NY POLITICS | SEPTEMBER 29, 2011
Layoff Notices Sent to 3,500 State Workers
By JACOB GERSHMAN
Unmoved by pleas from union officials, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday pushed ahead with plans to lay off 3,500 state workers, sending notices to workers throughout the state's government bureaucracy.
The governor's ax landed hardest on mental-health and corrections employees, but the impact was spread widely among 44 agencies employing workers from the Public Employees Federation, the state's second-largest union. Its members rejected on Tuesday a five-year contract that included wage freezes.
Mr. Cuomo's office on Wednesday issued a list showing a breakdown of the 3,496 layoffs by agency.
"All 3,500 started to go out today," said Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo. The notices were sent to workers by email and regular mail, he said.
Ken Brynien, PEF's president, called Mr. Cuomo's office several times to try to persuade the governor to suspend layoffs and resume talks, said a PEF spokeswoman.
"They're playing phone tag. He has not been able to have the conversation that he needs to have," said the PEF spokeswoman, Darcy Wells.
Aides to Mr. Cuomo, who said he needs to lay off workers to plug an $80 million hole in the state's budget, have said he won't renegotiate the bill and have called for a new vote.
About 54% of PEF's membership voted against the contract Mr. Cuomo hashed out with union leaders, a deal that would have shielded workers from layoffs for two years in exchange for wage freezes, spikes in insurance premiums and furloughs. Under state law, the workers' current contract remains in effect until a new pact is negotiated.
Mr. Brynien and most of PEF's leadership had urged its 52,000 members to accept the deal. But a faction led by an anonymous group of members called PEF Proud marshaled anger at the contract's terms.
Wayne Bayer, a member of PEF's executive board who works for the Department of Environmental Conservation, said union members printed leaflets posted on PEF Proud's blog and distributed them at contract forum meetings. "It caused a lot of chatter," he said.
"It got people thinking and questioning, and the truth is, there wasn't anything good in the contract," said another PEF board member, Jim Blake, a computer programmer and systems analyst for the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.
Anxiety spread throughout the Capitol and among public workers as the consequences of PEF's vote set in Wednesday.
The Office of Mental Health—an agency with 17,000 civil servants that runs state psychiatric hospitals such as Creedmoor in Queens and the Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on Long Island—was hit with the most layoffs at 643. Layoff figures topped 300 at several other agencies, including corrections, transportation, tax and finance, and developmental disabilities.
The layoffs won't affect the 65,000 members of the Civil Service Employees Association, which approved a deal with similar terms over the summer.
The governor's office said it is nearly impossible to know which workers will be forced out of their jobs and leave state government because each eliminated position trickles down an arcane flowchart of seniority.
Technically, workers aren't laid off—a term not defined in state law. In most cases, they are "bumped," a process referred to as "vertical displacement." More senior employees whose civil-service titles are wiped out can remain employed by taking the jobs of, or "bumping," workers occupying lower-level titles. When laid-off workers aren't eligible to bump someone else, they still may not be out of luck. If they've worked in a different full-time government position in the past, they can return to the old job, even if it's occupied by somebody else. That's called "retreating." If that's not an option, workers can try to get hired by another agency or branch of government not controlled by the governor, like the comptroller's office.
Two decades ago, Gov. Mario Cuomo, the current governor's father, ordered several thousand layoffs to trim a work force that had grown to a record-high of nearly 260,000.
The actual numbers of layoffs that resulted was estimated but not known for certain. The Albany Times Union at the time reported that 40% of the laid-off workers retained positions in state government.
"When the process is over months from now, it's highly unlikely that 3,500 people will have been involuntarily separated from their jobs," said E.J. McMahon, a fiscal analyst at the Empire Center for New York State Policy.
Write to Jacob Gershman at
jacob.gershman@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...615237904.html