As Domestic Workers United members celebrated in the blazing heat at Union Square July 6 after the State Legislature passed a sweeping set of labor provisions protecting nannies and other home-care workers, the demonstrators received some unwanted resistance.
A lone man with a hand-held video camera in the otherwise empty park shouted "clean my room," and "wash my dishes," to the disgust of the activists who used a bull horn to rattle off a list of state lawmakers who pushed the bill forward. Park security led the heckler away while he tried to argue that he was simply exercising his free speech rights. By his demeanor and appearance he seemed not so much a political contrarian as a bystander who was a few sandwiches short of picnic, but the knee-jerk negative reaction offered a sign of the push-back the domestic workers are likely to confront as they try to implement their newly won legal rights.
The Bill of Rights is a milestone to be sure. A coalition consisting mostly immigrant women of color gathered enough political support to codify employee rights they have lacked: one day off per week, overtime pay and protections against workplace harassment. These are people who cannot form a union because of the nature of their work -- individual arrangements with employers who usually have only one or two people working for them. Now the legislation -- the first law of its kind in the country -- is intended to fill that gap.
These are great things for workers, but how will Domestic Workers United, which is not a union, hold employers accountable to these new laws? After all, the group does not have shop stewards who can file grievances and take employers before arbitrators. And just because something is illegal, it does not mean an employer won't do it.
Gov. David Paterson has announced his intention to sign the bill. Once he does, the Domestic Workers United will have to rely on one, the state to enforce the laws, and two, domestic workers to know their rights and have the confidence to speak up if they believe those rights are being violated.
"The most critical piece is going to be the education of workers so they understand their rights under the new law and employers understand their responsibilities," said Domestic Workers United director Priscilla Gonzalez, noting that the group communicates with members via newsletters and a network of volunteers to reach out to workers face-to-face.
Domestic workers cannot form unions for a variety of reasons, Gonzalez explained, but mainly because most of them are lone workers employed by one family, making the collective-bargaining process impossible. In addition, and much of industry is based on casual employment -- cash under the table.
Luna Ranjit, the executive director of Adhikaar, a coalition of Nepali workers collaborating with the Domestic Workers United, said that making the set of laws in the bill of rights effective will rely on simply word-of-mouth among domestic workers.
"Most of work is really talking to our members on a day-to-day basis," she said.
With the state budget in shambles, enforcement may be a problem. While the state Department of Labor has been relatively progressive in terms of enforcing wage ordinances, it. Like many other state agencies, may see its workforce, diminished and weakened over the next several budget cycles.
"We understand the constraints at the Department of Labor, which is why we want to work closely with them to ensure that any existing resources are used in the most efficient way possible," Gonzalez said.
For the more-than 200,000 domestic workers in the downstate region, working conditions vary. Some employers already go above and beyond the minimum standards outlined in the law. But there are bad bosses too. Gonzalez explained that some domestic workers earn $12 per hour, while others have an hourly pay of 50 cents. In late 2007, a Long Island couple, Mahender and Varsha Sabhnani, were convicted in federal court on charges of enslaving and torturing their Indonesian servants. The news coverage sparked outrage against the family, though Gonzalez does not believe it was an isolated incident.
"There's more than we actually think," she said. "This is work that happens behind closed doors. The government has refused to see the home as somebody else's workplace."
Indeed, labor inspectors are common in commercial and industrial zones, but do not go door-to-door in residential neighborhoods.
All this comes as many domestic workers are still grappling with the effects of the recession. When financial firms laid off traders, thousands of nannies, house cleaners and other similar workers lost their jobs as well. Things have recovered, although Domestic Workers United has been scrambling to direct out-of-work members to social services. Some have encountered new problems such as "nanny sharing," where two families seeking to reduce expenses share one nanny for one salary.
As it seeks to implement the law here, Domestic Workers United is looking beyond New York, helping to push similar legislation in Colorado and California. The group, Gonzalez said, also is exploring how it might push for federal legislation would make the domestic work industry a part of standard labor law.
