labor actions by police officers, who demanded the hiring of more officers and the issuing of better weapons and equipment to the cops already on the force.

These mutinous protests by the City's armed apparatus - the force that, at the end of the day, was the backbone of the municipal government's authority over it's population - was very dangerous, and Koch had no choice but to make concessions to the cops, lest he lose control of that vital armed body.

It wasn't that hard for Koch to give in to the cop's demands, since the expanded and better armed police force that the police officers were demanding fit in with what New York City's capitalist class actually needed to maintain their rule over the city.

Koch hired 15,000 new cops, expanding the NYPD, Housing Police and Transit Police from a combined total of 25,000 officers up to 40,000 (giving New York City the largest municipal police force in the world).

Koch also beefed up the Department of Corrections by 60% - up to 10,000 officers.

He also enlarged Rikers Island, the city's penal colony on an island in the East River, from 4,000 cells for men to 21,000 beds for men, women and children - making it the biggest municipal detention facility on the face of the earth. Koch even purchased a British Royal Navy troopship, HMS Bibby Venture, to be used for extra cell space!

The fire department was also expanded back up to it's pre fiscal crisis strength of 14,000 firefighters, fire marshalls and officers.

The fire department was expanded even though the arson wave had stopped around the same time that MAC cut off the subsidies for luxury real estate developement.

With the profit motive removed from arson for hire, the city was no longer burning.

But the city was still filled with burnt out abandoned buildings, which were at high risk for spontaneous combustion and/or building collapses, and there was still a risk of a repeat of the 1977 blackout riots (and possible fires either accidentally breaking out or being deliberately set in looted stores).

Also, firefighters had also waged a series of wildcat labor actions - "blue flu" sickouts, refusals to carry out non-firefighting duty and even a couple of Uniformed Firefighters Association sanctioned strikes. They demanded more firefighters on the job and better equipment for those already on the job.

Consequently, Koch had no choice but to fully staff the FDNY.

Between the urgent needs of the city's rulers and the labor strife from the uniformed forces, Koch had had no choice but to expand the NYPD and FDNY - and an expanded NYPD pretty much required an expanded Department of Corrections. The City had no choice but to absorb the higher labor costs necessitated by expanded uniformed forces in the Police, Fire and Corrections departments.

The city's other uniformed force, the Department of Sanitation, wasn't so lucky.

The rulers of the city could cope with dirty streets and uncollected trash - in large part because the wealthy had doormen and porters to clean the streets in front of the luxury buildings they lived in, and janitors to clean up in front of the commercial buildings that their businesses were located in.

As for the city's working class majority - they'd just have to learn to live with foul smelling uncleaned sidewalks and uncollected trash.

Also, unlike the cops and firefighters, who'd been carrying out wildcat strikes and blue flu sickouts since 1970, the sanitation workers had been largely quiet since their 1975 strike was betrayed by their own union.

The Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association had done a fine job of helping the DSNY stop wildcat strikes and sickouts and punish the workers who were trying to organize resistance to the layoffs.

Consequently, the DSNY was the only uniformed force which could be reduced without fear of any significant worker resistance.

Sanitation would never again be what it was (even though the layoffs had left 52% of NYC's streets unacceptably dirty).

Koch laid off even more sanmen, through a deal with the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association that would allow two man collection trucks in place of the department's standard three man trucks.

That reduced the number of sanmen from 11,000 to 6,600, where it stands today.

The sanmen's union actually claimed this as a "victory" - because the sanitation workers who kept their jobs got a modest "productivity" pay increase, since two sanitation workers now had to do the work once done by three, and the number of sanmen would be reduced by attrition instead of layoffs - that is, as sanmen got promoted, quit, got fired, got disabled, retired or died they would not be replaced .

In other words, John De Lury did what municipal workers here call "killing the unborn" - that is, he preserved the jobs, wages and benefits of incumbents at the expense of those who haven't been hired yet.

It's a common and very sleazy way municipal unions here get workers to approve very bad sellout contracts - don't worry, YOU won't take the layoffs, that's a problem for the folks who haven't been hired yet to deal with!

By "killing the unborn", De Lury got incumbent sanitation workers to accept a massive workforce reduction by keeping all the current sanmen on the job.

Future workers would pay the price because they would not be able to get hired by a much smaller DSNY.

