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 Workfairness.

Not Larry Holmes the world famous champion heavyweight boxer, of course.

The lightweight Larry Holmes was the leader of a small trotskyite socialist group called the Workers World Party, an organization well known on the far left for organizing anti war protests through it's rigidly controlled front groups.

Workfairness was yet another one of those fronts.

Holmes' group presented itself as more radical than WWT - it actually attacked the very idea of workfare, and initally Workfairness talked of organizing mass rallies and confronting Giuliani and Turner in the streets.

But, in practice, Workfairness did the same stuff WWT did - lobbying Democratic City Councilpeople to try and reform the worst abuses of the WEP system.

And, as if two rival unions trying to organize the same group of workers wasn't enough, a third group came on the scene.

A national Democratic Party-connected anti-poverty agency, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), came in to organize WEP workers too.

It didn't have the community ties that WWT or Workfairness did - but ACORN had a hell of a lot more money.

ACORN had a huge fundraising network and, as is typical for any ACORN campaign, they were able to quickly deploy an army of young, dedicated, hard working, very low paid and predominantly White middle class college student organizers out into the "job opportunity centers" and WEP jobsites around the city.

In short order, they signed up 6,500 new members - a testament to the desire of WEP workers to organize and fight.

On paper, the WEP workers paid ACORN $ 5 a month in union dues.

In practice, ACORN was so well funded by government and corporate grants that they rarely bothered to actually collect the dues.

ACORN, unlike WWT, was very explicit about organizing a union.

But, like WWT, they were going to keep the focus on minor reforms (work gloves and bathroom access type stuff) and they would not in any way fundamentally challenge the workfare system or Clinton's destruction of welfare.

And, as is typical for any ACORN-sponsored campaign, the working class folks in their WEP worker chapter were to be seen and not heard.

The White middle class organizers would make all strategic and tactical decisions - the poor Black and Latino WEP workers were only supposed to show up at the rallies, hold up the signs they were given, and chant the slogans they were told to chant.

This kind of elitism is a matter of policy for ACORN - because they know what's best for poor minorities (and it would be disruptive and dangerous for the poor to be allowed to speak or think for themselves - not to mention the fact that working class militancy would probably make George Soros, the Ford Foundation and the other funders cut off ACORN's financial lifeline!).

ACORN, like WWT, also had ties with the civil service unions - in their case, the largest municipal union, DC 37.

Of course, DC 37 could only give very limited help.

The union was preoccupied with fighting a government investigations and trying to reorient themselves politically. The district council's ties with the Democratic Party machine were no longer an asset. In fact, they were a liability (they cost DC 37 chief Stanley Hill his $ 250,000 a year executive director's job - and many DC 37 honchos soon followed him out of the labor movement).

They were trying to reposition themselves, from subordination to the old Democratic machine to subordination to the new corporate power structure at City Hall, and it was a hard transition.

The best DC 37 could do for ACORN was to lobby for a bill to grant WEP workers employee status. Despite the fact that machine politicians still controlled Albany at that time, DC 37's WEP worker bill died in committee, since it went against national and New York City policy on welfare.

Back on the ground, the three WEP unions, WWT, Workfairness and ACORN, steadfastly refused to cooperate.

Despite the virtually identical social work reformist politics of the leaders of the three groups, they refused to join forces to fight for the WEP workers.

There were too many bloated egos involved - and, in the case of WWT and ACORN, too much grant money at stake.

Combined, WEP Workers Together, Workfairness and ACORN could have organized every WEP worker in the city - divided they worked at cross purposes, duplicated each others work and created needless unnecessary conflict.

There was another factor - even divided, the newly organized WEP workers were very hard for WWT, Workfairness or ACORN to control.

Despite their utter exclusion from any leadership or policymaking position in all three of these unions, the WEP workers made their presence felt and their willingness to fight for justice forced their middle class do gooder leaders to lead uncharacteristically militant struggles.

This is probably why, at the height of the WEP worker movement in 1996-98, none of the WEP worker unions ever dared to call a mass WEP worker rally.

Holmes' group, Workfairness, did put out a call for a rally on January 15, 1997.

But Workfairness cancelled their rally at the last minute.

Instead, the WWP front group held a tightly controlled press conference featuring liberal openly gay City Councilman Tom Duane (D - Chelsea/West Village) on the heavily police guarded front steps of City Hall.

Behind the tall wrought iron fences of City Hall's courtyard, and under the watchful eyes of a squad of police officers, Duane, Holmes, Holmes' WWP flunkies and a carefully selected handfull of WEP workers (standing behind Duane and Holmes and kept far out of range of the microphones so they could serve as a human backdrop, to be seen but definitely not heard) held a press conference that was ignored by most of the city's media.

Workfairness never explained exactly WHY they cancelled that rally, which would have had a huge impact across the country and even around the world, and replaced it with a meaningless media photo opportunity that barely made the inside pages of the Post and the Daily News - but there is a possible explanation.

