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NEW YORK (AP) Saying his remarks were unlikely to make him "labor's man of the year," Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday blamed municipal labor leaders for union layoffs this spring and said the city had no money for pay raises without labor concessions.
The contracts of nearly every municipal union representing the city's 250,000-member work force — from teachers and police officers to firefighters, janitors, trash collectors and secretaries — have expired or will expire soon.
The city, which is facing a $2 billion deficit next fiscal year, wants labor to agree to productivity concessions including longer work hours and merit pay raises instead of across-the-board pay hikes.
But if the labor leaders assembled at the Municipal Labor Committee luncheon at a Long Island hotel Thursday had hoped for a thawing of their ice-cold relationship with the mayor, they likely came away with acid reflux.
"If you are intractably opposed to any work changes that save the city money, there just isn't going to be any raises," Bloomberg told the group. "I cannot print money. I cannot borrow our ways out of this."
The mayor told the group he was "convinced" that its members could keep their jobs and receive raises through "flexibility in ways that may be unpalatable to a lot of people or may be something that we can't explain well enough for people to go along."
Randi Weingarten, president of the labor group and of the United Federation of Teachers, said Bloomberg's "tough-guy talk" would get him nowhere.
"The sign of a successful mayoralty is to be able to get to agreements with your workers," Weingarten said, "not just to talk about getting to agreements, and not just to talk about collaboration, but actually to be able to do that. And unfortunately, the parameters that the mayor set today shows no ability to get to an agreement, because the parameters that he set forth today were simply still the unions give and the mayor takes."
Bloomberg repeatedly criticized the group for holding its gathering in a hotel outside the city and for not agreeing to grant $600 million in productivity concessions during this spring's budget crisis.
To close a $6.4 billion budget gap, the city had to cut services, raise taxes and lay off about 5,500 workers. After the tax increases kicked in, the mayor's poll numbers dropped.
The tax hikes, Bloomberg told the labor leaders, "funded your members' paychecks — parenthetically, let me add I don't remember getting a lot of support from a number of you when I took the heat from the taxpayers."
He added, "I think we could have avoided layoffs with a little (union) flexibility."
The Republican mayor cautioned the group about stalling serious contract talks with the administration to await a potentially more union friendly mayor after the November 2005 election.
"Two years from now I will get re-elected," Bloomberg said. "Anybody that wants to bet that I'm not going to be around in two years, and they'll wait it out, that's a pretty stupid bet if you think about it. I'm going to get re-elected."
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