Sanitation also largely abandoned manual street sweeping - with only 6,600 sanmen, they could only handle residential garbage collection, street trash basket collection and mechanical street sweeping operations. This meant that the city's streets got a whole lot dirtier.

As far as civilian workers, Koch did greatly expand the Board of Education, boosting the number of teachers from 40,000 to 80,000 and paraprofessionals from 10,000 to 17,000.

The "Paras" were typically mothers from the neighborhood the school was located in, and one of their main fuctions was to prevent racial tension between the largely White and suburban teachers and the largely Black and Latino inner city students.

But the bulk of the newly hired city workers were in titles represented by the two lowest paying unions, DC 37 and City Employees local 237 of the Teamsters.

237 represented maintence workers in the Housing Authority, municipal hospital cooks and various types of unarmed special police - welfare police, hospital police, sanitation enforcement agents, watershed police ect.

Local 237's president, Barry Feinstein, had followed Victor Gotbaum's lead every step of the way during the fiscal crisis - his members had suffered from the same layoffs, wage and benefit cuts as DC 37's members, and they were also ordered to scab on the teachers and sanitation workers strikes.

Incidentally, Feinstein had never ever been a city employee either - Barry's dad, a renegade DC 37 organizer who was local 237's founder, had hired him as an organizer straight out of college and the younger Feinstein got promoted when his father died.

Many of the newly hired DC 37 or local 237 represented workers were employed in whole new departments which Koch had to create to deal with the crisis.

Like the Human Resources Administration, which took over the old Department of Social Services and also ran a network of homeless shelters built in National Guard armories to deal with the massive wave of homelessness that high rents and falling wages had created in the city.

Or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which confiscated burnt out abandoned buildings (and vacant lots that used to be buildings) in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn from their former landlords, hired contractors to build new housing on the ashes of the old and fielded a force of housing inspectors to levy fines on the many landlords who'd stopped properly maintaining their buildings.

Or the Department of Health's Bureau of Tuburculosis Control, disbanded after TB was eradicated here during the 1950's, which had to be revived to deal with a new epidemic of the disease that had broken out among the poor and homeless.

As Koch rapidly hired many low paid workers, he actually continued cutting the jobs of the highest paid civilian workers - the transit workers.

Koch continued Beame's policy of demolishing subway lines in poor minority neighborhoods, and reducing service on the remaining lines.

Beame had destroyed the 8 train on 3rd Av in the Bronx and the Myrtle Av section of the M train and the Culver Shuttle in Brooklyn.

Beame also halted construction of the 2nd Av Subway in Manhattan, and had the partially built tunnels sealed and abandoned.

Those weren't the only City construction jobs that were abandoned - the city was dotted with fenced off half built city structures, with the exposed steel beams left to rust out in the rain and weeds growing behind the decaying fences.

Koch finished the job by tearing down the J train's Jamaica Av section in Queens - leaving the main business district in that borough without subway service.

Koch also reduced the number of cleaners employed in the transit system.

This was done by having busses, trains and stations cleaned less frequently, and by the closing of public restrooms in most subway stations.

The restroom closings not only made the subways far more uncomfortable for female riders, it also made the stations much filthier and fouler smelling, because male riders resorted to urinating on subway platforms, and their waste stayed on the platforms uncleansed, because the stations got cleaned far less frequently than before.

Local 100, Transport Workers Union, had kept it's members from striking against the service cutback-related layoffs all during the fiscal crisis because the MTA had, like the Sanitation Department, "killed the unborn" by preserving pay and benefit levels for those workers who did not get laid off (at the expense of reduced pay and benefits for new hires).

Finally, in 1980, Local 100 TWU reluctantly called a strike.

Newly elected Local 100 President John Lawe had no choice but to authorize a walkout - the majority of the members of local 100's executive board were from union dissident caucuses led by communists and trotskyite socialists, and the radical transit workers made Lawe call a strike.

Unfortunately, the dissidents couldn't stop Lawe from sabotaging the strike from within - nor could the force him to reach out to the passengers, who were also victims of transit cutbacks.

Thanks to Lawe's failure to mobilize passenger support for the transit strike, Koch was able to paint transit workers as the enemy of working class commuters and himself as their defender.

Koch even had himself put on TV walking with workers who had to travel on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to their jobs.

Thanks to Lawe's misleadership, the strike went down in defeat, and the workers went back to work within 10 days (and they had to pay 20 days wages in fines to the State of New York).