Holmes' organization, the Workers World Party (the folks who actually called the shots in Workfairness) are infamous on the left for their rigidly controlled rallies and for the squads of beefy, thuggish and non political security guards they bring to make sure that they keep control of their events and silence anybody they don't agree with.

Larry Holmes' platoons of roughnecks were notorious for their Mike Tyson-style approach to dealing with folks who wanted to speak freely at a WWP front group-run rally - in particular, with leftists from groups that didn't agree with WWP's politics.

They were quick to get right up in the face of dissidents, standing thisclose, and making it clear that if you dared to defy WWP, you might just catch a beating!

WWP had NOT been able to do that with Workfairness - even at the smallest events, WWP's goon squads had never been able to prevent WEP workers from expressing themselves freely.

The WWP's goon squads were used to terrorising college student leftists and middle class radicals, folks with little personal experience with street fighting.

Terrorising poor people from tough neighborhoods who spent their days doing hard physical labor was a whole different ballgame - WWP's thug squads might be the ones who ended up getting roughed up!

The WWP probably feared that, at a large event attended by several thousand WEP workers, their hired hoodlums would have no hope of controling what WEP workers said on their platform - they probably wouldn't even be able to keep the WEP workers from capturing the event and doing something militant, like storming City Hall or HRA headquarters!

This surely terrified Holmes and his comrades - after all, the WWP were respectable socialists, with a cozy relationship with the more leftist leaders of the Democratic Party machine - they would be very embarrassed if the were unable to control those workers at a high profile event in the middle of the Civic Center (and just a short walk from the banks of Wall Street).

ACORN and WWT were unwilling to even suggest the idea of having a mass rally - because they too feared, probably correctly, that they'd lose control of it.

Unlike WWP, neither ACORN nor WWT had access to squads of thugs, so they'd be totally unable to take control of a mass rally if they lost control of it to the workers.

In the absence of any kind of citywide mass struggle, and thanks to the fact that the NYC labor movement almost totally absented themselves from the WEP worker struggles, the WEP unions soon fizzled.

By the end of 1998, all three WEP worker unions were basically dead in the water.

Larry Holmes and the Workers World Party went back to setting up front groups to run anti war rallies, the anti poverty organizations that jointly ran WEP Workers Together went back to their own seperate social service projects and let WWT fade away and ACORN deployed it's batallions of energetic White teenagers to the next cause (one that hopefully didn't involve 35,000 militant Black and Latino workers!)

And, local 1180 and DC 37 abandoned any pretense that they actually gave a damn about organizing WEP workers.

They rejoined the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association, Transport Workers Union local 100 and the rest of the city worker unions, who openly ignored the forced labor of the WEP workers who were employed side by side with their members.

But, despite the misleaders who sold them out and led their heroic and truly inspiring struggle into a blind alley, the WEP workers had won some real victories.

First of all, they had totally stopped WEP program expansion in it's tracks.

The City had a hard enough time controlling 35,000 WEP workers - keeping 100,000 of them in line would be damned near impossible! The City was definitely not up to the task, and neither WWT, Workfairness nor ACORN had proved themselves capable of keeping the WEP workers under control.

So the WEP program was capped at 35,000.

The WEP workers also won the right to get excused from WEP assignments - due to ill health, childcare or other family responsibilities, GED program participation or college student status.

This created a long slow decline in the number of WEP workers.

Another factor in the decline of the WEP forced labor program was Turner's policies.

Many of the welfare recipients with job experience, the folks who typically got sent to WEP assagnments, were being kicked off of welfare.

Those who remained were folks who were, for the most part, unfit for work due to old age or infirm health or who could not be sent to work due to family responsibilities.

So, the pool of potential WEP workers got shallower and shallower as the welfare rolls were systematically slashed.

Also, the booming economy had pulled many welfare recipients with work experience back into the labor force, further reducing the pool of viable recruits for WEP.

Jason Turner's successors at HRA (that was another victory for the WEP workers - they sent the Commissioner back to Wisconsin!) had learned some valuable lessons from the WEP experiment.

They had learned that it was a really bad idea for them to have a large pool of forced laborers permanently assigned to the same site with the same crew. Sooner or later these workers would begin resisting their involuntary servitude, and those struggles were very dangerous - to HRA, the City and to the capitalist class that they served.

The lessons the City drew from the WEP experience have colored every forced labor program imposed since then.

After the failure of WEP, community service became the forced labor program of choice for the City of New York.

Unlike WEP workers, who were on essentially permanent assignments with the same crew in the same area of the city (usually the neighborhoods where they lived), folks caught up in community service served short term assignments - typically 3 days, but in some cases as little as 1 day and never more than 5 days.

They wern't part of a crew - they came into the program as individuals, and were out of the program long before they'd be able to develop any kind of ties with the other folks on their crew.

Also, the goverment had a hammer over their heads - the cellblocks of Rikers Island, which is where they could be sent for a month if they failed to comply.

Those two factors would work to effectively prevent workplace resistance from the community service workers.

There was another form of community service introduced by the Housing Authority.