All of this activity, the group hopes, could lead to a change in the change the perception of domestic workers. And that in turn, it thinks, could spur employers to adhere to acceptable workplace standards for people who care for children, cook and clean.
The time has come, Domestic Workers united argues, to realize that, for the class of movers and shakers in a place like the five boroughs, employing household workers is not a luxury, but a necessity.
"Domestic workers make all other work possible -- literally," Gonzalez said. "If a domestic worker doesn't show up to work then other workers can't go to work. These are the invisible hands that hold up countless families and homes."
The professionals with coffee cups and laptops spread out in front of them as they followed a lecture about government incentives for energy efficiency projects had something in common. They all had lost jobs in finance, swept out of interesting and lucrative jobs by the recession.
Among them was a 57-year-old man who used to run a platinum metals desk in New York for a family business from South Africa, a 33-year-old former technology analyst for a brokerage firm and a woman who once supervised the New York Stock Exchange's websites.
Those attending the career session at the State University of New York's Levin Institute in midtown Manhattan also were united in their willingness to look beyond Wall Street for their next jobs. After finishing a weeklong seminar on small businesses and entrepreneurship, 45 people stayed on for a second week of "green finance boot camp," said Helene Rude, the institute's director of educational services. The group spilled out of the main room into a nearby conference room where the attendees followed the presentations by video hook-up. "Why wouldn't you invest another week in something that's quote, unquote hot?" asked Rude.
The Levin Institute is contracted by the city's Economic Development Corp. to run the JumpStart program, which helps laid-off workers transition into new jobs. The program is open to professionals who worked in the financial services industry and lost their jobs due to the economic downturn. Participants, who attend at no cost, also must be New York City residents. Admission is based on a review of resumes and essays.
The current contract, which runs from December 2009 to the end of 2011, provides $300,000 for Levin to carry out several JumpStart programs benefiting a total of 300 out-of-work financial services workers, according to the Economic Development Corp.
While the main focus of the program is helping financial services workers, JumpStart also this year held a pilot program for laid-off media employees.
The green session, which ends this month, was designed to present out-of-work finance professionals with opportunities in the growing fields of developing, producing marketing and selling energy efficient technology and other environmentally friendly products and techniques. It addressed two economic goals of the Bloomberg administration -- keeping talented people shed by Wall Street from leaving the city and helping a vibrant green economy grow.
"When you match really smart business people up with really smart entrepreneurs, really interesting things happen," said Rude.
After they complete the session, participants are placed in 10-week, unpaid "consultant-ships" so they can gain experience.
It is difficult to pinpoint just how many job opportunities now exist in the green finance sector, but people involved in the JumpStart program see possibilities. They drew a parallel between the current potential for growth in green sector companies and the Internet bubble of the 1990s.
"The green movement is sort of like where the Internet was a dozen years ago, new and ready to explode," said participant Frank Provenzano, 33, who used to work in sales and marketing at a Wall Street firm. He said he came to JumpStart program primarily to learn about entrepreneurship but is glad he attended the green finance boot camp. "This has definitely opened up my eyes to how much opportunity there is," he said.
Provenzano knows that with opportunities come risks. The Internet bubble of the 1990s burst, forcing many companies to close down, something that could happen to the green sector as well. "A lot of start-up companies will come out of it, perhaps 10 percent will hit it big,” he said.
As the green sector began to emerge in the past few years, the city's finance and insurance industries lost tens of thousands of jobs. According to the Economic Development Corp., finance and insurance peaked in November 2007 when they supported 350,200 jobs. This May, that number stood at 311,000, the agency said.
Meanwhile, the Bloomberg administration was looking at efforts to add green jobs to the city's economy. Last October, Mayor Michael Bloomberg pledged to double the city's green-sector jobs from 13,800 to 27,600 by 2018.
"The impetus really came from city," Rude said. "They had done some research into the sector and really wanted to redirect some of the financial talent that lost its jobs into different areas and green finance was one of them."
Figures on how many green jobs have been created so far are not available, according to the Economic Development Corp.