Newly hired transit workers would also lose their right to retire after 20 years on the job - instead, they'd get much lower "Tier 4" pensions and they'd have to wait until they were 62 to retire.

Bottom line, by defeating the 1980 transit strike, the City of New York had decisively beaten it's workers.

This was a massive loss, not only for the 330,000 municipal workers themselves, but for the city's working class as a whole.

Basically, the 1980 transit strike was New York labor's PATCO.

But things would get far worse - at least Koch (and his successor, one term Mayor David Dinkins) did expand the civil service workforce - or at least the lower paying titles.

Koch had also experimented with an early form of what would eventually become the WEP program.

In the mid 1980's, the federal government set up a program called workfare, which required certain welfare recipients with extensive work histories to work for no pay for the local government agency they recieved their benefits from.

Reagan-era workfare was a lot different from the model we're familiar with today.

The welfare recipient had to be counceled by a caseworker before they were referred to the program, to determine their previous work history. They also had to recieve a medical exam, to see if they were fit for work.

Once assigned to work, they had to be assigned to a job related to their previous work history, they also had to get relevant job training, and their kids had to be put in a high quality day care program.

This meant that only a handfull of New York welfare recipients could go into workfare, and almost all of them ended up as clerical workers (since, like most New York women most of their work experience involved office jobs).

That would not fulfill the City of New York's most urgent need - low wage or no wage street sweeping, subway station cleaning and parks maintenance labor.

That wouldn't be possible until the Clinton Administration's 1994 repeal of welfare.

When the Democratic administration abolished the federal requrement that all states have a welfare program, they also lifted all of the Reagan-era restrictions on workfare assignments.

Now states could assign any welfare recipient to workfare - they didn't have to see if the person was medically cleared for work, they didn't have to take care of their kids while they were at work, the assignment didn't have to have any connection to their previous employment history and they didn't have to get any training (they could even be forced to drop out of college to report to a workfare assignment).

This created an opening for newly elected Liberal Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Giuliani was a new type of mayor.

His predecessors, Republican or Democrat alike, were beholden to the Democratic Party machine, and the contractors, local businesses and gangsters who stood behind that machine. These folks and their predecessors had run the city since the 1830's.

But Giuliani, a federal prosecutor turned Wall Street lawyer, answered to the bankers who held the City of New York's municipal debt (the same folks who'd taken over the city back in 1975).

They had tired of 164 years of having their investments put at risk by clubhouse political hacks like Lindsay, Beame, Koch and Dinkins.

They had gotten a taste of power when they had installed Rohatyn and MAC in power on a temporary emergency basis in 1975, and they liked it!

The Wall Street financiers needed their own man to get elected to office so he could decisively deal with the city's permanent crisis.

The city was physically filthy, had rampant crime (much of which was tied to the drug trade, which was carried on openly on the city's streets) and the city still bore many of the scars of the landlord arson and abandonment of the 1970's.

Giuliani's first order of business was dealing with the crime issue.

Of course, he was NOT going to reduce crime by creating more jobs - that was out of the question, because it would cost the Wall Street financiers far too much money!

Instead, Giuliani systematically expanded the repressive initiatives begun by Koch and Dinkins.

In particular Dinkins, a former liquor store owner and Democratic Party clubhouse regular who was the city's first Black mayor, had pushed the envelope with police repression.

Dinkins started off by uparmoring the NYPD.

He issued kevlar bullet proof vests to every officer on the force, and replaced their 6 bullet single shot .38 cal. revolvers with 15 shot 9mm automatic pistols. Officers in the Emergency Services Unit even got equipped with military style helmets, flak jackets and .223 cal. mini 14 submachine guns with 30 bullet magazines!

In a city where it's illegal for private citizens to carry a pistol and the vast majority of residents do not have guns, this was overkill - and made the NYPD by far the best armed gang in the city!

Dinkins then ordered the now body armor clad and automatic weaponized NYPD to carry out mass "quality of life" arrests of poor Black and Latino young men.

Dinkins begain with "Operation Silent Night" - a campaign of arresting poor Black and Latino teens for the "crime" of hanging out in Manhattan's predominantly White and affluent Greenwich Village neighborhood on Friday and Saturday nights.

Seeing no serious resistance to the weekend police sweeps, the NYPD then extended these arrests into Black and Latino neighborhoods on a 7 day a week basis.