They mandated that every unemployed able bodied adult who lived in the projects had to do unpaid building maintenance work for two days a month - and if they failed to comply, their whole family would be evicted in retaliation.

New Yorkers can thank another Bill Clinton-era congressional initiative for this forced labor program.

Clinton had directed the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to require that all federally subsidized housing projects had to set up a forced labor program for all of their unemployed tenants as a condition of recieveing federal funding.

These folks would be working in the projects they lived in - and, for many NYCHA tenants, the projects they'd been born and raised in.

A high proportion of public housing residents are "forever tenants" who's families have lived in the projects for generations. Some are actually descendants of the original tenants who came in when the projects were originally built in the 1930's.

But, they would not always be with the same crew, since they only worked 2 days a month.

And,if they failed to comply they and their entire family would face massive retalliation - their whole family would be driven from the only homes they had ever known and cut off from the communities they'd been born and raised in.

On the flip side, they'd also be cleaning up their own homes - communities that had become filthy due to 30 years of understaffed maintenance crews and systematic NYCHA neglect.

MTA New York City Transit also jumped on the community service bandwagon.

Many of the 250,000 New Yorkers who got arrested every year were accused of jumping the turnstiles because they couldn't afford to pay the train fare.

New York City Transit arrainged for those prisoners to be assigned to clean it's stations and subway cars.

TWU local 100 went along with the program, just as it had with WEP.

This was ironic, since local 100's newly elected president, former trackworker and union dissident Roger Toussaint, was a hoxhaite communist, placed into power at the head of a slate controlled by the trotstkyite socialist-run New Directions caucus.

You would think a man like Toussaint, who had been an open and passionate supporter of working class revolution (he'd actually had to flee to Brooklyn from his homeland, Trinidad and Tobago, as a young man due to his radicalism), would have a problem with having forced laborers doing barganing unit work side by side with union members

Oddly enough, Toussaint didn't have a problem with it - he didn't go out there and openly support forced labor like his predecessor Willie James did, but he didn't do anything to stop it either!

When Mayor Giuliani was forced out by term limits in 2002, he was replaced by Democrat turned Republican Mike Bloomberg.

While Giuliani served Wall Street, Bloomberg WAS Wall Street.

The $ 5 billion dollar net worth mayor (one of the 500 richest people on the face of the planet) was the founder and owner of Bloomberg, LP - a company that supplied the computer terminals used by every financial services firm in the world that operated a trading floor. He also supplied the software and the news content on the machines - which are commonly known as "Bloomberg Terminals".

Bloomberg agreed to work for no pay as mayor - but it wasn't like he needed the cash, his company was growing by leaps and bounds while he was in office, and his already obscenely vast personal fortune ballooned up to $ 13 billion (held in a so called "blind trust" since, supposedly, he didn't run Bloomberg, LP while in office).

DC 37 stepped in to help the billionare mayor figure out new ways to superexploit the poor.

We can thank Lillian Roberts for that.

Roberts was the former New York State labor commissioner installed by AFSCME President Gerald MacEntee as the $ 375,000 a year executive director of DC 37 after the trusteeship was lifted. Roberts was also allowed to give her son a $ 50,000 a year no work legal services contract.

Like her predecessors Jerry Wurf, Victor Gotbaum and Stanley Hill she was never elected to her post in the union, and like Wurf and Gotbaum, Roberts never held any civil service title in the City of New York. Nearly 60 years before, Roberts had briefly been a nursing assitant for the City of Chicago, but she had been either a union officer or a high ranking state executive ever since.

Roberts was the first municipal union chief who'd formerly been a boss - she'd served as New York State Labor Commissioner for nearly 20 years prior to her installation as DC 37 chieftan. During those two decades, Roberts supervised members of AFSCME Civil Service Employees Association local 1000 who worked for the New York State Department of Labor - and she also presided over the mass layoff of hundreds of those workers when she automated the Unemployment Insurance system.

Roberts also had the distinction of being the first Black woman to run DC 37 - and it was about time, since the union had been majority female and largely Black since the mid 1960's.

Roberts, anxious to ingratiate herself and her union with the new regime at City Hall, came up with the idea of setting up "job training" programs to fill the city's unskilled labor needs - and to drive the working poor off of welfare.

Under Roberts' scheme, welfare recipients with long work histories would be mandated to take $ 8/hr part time jobs with city agencies doing janitorial and street cleaning work

The program would be insultingly labled a "training" program for "unemployable" Black and Latina women with "bad attitudes" who "needed to develop a work ethic".

In fact, only women with long work histories would be selected for the program, and the so called "training" basically involved them doing unskilled labor that did not require any actual training at all.

The "trainees" would only work 5 days every two weeks, and would recieve only $ 320 every two weeks in wages.

$ 320 every two weeks just happens to be just enough wages to get a person's whole family kicked off of welfare!

It's far from enough to live on - in a city where the cheapest one room apartments cost more than that, it's a starvation wage even for a single person, and a substarvation pay scale for single moms with kids (the typical "trainee").

Worse yet, the City of New York's municipal payroll system is notorious for delays in paying casual workers - bad enough if you're earning a decent wage, but a disaster for folks who make so little.

