Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced Friday that his administration has begun the process to privatize the city’s water bill call center, janitorial work at airports and libraries and employee benefits services, carrying out a threat to issue as many as 625 layoff notices.
Emanuel also promised to cut 75 percent of the city Transportation Department’s seasonal workforce, a move that will curtail improvements to curbs, gutters and sidewalks across Chicago.
At a City Hall news conference, the mayor said his goal is to look out for the interests of taxpayers, “not to protect the city’s payroll.”
“I recognized that the workers affected here are people with families to support and bills to pay, and they’re going to be case into an economy that is scarce on jobs,” he said. “But there are millions of hardworking families across the city who are trying to pay bills every day … and are trying to make ends meet on a pay check that may run out at the end of the money. My job is to represent those people.”
Chicago Federation of Labor President Jorge Ramirez called Emanuel’s actions “perplexing and disappointing.”
“When there’s a fire, you don’t pour gasoline on it,” Ramirez said at a news conference called in response to the city announcement. “This is no way to treat a partner.”
Ramirez said he thought the mayor’s latest moves amounted to “taking a bad problem and making it worse.” He noted that many city workers already took unpaid days off the job to help the city balance budgets in recent years.
Emanuel called Ramirez a few minutes before his news conference Friday to tell him of the coming layoff announcement. Ramirez said he told the mayor that city leaders have been ungrateful to workers and that he would be making “a mistake” to issue layoff notices.
“These people have suffered a lot,” Ramirez said he told Emanuel. “These people have gone through this furlough arrangement. They have a previous mayor that never told them thank you. They have a current mayor that has never said thank you. I think layoffs are a matter of last resort.”
Emanuel’s announcement comes two weeks after he met with labor leaders and suggested nine changes to city employee work rules to help the city close its budget deficit.
The mayor publicly released the full list of those proposals Friday. He said union officials have not agreed to any of those changes, which are enshrined in long-term deals that they forged with former Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Emanuel said the changes he proposed target “archaic” practices in the city work place that do not mirror how things commonly are done in the private sector.
“I’m not asking anybody to go into uncharted territory,” Emanuel said. “This is done all across the country, all across the city.”
In announcing his privatization plans, the mayor also suggested that some city workers are not performing services at a high enough level. He said the wait time for callers to the water bill center averages 20 minutes, with 40 percent of callers hanging up before they are helped.
The reduction in temporary Transportation Department crew workers will have the most immediate and visible impact on the city’s neighborhoods. Officials said the move would translate this summer into 61 fewer improved curbs and gutters and 76 fewer blocks of repaired sidewalks than had been scheduled.
The dismissal of as many as 125 seasonal Transportation Department employees and the farming out of other work now done by government workers will save between $10 million and $12 million in the second half of this year, Emanuel aides said.
Five of the nine work rule changes that Emanuel wants directly target the city’s unionized hoisting engineers. The labor group representing them had been a vocal backer of Emanuel rival Gery Chico in the February mayoral election.
The mayor suggested that hoisting engineers should no longer receive double their usual wages for overtime hours. He said they should get one and one-half times their regular pay for overtime, like most other city workers.
He also called for paying hoisting engineers less than their top pay rate, which ranges as high as $46 an hour, for operating equipment that requires less skill than other machines.
A former Daley transportation commissioner told the Chicago News Cooperative last week that the practice of paying all hoisting engineers at the same rate, regardless of the equipment they operate, differs from the arrangement for such unionized workers on private job sites.
In another of his nine proposals, Emanuel asked for the elimination of sick pay for some trade employees “to match the private sector” and a reduction in paid holidays. Some city trade employees get as many as 12 paid holidays per year.
None of the work rule changes would affect the largest groups of city employees — police and firefighters. They also were not involved in taking unpaid days off and foregoing overtime, concessions that other city employee unions made for years under Daley.
The two-year concession agreement between dozens of unions and Daley expired June 30. But because Daley, in his budget for 2011, banked on the extension of those givebacks, Emanuel was left with a budget hole of more than $30 million for the second half of the year.
That shortfall only exacerbated the city’s perennial deficits, which officials expect to top $700 million in 2012. Given that most city money goes toward personnel costs, and that 90 percent of workers are in unions, the impasse between Emanuel and labor leaders appears likely to only intensify.
Union leaders and Emanuel aides are scheduled to meet Monday. “Look forward to their ideas,” the mayor said.
But labor leaders suggested that Emanuel had not dealt with them in good faith since his May 16 inauguration. Ramirez, the CFL leader, said he had not seen a detailed list of Emanuel’s proposals to change work rules until after it was released to reporters Friday.
“We’ve got nothing on paper from these folks,” he said, adding that it was “news to us” that the mayor intended to privatize the work of city employees.
Ramirez said union leaders soon will propose management changes to save taxpayer dollars.
Asked if he thought public opinion was on Emanuel’s side in the labor dispute, Ramirez replied, “Maybe the mayor does have the public on his side, if he’s conducting polling, but I’m not sure … We represent the workers that work at the city, and our job is to make the city is run in a good enough way that they don’t have to solve the budget problems on their backs.”