"Quality of life crimes" is a euphamism for arresting poor people for the "crime" of being poor.

Most of these so called "criminals" were arrested for things like:

- hanging out in front of buildings without the landlord's permission ("tresspassing") - this has become the # 1 "crime" that New Yorkers get arrested for!

- jumping a subway turnstile because they didn't have money for train fare ("theft of services")

- peeing in the street because they didn't have the money to go to a restaurant and buy something to get permission to use the restroom, or because they were in a subway station that no longer had a restroom, thanks to Koch's service cuts ("public lewdity" and/or "creating an unsanitary condition")

- drinking a beer on the corner because they didn't have the money to go to a bar ("public consumption of alcohol")

- smoking a joint on the street ("criminal possession - marihuana")

- trying to make a living as a self employed street vendor ("unlicensed vendor" and/or "trademark infringement")

- arguing with a cop who was harassing them ("interfering with a public officer" and/or "obstructing government administration")

- or, the very popular catch-all charge ("disorderly conduct") a vaguely defined "crime" which could mean whatever the arresting officer wanted it to mean - this charge was often used against homeless people begging on the streets and in the subway system.

- and, of course, many "quality of life" arrestees also got hit with two additional ever popular charges ("resisting arrest" and/or "assaulting an officer") basically meaning that the cop beat them up with his/her nightstick or sprayed them with chemical mace while arresting them.

And, poor people who had the misfortune of getting caught up in the dragnet 3 times in a year got put in the "Spotlight Program" where they'd have the threat of felony time hanging over their head the next time they got picked up in a police sweep.

Giuliani's "quality of life" program unleashed a campaign of mass arrests and police terror unprecedented in peacetime in a democratic country.

Every year, the NYPD stopped and frisked over 1 million people (almost 50% of them Black men) and arrested over 250,000.

That rate of mass police harassment had been kept up to this very day, 13 years later, even as the crime rate has fallen by 70%.

In other words, in the course of a typical year, one out of every 8 New Yorkers (and one out of every 2 Black New Yorkers) gets stopped and searched by the cops for no good reason - and one out of every 32 New Yorkers (one out of every 8 Black New Yorkers) gets arrested for petty "crimes" that used to be punished with a ticket!

That's a mass arrest rate comparable to the German Gestapo or the Russian NKVD of the late 1930's!!!!

Beyond the "quality of life" dragnets, Giuliani also expanded mass arrests of low level street drug dealers - to drive the drug trade off the streets and out of sight.

He also carried out a purge in the NYPD by arresting corrupt officers who were in league with the drug dealers (or, in some cases, were themselves part time drug dealers).

In one precinct, Manhattan's 30th Pct (which patrolled West Harlem, an area that was a center for the wholesale cocaine trade), the entire night shift was arrested, fired and imprisoned for their all but open collusion with local drug dealers.

Once purged of the openly corrupt elements, the Koch and Dinkins expanded NYPD and Department of Corrections were perfect instruments for Giuliani's mass arrests.

Giuliani also restructured the NYPD away from criminal investigations and towards making mass arrests.

Although he maintained the sworn officer headcount at 40,000, the Detective Bureau (made up of specially trained officers who actually solve serious crimes) was reduced by attrition from 5,000 to only 2,500 - and most of the remaining detectives were taken off investigations of serious crimes and put on plainclothes duty on the streets, so they could make more arrests of low level offenders.

Meanwhile the Division of Patrol (the cops on the beat and in the radio cars who make low level street arrests) was expanded to an all time high of 12,000 officers on patrol.

Also, the officially nonexistant but in practice very real ticket quotas were expanded to include arrests. Now, along with the mandatory 20 tickets per month that they had to write, cops also had to make at least 1 felony arrest per month.

This meant that every one of the 12,000 cops in the Division of Patrol had to make 12 felony arrests a year - a total of 144,000 arrests!

They didn't have to be legitimate felony arrests either - nearly 25% of these arrests were so grossly unconstitutional that, even before defense attorneys could file motions of dismissal, the prosecutors had no choice but to ask the judge to throw them out of court!

Similar arrest quotas were imposed on officers in the Detective Bureau, Transit Bureau (the formerly independent Transit Police that patrol the subway system) and Housing Bureau (another formerly seperate force that polices the NYCHA projects).