Oh yeah, one other wrinkle - the "trainees" would have to pay union dues out of their obscenely low wages, because Roberts would have them enrolled in her union!!!!

And after 6 months, they'd get fired, and they would be replaced by other former welfare recipients.

No matter how well they did their job, they would not get hired as a permanent civil service protected employee of the City.

The Parks Department was the testing ground for this new plan.

Parks got picked because it had also been the testing ground for WEP - and because the most passionate supporter of this "training" plan in DC 37, after Roberts herself, was Mark Rosenthal, DC 37's secretary treasurer and Motor Vehicle Operators local 983's president.

Rosenthal was a former Parks Department motor vehicle operator, and the core of his local was Parks Department mvo's. He'd come to power in local 983 when the local's old Genovese family tied regime was ousted in the trusteeship - catapulting him from working poor status to making $ 375,000 a year from multiple union salaries.

Rosenthal was also a political rival of Lillian Roberts.

Apparently he may have seen the "trainee" program as a way of showing the City that he would be even more effective in selling out municipal workers than Roberts was!

Rosenthal's biggest beef with Robert's version of the "trainee" program was that he felt the "trainees" were OVERPAID at $ 8/hr!!!

The $ 375,000 a year union chief felt the "trainees" only deserved $ 7.50/hr!!!!

In any case, the City agreed to hire 3,000 of these low wage "trainees".

Despite the fact that almost all of these women had extensive white collar and/or service sector work histories, they were put to work doing street cleaning, gardening, building maintenance, restroom attendant or exterior painting work.

This "training" was absolutely irrelevant to these women's work histories. Some of the trainees publicly complained that they couldn't put this job on their resume, because it was so far removed from their regular and customary employment!

And of course, the whole "training" concept was based on the offensive, racist, sexist and grossly wrong idea that minority female unemployment is caused by personal character defects in individual jobless women of color, rather than by an overall lack of enough jobs, and the employer racism and sexism that distorts the distribution of the jobs that do exist!!

But, their union signed off on it, so it was OK - and, since they were already unionized by one of the largest and most powerful labor organizations in New York, they were effectively blocked from seeking out an alternative union to represent them.

And the 6 months and out policy effectively prevented workplace resistance by creating constant turnover in the maintenance crews.

The program also tried it's best to focus the women away from collective resistance and towards individual upward mobility - at the expense of their coworkers, if necessary.

The union sanctioned program also worked to promote resentment of and contempt for unions among it's participants, who had mostly been non union clerical workers in their previous jobs. Considering this was the first union job for many of these workers, it no doubt left a very bad impression of unionism on them.

Parallel to the "training" program, the Parks Department had also privatized many city parks - including the crown jewel of the system, Manhattan's Central Park (where Parks Department headquarters is located).

Private not for profit agencies called "conservancies" took these parks over.

They still had unionized parks workers on staff, but the conservancies supplimented that labor force with low paid non union workers, unpaid middle class and student volunteers and forced laborers from the WEP and community service programs and now, they had "trainees" too.

Not to be outdone in selling out the interests of the workers, Teamsters local 237 chief Carroll "Carl" Haynes authorized a similar policy in the Housing Authority.

NYCHA set up a virtually identical "trainee" program.

Women in the projects who had extensive work histories but who were presently jobless were forcibly enrolled in the "training" program and kicked off of welfare.

They worked 5 days every other week for $ 8/hr - or $ 320 every two weeks.

Despite the extensive white collar work experience that most of these women had (and the college educations of some of the women) they were used as building porters.

They were "trained" to put out garbage for collection, sweep and mop floors, stairs and elevators, paint apartments, change locks, replace lightbulbs, mow lawns, empty garbage baskets and sweep streets and walkways.

Incidentally, since the inception of this "training" program and the unpaid "community service" program, the NYCHA has laid off over 2,000 permanent civil service status building maintenance workers.

This has reduced the NYCHA's regular staff to only 6,000 workers, who have to cover 300 projects and 130,000 apartments!

And every one of those 2,000 laid off workers was a local 237 member!

Like the parks program, NYCHA's program was insultingly labled as a "training" program for "unemployable" women.

In fact, these ladies had extensive job histories (otherwise they would not have even been selected to participate) and they were being "trained" to do unskilled labor!

They also had to pay union dues to local 237 - and since, at any given time, the program had about 2,000 workers in it, the union made up for the lost dues income from the 2,000 laid off full time civil servants.

And, no matter how well they did their jobs, they got automatically laid off after 6 months of part time work, to be replaced by the next jobless tenant.

Like their sisters at the Parks Department, these women were effectively blocked from getting a union that would actually represent them because they were already union members, and the short term duration of their assignment worked to prevent these women from organizing workplace resistance.

Another byproduct of the program was to incite anti-union sentiment in the women.

Most of these women had worked for years in non union office jobs - for many, this may have been their first experience being a union member, and, since the union had sold them out even before they were hired, this no doubt made a sharply negative impression on these workers.

