New York City workers forced to pay for crisis

[Hannah Bell]

As the New York Times noted last week, the taxpayer-funded turnaround of the financial sector has set the stage for “the return of supersize banker bonuses,” with senior executives and top traders on track to receive even more money than before the onset of the crisis...

For the vast majority of the city’s more than eight million people...the financial crisis unleashed by...those being bailed out has meant attacks on jobs, wages and benefits.

Spearheading this assault is New York’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has demanded sharp concessions from the more than 280,000 workers employed by the city...

But cutbacks are being imposed on virtually every section of the working class in New York City...
According to Crain’s New York, “An estimated 75 percent of non-unionized businesses are exploring labor-cost reductions like furloughs, pay cuts and increased employee contribution to health plans.”

The city’s biggest union, Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, voluntarily reopened its contract covering 145,000 hospital and nursing home workers...The employers’ group, the League of Voluntary Hospitals and Homes, responded with a set of concession demands...

Meanwhile, unions representing hundreds of thousands of municipal workers reached a deal with the Bloomberg administration that trades $1 billion worth of health care concessions over the next six years for a three-month reprieve for 1,000 workers who were to be laid off...

At the New York Times, the unions agreed to a deal that cuts unionized workers’ pay by 5 percent through the end of the year, while failing to incorporate a no-layoff pledge that union leaders had claimed they would get in return.

The city’s 40 building trade unions have accepted some of the deepest cuts...The deal reduces wages, hours and benefits...

At a union-management Construction Industry Partnership meeting held in February, Larry Silverstein, the developer of the former World Trade Center site, gave a keynote address calling for the concessions in which he said that the demand for cuts in labor costs were being driven by the Wall Street banks.

“We need to reestablish the bottom line on labor costs for banks to be willing to lend,” Silverstein told his audience of developers and union bureaucrats.

Lou Colletti, head of the Building Trades Employers Association, followed up by declaring, “We must take drastic action to survive. The demand being made for cost reduction is not coming from the employers of union labor but from the banks.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/nycw-j22.shtml

[Skittles]

1. we are all paying for the fuckups by these greedy banker bastards

ALL of us

[aquart]

2. Has Bloomberg taxed one of them a dime?