Giuliani also imposed something called "COMPSTAT" on the NYPD - every precinct commander in the city would be summoned to a monthly meeting at 1 Police Plaza. The superior officers would be required to present their command's arrest statistics for that month - and if a precinct commander's officers had not made enough arrests, he/she would be stripped of his/her command on the spot by the police commissioner!!!!

Needless to say, the precinct commanders, who's careers were on the line every month at these COMPSTAT meetings, had a very strong incentive to make damned sure that all of the officers under their command met or exceeded their monthly arrest quota!!!

All told, 250,000 New Yorkers a year were now being arrested - 90% of them Black or Latino and virtually all of them young, male and poor.

This police terror, while causing much misery for young men of color, did end the drug wars (the root cause of most of the murders and open gunfights in the streets) and it did force the remaining dealers to take their trade out of public view.

The Mussoliniesque dragnet mass arrests of poor young men also did sweep up some actual criminals along with the mass of unjustly arrested innocents.

This worked to reduce the number of burglaries, muggings, robberies and rapes - and that in turn won mass support for Giuliani from White New Yorkers of all classes, and even from the more affluent sections of the Latino and Asian communities.

Of course, very few Blacks supported the "quality of life" mass arrests (since it was mostly poor Black men being arrested), and poorer Latinos and Asians had similar attitudes, since their unemployed youth were among the mass arrestees as well.

It wasn't that Blacks, Latinos or Asians LIKED crime or drug dealing - but the "cure" of mass arrests of young poor men of color was far far far worse than the "disease" of rampant street crime!

Consequently, Giuliani was viewed as a racist despot by working class Latinos and Asians, and Blacks of all classes, and his regime was looked upon as a reign of terror.

But, Giuliani's support from Whites and well off Latinos and Asians was enough to make up for the mass hatred of him and his administration by the majority of the city.

More importantly, Wall Street got the perception of New York as a safe and heavily policed city where the poor were held in check that they needed to boost the value of their investments in the city - not only in municipal bonds, but also in real estate.

Plus, the city is the capital of high finance in this country, and a lot of these financiers live in or near the city and commute into the city every day - it's their backyard, and they wanted it to be a safe and comfortable environment for them and people like them.

Having a 40,000 officer strong kevlar clad blue wall between them and the city's poor made these rich folks feel a lot safer - and they gave Giuliani the credit for that.

Once the crime issue was tackled, Giuliani was ready to move on to two other vital tasks - maintaining world class municipal services with as few unionized civil servants as possible, and driving as many of the city's poor as possible off of welfare and into the low wage labor market.

Giuliani brought in Jason Turner, former director of social services for the State of Wisconsin, who'd set up one of the most brutal workfare programs in the nation - that program, "W-2", actually forced welfare recipients to work in the Allen Bradley Co's battery factory for no pay

Oddly enough, the union at that plant, local 1111 of the United Electrical Workers, a supposedly communist-led labor organization, didn't lift a finger to stop Turner's forced labor program in their factory.

In addition to workfare (called the "Work Experience Program" in this state) Turner would make it harder for poor people to get on welfare and very easy for them to get kicked off.

At the time, HRA had over 1.2 million welfare clients, plus another 800,000 folks who only recieved food stamps.

To drive those two million people off the rolls, Turner used every tool given him by President Clinton's "welfare reform" - including the mass denial of food stamps to legal immigrants, no matter how low their income was.

Since a third of New Yorkers were born overseas, this drove a lot of deeply poor people off the welfare rolls.

Turner also reinstituted many of the worst abuses of the pre 1960's welfare system.

Like home visit certification - that is, caseworkers would come to the client's home to see if they really needed assistance - and to spy on their personal habits, like checking to see if single moms had beer in the fridge or men's clothing in their closets!

Or calling single mothers down to HRA headquarters to interrogate them about who the father of their children was - so the women could be kicked off welfare, and HRA could confiscate 100% of her child support money to pay for all the assistance paid out to date!

Welfare rights advocates, and DC 37's Social Service Employees Union local 371, had fought to abolish those brutal abuses over 20 years before - now, they let it come back without a fight.

The social services workers took it on the chin too.

Turner combined the jobs of local 371's caseworkers and caseworker supervisors (professionals, many of whom had masters degrees and all of whom had at least a bachelors) with eligibility specialists (lower paid high school or associates degree educated clerical workers in DC 37's clerical workers local 1549).