Also, it wasn't an accident that both of these programs were largely female.

Roberts, Rosenthal, Haynes and Bloomberg probably felt that women workers were easier to control than men, and any resistance from women would be more likely to be verbal - rather than the physical confrontations that the City might have to deal with from a more heavily male workforce.

In other words, it's easier for the supervisors in the field to deal with being yelled at by a woman they've mistreated than it is for them to cope with getting punched in the face by a man they've wronged!

Lillian Roberts has other brilliant ideas to help the City deal with the extreme misery of New York's poorest workers.

In the current DC 37/City of New York agreement, Roberts put a clause lifting the residency requirement for her members.

The City's uniformed workers (cops, firefighters, corrections officers and sanitation workers) are already permitted to live outside of the city, as long as they live in nearby counties (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess or Orange) and they still live within New York State.

This enables uniformed workers to be able to buy larger houses than they'd be able to afford in the city, since suburban home prices are far lower than here.

The residency rule also enabled some of the more racist minded White uniformed workers to avoid living near Blacks or Latinos, since the suburbs have much smaller minority populations than the city does.

Roberts wanted to extend this policy to her members, to help them deal with skyrocketing rents by moving to the suburbs.

Of course, rents are far lower in Westchester or Long Island than they are here - but rents are unregulated there, and most of the apartments are illegal rooms carved out of single family houses.

But lower rents are balanced out by much higher commuting costs - some DC 37 members are actually able to walk to their jobs, or just take a short bus or train ride.

But if they moved to the suburbs, many would have to take a commuter train to a subway to a bus to get to work.

And, Roberts overwhelmingly Black and Latino membership would have a limited choice of unregulated apartments to choose from - since most White homeowners would be reluctant to rent a room in their house to a minority person.

Since these apartments are illegal and technically don't even exist, it would be hard to sue the homeowner for housing discrimination.

This would effectively confine those minority workers to that small part of Long Island and Westchester that is already majority Black or Latino - the areas which also have the lowest number of vacancies and the highest rents in the suburbs, thanks to de facto housing segregation.

Above all, there's the glaring fact that it's one thing for $ 57,000 a year uniformed workers to live outside the city, it's a whole other deal for civillian workers, some of whom make as little as $ 15,000 a year, to move to suburbia.

It translates to suburban McMansion spendor for the uniformed workers - and rented room in an illegally converted basement boiler room squalor for the civilians!!!

The City Council nullified that clause in the contract.

The City Council's Black, Puerto Rican & Latino caucus felt, correctly, that ending residency restrictions on civilian city workers was discriminatory to Black and Latino workers.

The Councilmembers also feared, correctly, that unemployed suburbanites would try and take jobs that are reserved for poor New Yorkers - and taking those last few jobs out of the ghettoes would guarantee civil unrest in the near future!

Needless to say, it never even occurred to Roberts to use her union's strength to fight for the restoration of Rent Control, a rent freeze and rollback and an expansion of the projects and the Mitchell Lama developments.

That would involve fighting for what workers need, rather than what the bankers want.

And Roberts doesn't get down like that!

In any case, the real tragedy here is the degree to which the unions have joined the City in actively attacking the poorest workers.

Liberal newspapers like the New York Times and the Village Voice frequently condemn DC 37 for "betraying the legacy of Victor Gotbaum".

They're wrong about that.

DC 37 is loyally following the REAL "legacy of Victor Gotbaum" - selling out City workers and fighting for the interests of the bankers and financiers.

As we've seen above, in many ways Lillian Roberts has out Gotbaumed Gotbaum!

He would never have dreamed of DC 37 actually creating sweatshop labor programs for the City - and then making the low wage laborers pay union dues!!!

And Gotbaum would have at least gone through the motions of issuing press releases condemning galloping rents - rather than openly surrendering to landlord gentrification and rent gouging by trying to make the poorest city workers move out of the city!

But, what is the alternative to the constant retreat and surrender policies of NYC's municipal unions?

We caught a glimpse of the potential power of municipal workers in struggle in December 2005, when TWU local 100 called a 60 hour strike at New York City Transit.

The transit workers were able to shut the city down. Streets were gridlocked with huge traffic jams, and that majority of New York City's 4 million workers who do not drive had to walk to work or stay home.

Despite the massive inconvenience to New York workers, and the incessant, and often very racist, anti strike propaganda campaign on broadcast TV, cable, radio and the newspapers, most of the city's working class (in particular Black and Latino workers) openly supported the transit workers.

If the transit workers hadn't been stabbed in the back by their own leader, Roger Toussaint, and had been allowed to stay on strike until they won, they would have scored a massive victory, not only for themselves but for the whole New York City working class.

Incidentally, Toussaint didn't even put abolition of WEP and community service forced labor on the table as a bargaining issue.

However, even though Toussaint was able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the strike showed that it is still possible for New York's working class to fight back.

It also shows that New York's union leaders are utterly unwilling to lead effective working class struggles.