The seminar covered a number of types of green finance including carbon emissions trading, opportunities in renewable energy start-up companies, green project finance and socially responsible investing, she said. Among the sessions offered were: "Making Some Green on 'Green'," led by Daniel Byrd, director of research for Virid Capital Management; "The Empire State Building and Large Scale Retrofits," on how the city's tallest building is becoming more energy efficient; and "What's Blowin' in the Wind?," a discussion of how wind can be distributed as an energy source, led by Russell M. Tencer, CEO of Wind Products, LLC.
The participants also learned they could make themselves valuable to future employers by understanding the Byzantine web of government incentives and tax breaks for energy efficiency improvements. They heard how green energy start-up companies needed financial expertise.
One such company, New York-based Solaire Generation, which makes solar-panel carports for parking lots, took two of the boot camp participants. One, a lawyer, provided legal help with a contract while the other helped to create a marketing plan, said La Vonda Williams, the company's chief operating officer. The company's decision to take on JumpStart consultants, she said, was prompted partly by its desire "to add momentum to several projects that had been placed on the back burner."
She added, "We were not just looking for financial skills, but multi-faceted individuals who could contribute on several fronts -- creativity, relationship building, legal strategy, etc."
Most everyone involved in the program agreed that it made sense for the city to nurture the green finance sector and to encourage its talented workforce to seek out opportunities there.
"It's a win, win, win situation," said Danielle Gustafson, a boot camp participant who was the former managing director of global websites for the New York Stock Exchange. "It's a win for the consultants, for the companies where these consultants land and it's a win for New York City in terms of giving it an injection of talent into that start-up economy."
The classes, though, will not be successful if the jobs do not exist. People involved in the program acknowledged that green finance is a fledgling sector that has just started to grow and that opportunities are still limited.
Like some of the other participants, Gustafson did not end up at a "green" company for her consultancy position. Instead, she got a place at dotbox, a social media, e-commerce company. Nevertheless, she found the knowledge she gained during the boot camp on green finance useful. "It's already increased my clout," she said. "Whether I land back at some corporation, or land at a start-up, or kind of augment my existing consulting practice, it definitely was a good booster for me."
Rude said her efforts to place the participants at green companies were challenging. "It was a little tough because it's an emerging industry," she said. "There aren’t that many companies that can really bring someone on board because they are so busy trying to get the company off the ground.
"But that said, there are quite a number of entrepreneurs in the city who are venturing into green" and who need help, she said. "People who are starting these companies, they may know the technology really well but they may not have the same kind of business acumen."
The city had placed a lot of hope for job growth in carbon emissions trading, but with a new national energy policy stalled in Congress, those opportunities have not developed.
The key to these jobs would be a national "cap-and-trade" policy, in which the government sets caps on the amount of pollutants utilities and other industries can emit. Those companies, in turn, are allowed to trade their allowance permits among themselves. The legislation, a version of which passed in the House of Representatives, is stalled in the U.S. Senate.
"The legislation has moved slower than everybody has hoped," said Ann Li, the director for financial services and international business at the Economic Development Corp.'s Center for Economic Transformation. "A huge part, if not the biggest part, of whether or not we have a vital carbon market depends on government legislation."
Currently, the New York Mercantile Market does handle some emissions trades, mainly from the European market. If the U.S. adopts a cap-and-trade policy, the number of carbon trades would increase greatly. To address that potential growth, efforts are underway to create a New York City-based Green Exchange.
"We think the prospect of an American carbon market is definitely on the board pending the creation of an important legislative framework," said Henry Bakker, the exchange's director of communication . "New York City, as a major international finance center, is particularly well-placed to become a global carbon finance hub."
Despite the uncertainties, the green finance boot camp included two days of presentations by Robert Rabinowitz of the London-based , European Climate Exchange, who talked about how he sees this type of trading developing in the United States. Rabinowitz addressed the April seminar via video-hookup because his flight to New York was grounded by the Icelandic volcano ash cloud.
Li said the city wants to make sure to be prepared if and when carbon trading becomes a going concern. "Once you can put a price to pollution you will have a market," she said. "We want to make sure New York City captures that market."