The new title was called "job opportunity specialists", and had the lower clerical level eligibility specialist salary and the higher educational requirements of the caseworker job.

Turner negotiated a deal with DC 37 and SSEU local 371 to impose this concession by "killing the unborn" - new hires in the "job opportunity specialist" title would take the pay cut and incumbent caseworker supervisors and caseworkers would keep the salary they were hired at.

Incumbent eligibility specialists really got the short end of the stick - DC 37 and local 1549 made a deal where they'd still be getting clerical worker pay, even though they were now doing professional-level casework!

And, the former eligibility specialists would have to take night school college classes to get professional credentials, just to keep their jobs - but they'd still get the clerical level wages of their original title!

The welfare centers themselves got Orwellianly renamed "Job Opportunity Centers" - in reality, the only "jobs" they had were unpaid forced labor "opportunities".

The so called "job opportunity specialists" in the "job opportunity centers" were told to comb the welfare rolls for clients who had employment experience, especially those who were currently employed (but in jobs that paid such meager wages that they had to go on welfare to make ends meet).

Welfare and food stamp recipients who had jobs were systematically kicked off the rolls - even if their income was still low enough to make them eligible for assistance!

Since most of the folks on the welfare rolls actually had part time, seasonal or casual low wage jobs, this enabled Turner to kick about half the people on welfare or food stamps off the rolls.

Those welfare recipients who had job experience but were not presently employed were channeled into the WEP program.

The excuse was that these folks were unemployed because of their alleged character flaws, and they needed "work experience" to "motivate" them to find a job.

Of course, in the real world, these clients were jobless due to the lack of jobs!

And their past employment history proved they were plenty motivated to work if jobs were available!

HRA was fully aware of that fact - that's why these folks were singled out to be sent on WEP assignments.

But Clinton-Giuliani era WEP was much different than Reagan-Koch era workfare.

There was no medical screening of WEP workers to see if they were fit for work, nor was childcare provided for WEP workers kids, nor was their a job training component to this program. In fact, many WEP workers who were enrolled in college were told to drop out of school so they could perform their WEP job!

As far as matching the assignment to the workers experience goes, it was entirely dependent on the city's labor needs.

The City primarily needed blue collar workers - so, those WEP workers, mostly males, who had previous skilled trades or labor experience would actually get jobs related to their training.

For that large proportion of female WEP workers who's work experience largely involved white collar employment, a handfull got clerical jobs - but most were sent out to work as laborers, irregardless of their previous employment background.

The only WEP workers who's assignments largely matched their previous education and experience were the laid off city workers - they often got sent back to their old agency, and they got to do their old job, for no pay!

Typically, WEP assignments were every other week, usually for 3 to 5 days. For administrative convenience, WEP workers at a given location were often divided into two alternating crews.

In at least one job location, the Department of Sanitation's Manhattan 9 district in West Harlem, the WEP crews were divided by race - one week it was all Latino, the next week all Black.

HRA was a major user of WEP workers - some were assigned to clerical tasks in the Department of Social Services' so called "job opportunity centers" and others were given institutional aide (building maintenance) jobs in the Department of Homeless Services' armory shelters.

Incidentally, many of the DSS clericals and DHS institutional aides were formerly homeless people, who had been able to get out of the shelters by getting city jobs with HRA. Now, they were jobless - and, in many cases, homeless - thanks to the WEP program.

But, the hard core of WEP was street cleaning - most of the city hadn't had regular systematic manual street sweeping since the 1975 fiscal crisis, and that urgently needed to be taken care of after two decades of neglect and uncleansed filth.

The Department of Parks and Recreation took a huge contingent of WEP workers - over 5,400 WEP workers were assigned there, to restore the park system after 20 years of near abandonment.

The Department of Sanitation took over 2,000 WEP workers to be used for manual street sweeping duty.

And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's New York City Transit took 3,500 WEP workers to be used as cleaners in the train stations and on the subway cars.

Including WEP workers assigned as highway cleaners to the NYC Department of Transportation, over one third of the 35,000 WEP workers were assigned to street or mass transit cleaning duty.

Parallel to the WEP street cleaners, Giuliani also began to rely on the Business Improvement Districts.

This was a Koch-era program which allowed local chamber of commerce-type groups in local shopping districts in various city neighborhoods to get semi-official status - and to levy a special private tax on all businesses in their community to fund their operations.