The reason for that is pretty simple - the union leaders are pro capitalist, they support the present system, and they know that if they were to fight for the burning needs of the working class, they would threaten and undermine that system, which is in a deep and unresolvable crisis.

So, instead, union leaders try and get workers to accept a steadily falling standard of living (in New York's municipal unions, a common method is to "kill the unborn" - get incumbent workers to vote for concessions that will be imposed on workers who have not been hired yet).

But that is just not good enough!

Workers need, and deserve, far better than that!!

And, if this present capitalistic system can't deliver on what we need, then it's long past time that we overthrow and replace that system with a working class-controlled communistic system that can!

To even get to the point where we as a working class can fight for control of the whole society (and to get workers to realize that this is not only desirable but is actually a real world possibility) we have to start by fighting in an organized way for the most urgent needs of the most economically deprived and oppressed sections of our class.

Obviously, one of the glaringly immediate issues is to demand the immediate abolition of all of the City of New York's forced labor programs.

All of 12,000 current WEP workers should be hired by the city, at the rate of pay that would normally be recieved by an incumbent in the civil service title that normally does that job.

These WEP workers should also get seniority credit for the time they spent as WEP workers, and they, and everybody else who was in the program from 1996 to date, should get retroactive pay and pension credits for the time they spent in the program.

All 5,000 current Parks Department and NYCHA "training" program participants should also get immediately hired by the City, on a full time basis, at the full pay and benefit scale of the civil service title that normally does that job, with seniority credit for the time they spent in the "training program".

They should also get retroactive pay for the hours they worked at the substandard rate, and the same health insurance and pension credit a full time worker would have recieved for 6 months of work.

All workers laid off from the Parks Department and NYCHA "training" programs should also get retroactive pay, pension and health insurance benefits, as well as a hiring preference and 5 point civil service test credit for any future city civil service title that they take the test for.

Also, the Department of Sanitation's non union emergency snow laborers should be brought into the civil service system.

All snow laborers who have worked during previous snow seasons should be hired by the city as seasonal laborers, and put on a seniority list, so the workers who have worked the most number of seasons would get hired first during the next snow season.

They should also have their wages raised to the level of entry level sanitation workers and they should get pension fund contributions and year round health insurance for their seasonal work.

They should also be allowed to join the Uniformed Sanitationmen's Association.

Also, the present system where snow laborers are only called up the day after a snow storm and are discharged as soon as the City thinks enough of the snow has been cleared should be replaced by a system where snow laborers get hired the first day of winter and are kept on the payroll until the first day of spring.

Between snow storms, the snow laborers should be used to do street sweeping and general cleaning in and around Sanitation Department garages.

They should also get 10 points credit towards the sanitation worker civil service test, and 5 points credit towards any other city test they might take, and they should get seniority credit for the time they worked as snow laborers prior to their appointment as sanitation workers.

As for the community service workers - both court mandated DSNY forced laborers and NYCHA project tenant forced laborers - they should get back pay for the time they spent doing unpaid forced labor, at the same wage scale as the civil service workers who would normally do that work.

They should also get a cash payment equivilent to the pension and health insurance contributions that would have been paid had they been municipal workers and a 5 point credit on any future civil service test that they take.

There should also be an absolute ban on any future use of forced laborers at any municipal agency or public authority or other governmental entitiy and on the regular use of unpaid volunteers to do regular work that would otherwise have been done by hired civil service workers.

Also, all government subsidized private not for profit agencies presently using low paid and/or homeless workers to do municipal work for low pay (the Business Improvement Districts, Wildcat Services, Ready, Willing & Able, ect) should be requred to pay their workers the same wage scale, medical and pension benefits they would recieve if they were municipal workers, and to give their present and past workers retroactive wages, benefits and pension credit for the time they worked at the substandard scale.

This anti-forced labor campaign should be part of a broader campaign to deal with the most burning and immediate issues facing New York's working class - high rents, not enough jobs and the systematic police harassment and incarceration of low income minorities.

On the rent question (a burning issue not only for the city's working class but even for many middle class New Yorkers), we should demand restoration of the pre 1969 Rent Control Law.

This new Rent Control should be expanded to cover maintenance fees on coops and condos (since so many New Yorkers have been forced to buy their own apartments) and illegal apartments in private residences and should also include a 20% rollback on current rents and strict limits on future rent increases.

There should also be a moratorium on non payment evictions for unemployed, low income, retired and disabled people and the custodial parents of children under 18, with HRA covering the unpaid rent through an expansion of the existing "One Shot Deal" program.

Further, there should be an expansion of the NYCHA projects, with a sufficient number of hirise low rent apartments to be built to increase the city's apartment vacancy rate to 5%.

Currently, apartment vacancy rates in the city are under 1%, thanks to a landlord generated "housing shortage" that has it's roots in the landlord arson of the 1970's.

If there is insufficient land in the more congested residential areas of the city, the City should purchace the land from it's present owners and demolish the existing buildings, with the current residents to be temporarily housed elswhere and to be given low rent apartments in the projects once they're built.