Vera Haller, the former editor-in-chief of amNew York and editor of NYNewsday.com, currently teaches journalism at Baruch College.
Self-congratulation filled City Hall late last month as the City Council adopted the $63.1 billion 2011 city budget that took effect July 1. For Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council, the new budget represents a tough but fair resolution of the fiscal problems generated by a weak economy and losses in federal and state aid.
The mayor and council could in particular point to the $3.6 billion surplus in 2010 whose roll-over provided the key base for balancing the 2011 budget, an effort the state Financial Control Board in its June report credited to the city's "conservative assumptions and proactively managing its budget."
But from another perspective, the adopted budget is simply a short-term political solution, filled with unacknowledged inequities and mismanaged priorities, many of them the result of the rush to create the 2010 surplus. In this view, the budget could unravel in the next few months, much as last year's budget had to be modified mid-year.
The new budget, for example, depends on what City Comptroller John Liu, in comments on May's executive budget called "a labor negotiation strategy that has little precedent in our city's history. In case it is not successful, there must be a 'Plan B' to address the challenging period ahead." In other words, if city workers do not accept the wage freezes at the heart of this budget, hundreds of millions of dollars will need to be found elsewhere.
The budget adopted on June 29 reflected some typical end-of-year changes. New revenues and new expenditure savings since May's executive budget added $370 million to the 2010 surplus and helped fund $395 million (only 0.9 percent of city funds) in City Council restorations and initiatives.
A few days earlier, after the preliminary handshake budget agreement with Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there would be, "pain, yes. Serious damage, no." On the council side, Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia explained, "We got lemons from the state, from the federal government and from the economic climate, but I'm proud to say that by working together with the mayor, we were able to make budget lemonade."
On budget-adoption day, Speaker Quinn echoed the Recchia metaphor: "We found ourselves struggling beneath an avalanche -- the persistent economic downturn; the declining federal stimulus dollars; the limited state resources -- all led to us ultimately being left with practically no tools to rebuild our city after being hit by such a historic financial crisis.”
The lack of "tools," though resulted from choice in some cases, not necessity. The mayor and speaker, for example, had made a much-touted pledge that there would be no new taxes in the adopted budget. This was an unusual if not unprecedented response to "a historic financial crisis." By contrast, the last financial crisis -- in 2002 -- was resolved with a balance of tax increases and expenditure cuts.
The speaker continued with a slap at the budget chaos in Albany. "Through a thoughtful, deliberate process, we agreed to a fiscally responsible, timely budget " she said. "We restored funding for core services for the most in-need New Yorkers.”
These positive City Hall comments brush over the fact this new budget represents the latest round of budget cuts -- the eighth in the past three years. The cumulative impact of these cuts totals $3.6 billion for 2011 alone. That is the equivalent of the combined expenditures of the fire, sanitation and housing departments in 2011.
The rolling nature of budget cutting over the three years has both minimized any political opposition and made more difficult to identify pain and serious damage from the budget. For instance, the city comptroller's recent comments on the executive budget pointed out that only $544 million of $1.3 billion in agency cuts for 2011 will be implemented in 2011; the other $747 million are recurring savings from cuts implemented in 2010.
The New York Nonprofit Press provides extensive evidence that, while the administration has repeatedly said the cuts have been across-the-board and equitable, they have not always worked out that way. Instead, three years of agency cuts have caused serious damage. Since agency heads have much discretion, some programs remain relatively untouched, while others have suffers severe cuts or even elimination.
For instance, in child welfare, Nonprofit Press reports the council restored $12.1 million of the $12.8 million cut in preventive service programs, which could have reduced capacity by 30 percent. Also, some $6.7 million of a $9 million cut to childcare centers was restored. According to the Press, most significant proposed cuts in youth development programs were restored "either in whole or part."