By Giuliani's time, there were over 60 BID's around the city. The BID's had two main functions - employing security guards to patrol their service area and street cleaners to sweep the streets and empty wastebaskets in their districts.

Basically, they were privately doing what the pre fiscal crisis NYPD and DSNY had once done - except their guards and street cleaners earned close to minimum wage.

At least one BID - the Grand Central BID on East 42nd St in Manhattan - hired all of their workers straight out of the shelter system, and it kept their wages so low that few of them could afford to move out.

Ironically enough, one of the main jobs performed by homeless men working for the Grand Central BID was - driving other homeless people out of the Grand Central Terminal business district!!!!

And one homeless shelter operator, Ready, Willing and Able, actually set up it's own low wage street cleaning program near their facility on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Another social service agency, Wildcat Services, set up a low wage "training" program for the paroled prisoners who had been mandated by court order to be put under their agency's supervision.

Wildcat's "trainees" were used as low wage painters and janitors in city office buildings and homeless shelters - in place of civil service workers.

Of course, Wildcat's "trainee" workforce had rapidly expanded, thanks to the mass arrests.

And if Wildcat's forced laborers refused to comply with their forced labor assignment, or in any way angered their supervisors, Wildcat could have their Parole Officer write them up for violating their parole and send them directly to jail without trial (a process the parolees call "being violated".)

The City actively encouraged and supported these moves - and even issued police radios to some of the BID's so their guards could replace even more police officers.

Astonishingly enough, the City's unions initially offered no resistance to this, even though the WEP forced laborers and the low paid workers for Ready, Willing and Able, Wildcat Services and the BID's were quite plainly being used to do jobs formerly done by civil service workers.

And Mayor Giuliani and Commissioner Turner initially planned to expand WEP to over 100,000 workers.

The biggest city union, DC 37, offered the least resistance.

But, Executive Director Stanley Hill (a former HRA caseworker who was Gotbaum's hand picked successor - and both the first Black man and the first actual city worker to ever run the union) had an excuse for his inaction - he was in the middle of being investigated.

DC 37's leadership were still loyal to the old corrupt Democratic Party machine, and that didn't mesh very well with the new, Wall Street-dominated, City administration.

So, after almost 40 years of willful blindness, the City suddenly noticed the widespread corruption in DC 37 and the fact that two of it's locals, Laborers local 376 and Motor Vehicle Operators local 983, just happened to be controlled by the Genovese family.

The New York Times also suddenly "discovered" this ugly reality of DC 37 - and naturally put a racial twist on it, claiming that DC 37 had been a good union when it was run by White men like Jerry Wurf and Victor Gotbaum, and only got corrupted when a Black man, Stanley Hill, took over as executive director.

Hill was soon ousted by DC 37's parent union, AFSCME.

AFSCME put the council under international trusteeship, supervised by General President Gerald McEntee's hand picked appointee, Lee Saunders.

This came in the wake of City also suddenly discovering the widespread corruption in the other large civilian civil service union, local 237, a couple of years before the DC 37 takeover.

Since the feds controlled local 237's parent union, it was easy for them to oust local President Barry Feinstein, and to ban him for life from the Teamsters.

Feinstein had used union funds to buy himself a palatial 5th Av apartment (complete with expensive antiques and a staff of servants) and to give himself all the other trappings of extreme wealth (at the expense of 25,000 poor blue collar workers who earned about $ 25,000 a year)

The NYC Central Labor Council rewarded the disgraced labor millionare with a high 6 figures job running it's educational arm, the Consortium for Worker Education - a post Feinstein holds to this very day.

The FBI-installed general president of the Teamsters, Ron Carey, then appointed Feinstein's deputy, a man named Carroll Haynes (he prefers to be called by his more masculine sounding nickname, "Carl") as the chief of local 237.

Unlike Feinstein, who'd never been a civil servant, Haynes had actually worked for the city - he had been a NYC Housing Authority porter. Haynes was also the first Black man to ever run the overwhelmingly Black and Puerto Rican local.

These law enforcement probes effectively neutralized the two largest city workers unions, and guaranteed their cooperation with the new order at City Hall.

TWU local 100 went even further than DC 37 and local 237 - they openly embraced the WEP program!

Local 100 President Willie James (who, like Hill and Haynes, was also the first Black man to run his largely minority union) openly welcomed the forced labor program, and presented it to his members as a promotional opportunity for cleaners, who would now supervise the WEP forced laborers.