Also, the Long Island Rail Road's Atlantic Avenue and West Side railroad yards, which at present are in the process of being handed over to real estate developers, should instead have public housing projects built on platforms erected above them.

Similar housing projects built on platforms should be built over CSX Railroad's Oak Point and Hunts Point railroad yards and Metro North's Highbridge railroad yard in the Bronx and Amtrak's Sunnyside railroad yard and the LIRR's Jamaica railroad yard in Queens, as well as MTA NYC Transit's 13 subway yards around the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.

The creation of a large supply of low rent apartments, along with the restored and expanded Rent Control Law, would tend to pull down the city's excessively high rents.

To further push rents downwards, all public subsidies for new construction of luxury apartment houses should be immediately terminated, and all property tax abatements for existing luxury housing should be immediately rescinded.

Also, all government funded housing developments should be built with 100% union labor, with the workers getting full union pay and benefits, unlike the present situation where the City uses scab contractors paying very low (and in some cases subminimum) wages and no benefits to do almost all municipally-subsidized residential construciton.

Along with rent reduction and public housing, this city also needs a jobs program.

We're never going to be the great manufacturing center we once were - New York's economy has long since shifted to financial services, corporate administration and tourism. Nor is our seaport ever again going to employ 50,000+ longshoremen, sailors and teamsters as it once did.

However, this city does have a crying need for massive expansion of it's public service sector.

Let's start with street cleaning - the sorely needed city service that the rulers of New York have been using forced labor to do for the last decade.

The DSNY's workforce should be expanded up to 15,000 sanitation workers and 1,000 snow laborers.

The Parks Department's workforce should be boosted up to 5,900 full time workers, 5,900 lifeguards and other temporary summer workers and 1,000 snow laborers and other temporary winter workers.

The NYC Department of Transportation should add 1,000 full time highway cleaning laborers and 1,000 seasonal snow laborers.

There should be part of a broader expansion of the municipal workforce.

The Transit Authority should bring it's total number of station department workers up to 7,500, by restoring the pre WEP-era number of station cleaners, adding elevator operators to all handicapped accessable stations, adding platform conductors to busy stations at rush hour and reopening station restrooms.

The Housing Authority should expand it's workforce up to 17,800, by adding building supers and 24 hour a day lobby security guards to all NYCHA apartment buildings, rehiring all the workers laid off due to the "trainee" program and giving permanent jobs to all of the "trainees".

The Department of Education should bring it's teacher workforce up to 100,000, expand the number of paraprofessionals up to 20,000, bring up the number of school aides (hall monitors) to 20,000, bring up the total number of custodians (stationary engineers) to 1,400 (one for each school) and expand the cleaner workforce up to 6,000.

And the Health and Hospitals Corporation should bring it's workforce back up to the pre fiscal crisis level of 20,000, by expanding public hospital clinic hours, expanding emergency room and outpatient services and expanding the number of off site clinics.

Two City departments should have their workforces reduced - the NYPD and the Department of Corrections.

The NYPD should be scaled down to it's pre Koch size of 25,000 sworn officers and the DoC should similarly be scaled back to 4,000 officers.

This should be part of a broader program of ending the mass arrest terror in the city's Black and Latino neighborhoods.

All arrest quotas should be abolished, and nobody should be taken into custody for violations, misdemeanors, traffic offenses or other minor charges. Since the city's crime rate has fallen by 70%, the number of stop-and-frisks should similarly decline from a million a year to less than 300,000 and the number of arrests should similarly fall from the present quarter million a year to less than 75,000 annually.

Now, these are all great ideas - and would no doubt be welcomed by the working class of New York City - in particular, Black and Latino workers.

Howerver, after 32 years of continuous defeats, most working class New Yorkers have developed an attitude of "you-can't-fight-City-Hall" cynicism, and few would be willing to think anything like this would be even possible.

The six-figure salary misleaders of New York City's municipal unions would go even further - they'd view this program with outright scorn and condemn it as "unrealistic" and a "pipe dream" not even worth trying to fight for.

The union chieftans would also be terrified of any campaign of mass working class struggle, since anything that would empower workers to actively participate in the life of their union would tend to put their privilged union positions at risk.

The leaders of NYC's dense network of "Community Based Organizations" and "advocacy" groups would have similar contempt for these proposals, and would view these ideas with absolute hostility.

This is because the CBO's have spent almost two generations trying to condition New York's working class to think that all we deserve are a few scraps of charity from the financiers and their government.

Also, many of the CBO's - like Wildcat, Ready, Willing and Able and the BID's - are actively involved in the impoverishment and immiseration of this city's working class, due to their direct role in the forced labor and mass arrest programs!

And, above all, the Wall Street financial interests and the city and state governments that rule on their behalf would be tooth and nail opposed to just about everything that I proposed above.

In particular, they'd be adamantly against the abolition of mass police repression, since that's what enabled them to keep the peace on behalf of their class and wage a one sided class war against working class New Yorkers for these past three decades.

They'd also be ferociously opposed to the expansion of the projects and the restoration of Rent Control - since mass rent gouging and real estate speculation has enabled the economic rulers of New York to successfully survive the economic crisis of the last 30 years.

