By Dustin Brown
The city’s public employees union rallied outside the Long Island City offices of the School Construction Authority last Thursday to protest the planned layoffs of more than 100 workers expected to accompany an overhaul of the city agencies responsible for building schools.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced in October that 600 jobs would be eliminated through layoffs and attrition in the merger of the School Construction Authority and the construction functions of the Department of Education’s Division of School Facilities, a plan designed to cut down on wasteful bureaucracy.
But officials with District Council 37, which represents more than 250 SCA employees in its Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375, contend the elimination of jobs will ultimately cost money by forcing the city to rely more heavily on outside contractors.
“It’s counterproductive because the people here are really the backbone of school construction,” said Lillian Roberts, DC 37’s executive director, as she marched in a circle with union workers outside the SCA’s offices on Thomson Avenue. “They do a lot of work for the city; they save them a heck of a lot of money. It’s one thing to reorganize, it’s another thing to destroy.”
Officials with the city Department of Education and the mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The authority’s layoffs began mid-month with the elimination of 150 management positions, and 50 members of Local 375 have been notified that their positions will be terminated as of Feb. 7, said Zygmunt Jagiello, the union’s chapter president.
The state legislation that created the School Construction Authority mandated that the agency do no less than 40 percent of its work in-house, a target union members claim the city has failed to meet.
“They want to spend millions and millions more to do the same job that we can do in-house cheaper and faster,” said Local 375 President Claude Fort, speaking through a megaphone to the more than 100 union members who crowded the sidewalk.
Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg has touted the agency’s overhaul as a way to eliminate an inefficient bureaucracy that has been blamed for high costs and extensive delays in school construction, Fort attributed the agency’s inefficiency to the excessive reliance on private contractors.
“This is why we have cost overruns,” Fort said. “This is why we have so much waste in this place.”
The workers targeted to lose their jobs said they feel as if they are being wrongly scapegoated for problems that could be resolved without layoffs.
“What I’d like to ask the administration is if there is this monster, it’s not on our level — simple working people who make designs,” said Tatyana Yezersky, a 47-year-old single mother from Brooklyn who exhausted her savings on her son’s education.
Joseph Varkey, an estimator with the SCA whose job is also on the chopping block, said his understaffed department actually needs more employees to properly assess the cost of contracts to ensure the city does not pay too much.
“I’m a public employee. My loyalty belongs to the taxpayers. An outside firm, they want to satisfy the other contracts and therefore end up paying more money than they’re entitled to,” Varkey said. “In laying off people, the SCA is not going to save a penny. They’re going to pay much more.”
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