Of course, James had made a deal to "kill the unborn" here - incumbent cleaners would keep their jobs, but as they got promoted, quit, got fired, became disabled, retired or died they would be replaced with WEP workers.

As for the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, they had written off manual street sweeping two decades before - since that was all the WEP workers would be doing, and they would not be driving collection trucks or mechanical street sweepers, it was OK with the union.

USA chief Harry Nespoli also didn't mind the use of WEP workers for emergency snow removal - his union had long allowed the DSNY to use a large force of low paid non union temporary snow laborers for snow removal, so letting the department use unpaid forced laborers for similar work was just a logical extension of that policy.

The other city unions were dead silent about WEP, except for the New York District Council of Carpenters, who's Civil Service Director, Richie Powers, said that the WEP workers shouldn't be used by the Board of Education because, allegedly, they were too diseased to be allowed inside public buildings!

Not one civil service union called for the abolition of the WEP forced labor program, nor did any of the unions condemn Wildcat, Ready, Willing and Able or the BID's or try and organize their workers.

Along with aquiesing to the WEP program, the city unions also accepted Giuliani's ending of the Koch/Dinkins-era rapid expansion of the civil service workforce.

The unions may have been perfectly OK with the WEP program - the WEP workers sure as hell wern't!!!

The WEP workers were harsly treated on the job. They often faced verbal abuse from their supervisors, were expected to do very dirty work in their street clothes and were not given gloves, boots and other protective gear that civil servants would have gotten to do the same jobs.

Women WEP workers had it especially hard - many of them faced sexual harassment in the largely male agencies they were assigned to and suffered from lack of bathroom access during their street cleaning assignments.

In one case, a group of women WEP workers cleaning a Parks Department baseball field were forbidden to leave the park to find an open public ladies room and were forced to resort to peeing on the ground behind an improvised screen they had made out of garbage bags.

Needless to say, this kind of abuse provoked resistance.

Some of it was individualized - like refusal to report for WEP assignments, verbal arguments with (and in some cases physical beatings of) abusive supervisors, leaving the worksite without permission ect.

And HRA was ready, willing and able to deal with that kind of resistance - by
FTCing the WEP workers who fought back.

FTC = "Failure To Comply" a catch-all reason that could be used to kick any welfare recipient off the rolls at any time for pretty much any excuse.

FTCing worked on individual WEP workers - but not on groups of workers who fought back collectively.

This became more and more common as time went on, and as WEP workers got angrier and angrier about the fact that they were forced to do hard work for no pay.

Since WEP workers typically worked in the neighborhood they lived in, and were almost always working with the same crew every other week, this lent itself to self organization and resistance.

And that spirit of militancy sometimes spread to the low wage non union laborers who they worked side by side with (in particular, to Sanitation's emergency snow laborers, who also worked in their own neighborhoods and were almost always with the same crew at the same garage after every major snow storm).

The self-organization of the WEP workers attracted left wing parties and anti poverty organizations, who sought to organize and lead the WEP workers.

First on the scene was a group called WEP Workers Together (WWT).

WWT was put together by a group of "Community Based Organizations" (private agencies with close ties to the Democratic Party machine that use public funds to operate privatized social service programs in poor neighborhood) along with a small city supervisors union, local 1180, Communications Workers of America.

CWA local 1180's involvement with WEP worker organizing was due in part to the fact that the union had seen a number of it's members jobs lost in Turner's reorganization of HRA.

Also, local 1180 second-in-command Arthur Cheliotes was a prominent figure in New York's socialist left - so it would be highly embarrassing to him and the union if they did nothing to deal with this massive forced labor program in their jurisdiction.

WWT's leaders (none of whom were WEP workers) were adamant that it was NOT a union - it was merely a "WEP workers association" and it's only function was to help WEP workers file grievances and lawsuits against bad working conditions, and to lobby city departments, and the still Democratic Party machine controlled City Council, to get raincoats, work gloves, work boots, access to bathrooms during working hours ect.

Despite it's limitations, many WEP workers attended WWT's meetings, and some of the more militant WEP workers even forced WWT to carry out strikes at their job locations to resolve those grievances.

But WWT wasn't the only union aspiring to organize WEP workers.

Larry Holmes organized a group called Workfairnes