They'd have serious problems with the job creation program too - since adding a large number of decent paying union jobs with benefits to the economy would force all of the non union bosses in the city to raise their workers wages and give them benefits - and they really cannot profitably afford to do that.

So, of course, the only way we could achieve any of these very neccessary reforms would be through a ferocious struggle - not only against the City and the State, but also against the Wall Street financial interests, the real estate developers, the Democratic Party and the corporate media.

And, we'd have to simultaneously fight the leadership of the civil service unions and the "Community Based Organizations" as well. These folks, who's job it is to help the Wall Street interests manage the discontent of the working class, would be among the most formidable and energetic opponents of any serious attempts to mobilize masses of working class people to fight back against the system in an organized way.

And there's a very real reason why the bankers, union chiefs and community based organization folks would be united in their opposition to anything even remotely similar to the program I've outlined above - because any serious attempt to meet the needs of poor working class New Yorkers would shake the capitalist system to it's foundations.

Naturally, the financiers, along with the rest of the capitalist class, want to preserve their system (a difficult task in this country these days, since America's rulers have been in a deep economic crisis for over 32 years - a crisis that they have no realistic solution to).

Of course, they will do whatever they have to do to keep their system afloat.

There was a time when they could afford to make economic concessions to working class people to maintain the stability of the system (and the more far sighted of the capitalists did just that) - but that's just not possible anymore.

That's why they've relied on police repression so much over these last three decades - they really didn't have many other options.

Unlike the days of post World War II prosperity, the corporate rulers of New York City could no longer buy the passivity of the working class - now they had to have their armed agents (the NYPD) enforce it with nightsticks and jail cells!

It's also understandible why the community based organizations want to preserve the system, and will never make demands that would put the stability of the system in any kind of jeapordy - the CBO's are financed by corporate grants, so their leaders are conditioned to a posture of extreme servility towards the corporate interests.

Also, the leaders of the CBO's view themselves as middlemen between the corporate rulers and the working class, who's job it is to get the more enlightened of the bosses to give a few scraps of charity to the workers, to maintain social peace - and the whole point of the charitable contributions is to PRESERVE the system.

Many of the CBO's are directly involved in repression - even part of the court system that sends so many New Yorkers into involuntary servitude is run by the CBO's! That is the flip side of their reformism - if they can't use charity to make working class folks passive, they will be quick to use the nightstick!!!

Above all, these professional reformists want to defend the system - if possible by persuading the bosses to throw a few crumbs to the working class, but if that's not a realistic possibility (and, more and more, it's not) they'll support the unleashing of the government's repressive forces if necessary, and they will actively participate in that repression if they have to.

But what about the unions?

Shouldn't they be committed to fighting for the needs of the working class?

Clearly, as I've shown above, New York's municipal unions show NO such committment to fighting for workers needs.

Many of the city unions have actively involved themselves in running the city's forced labor programs - in other words, they're so far from the solution that they've become a big part of the problem!!!

PART of that problem is the corruption of the unions - and not just "corruption" in the narrow criminal justice sense of union officials getting bribes and kickbacks!

Many municipal union officials make salaries that are 10 or 20 times higher than the salaries of the workers they represent, and they live a far easier and more luxury filled life than their members do.

Some city union officials (particularly in DC 37) have never even worked in the titles their unions represent. But even those union officials that used to actually be on the job have no desire whatsoever to trade their present high salaried low work jobs for their former life of working hard for very little money.

This leads union officials to orient the institutions they control towards the interests of the bosses and the most priviliged pro boss oriented layers of the workforce - and to systematically sell out the needs of the poorest and most exploited workers, as well as sabotaging any efforts of these workers to fight back against the system.

Of course, the great majority of they members of these unions do NOT have any common interest with the bosses... hell, if they did, why would they even need a labor union in the first place?

In fact, the needs of workers, particularly the poorest and most oppressed workers, are 180 degrees opposite of the needs of the bosses.

At this point in history, when the bosses can no longer afford to make any meaningful concessions to the burning economic and social needs of the working class, the only way we can get what we need is to fight for it.

We cannot afford to limit our demands to what the corporate rulers (and their CBO and union leader apologists) think is "realistic" ...because, more and more, what is "realistic" for our bosses is a starvation standard of living for us, and we just cannot have that!!!!

And, we're going to have to capture the leadership of our unions from their present misleaders. We have to transform them from business unionist institutions that divide workers and only protect the narrowest and most privilged sections of the workforce into revolutionary labor organizations that fight for the interests of our entire class - not only the narrow demands of a limited section of the workforce.

Now, this fight won't be easy, in fact the deck is stacked against our class - with our own union leaders working the hardest to keep us from fighting back!!!

But we really don't have any choice here, because the alternative to resistance is far far worse. If we don't fight back, all we have to look forward to is a future of higher rents, lower pay, police repression and more and more forced labor.

- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, local 608 carpenter,
for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
"UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER"
originally published April 30, 2007
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