On the other hand, although the $3.8 million elimination of the After-School Corp. youth program was fully restored, less than a half of a $8.5 million cut to the popular Beacon program, which runs afterschool, weekend and vacation centers for children and young people, was restored, and only half of the $6 million Out of School Time program was restored. A $1 million Neighborhood Youth Alliance/Street Outreach Program was eliminated.
Senior services "were extremely hard hit," the Nonprofit Press reported. While the mayor and council agreed to scale back the closing of 50 senior centers to save $11.5 million -- the social service cut that probably received the most publicity throughout the spring – the centers still saw their funding cut by 42 percent. Worse, a $10 million program that "provides homemaking for vulnerable home-bound seniors" was eliminated entirely.
A $2 million social services program for disabled older adults and an $850,000 intergenerational program for joint activities between seniors and youth also got the ax. After partial restoration, cuts to other senior programs ranged from 10 to 33 percent.
In homeless services, $1.2 million of a $1.7 million cut to medical services in shelters was restored. But other shelter programs, including the providing of employment specialists for residents, did not fare as well. Even after partial restoration, the city cut funding for Anti-Eviction Legal Services by 11 percent, the Housing Preservation Initiative by 33 percent; and community consultants by 50 percent. The $1.8 million cut in funding for on-site supportive housing case managers remained intact, an "unfathomable" cut, according to the director of the New York City AIDS Housing Network.
One earlier decision in the budget process can put these cuts in perspective: the mayor's decision, after the attempted Times Square bombing, to reverse an earlier decision and not cut some $105 million by downsizing the police department. That retraction took away funds that could have made most, if not all, of the social service cuts unnecessary.
The 2011 adopted budget has the seeds of the next big mid-year package of agency cuts. Labor costs remain the big question mark.
The 2011 budget does not include one of the mayor's standard labor-negotiation goals -- savings from labor concessions on health premiums and pensions. After the release of the executive budget, Bloomberg shifted from proposing a limited 2 percent raise for teachers to no raise at all for two years. That, he said, would avoid teacher layoffs. Neither the United Federation of Teachers nor the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, which represents principals, has accepted this proposal, although it remains unclear how they could fight it.
The mayor has expanded this no-raise demand to all city workers. As the comptroller points out, he has "removed funding of 1.25 percent from the [labor reserve fund] annually for the first two years for the next round of collective bargaining agreements, arguing that any wage increases must be paid for by offsetting reductions in the city's costs for fringe benefits or by productivity increases. On net, this approach allows the mayor to reduce projected spending $896 million over fiscal years 2010 through 2013.”
Another major question mark is whether the city will get $279 million in federal funds to offset city Medicaid spending; Congress has yet to agree to this.
The lack of a truly final state budget poses further uncertainty. According to the city comptroller, May's executive budget anticipated about $1.25 billion in lost state aid for 2010 and 2011, including nearly $500 million in state education aid for 2011.
The comptroller also raises the question of management. His comments include a charge, based on audits and contract registration, that some capital budget projects are mismanaged and do “not adequately protect the taxpayer.”
The CityTime computerized payroll project, significantly over budget, is "a prime example” of mismanagement, according to the comptroller. Juan Gonzales in a June 4 Daily News column pointed out that this system has already cost $700 million, 10 times its original estimated cost. It is not near completion, and the mayor is spending another $100 million on it this year.
Earlier in the year the Daily News found that 230 private CityTime consultants received an average of $400,000 each this year. (City computer technicians cost an average $77,000 a year.) At a June 16 labor rally outside City Hall, Lillian Roberts, executive director of the city’s largest union, District Council 37, argued that a 15 percent reduction in city consultant contracts would save over $316 million and thus eliminate all service cuts and preserve city jobs.
The city faces projected deficits averaging over $4.5 billion every year from 2012 through 2014. With the first of these deficits 11 months away, and the current prospects for a surplus in this year poor, recent history suggests that the exuberance at City Hall will soon fade. Unless the mayor and council can find new tools to minimize or cancel further harmful cuts, critics may begin to suggest that some of those budget lemons are homegrown.
Glenn Pasanen, who teaches political science at Lehman College, has been in charge of Gotham Gazette's finance topic page since 2001.