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Firefighters, police officers and teachers plan an around-the-clock demonstration outside Madison Square Garden starting Monday to protest the lack of a new contract.
The labor protest is geared to coincide with the start of work on the Garden to get it ready for next month's Republican National Convention, the unions representing the workers said yesterday.
The union announcement comes as planning for convention-week protests intensified and Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed to prevent demonstrators from sabotaging daily life for New Yorkers.
The unions have resisted Bloomberg's efforts to get them to accept contracts similar to one given District Council 37, the largest municipal union, in April. That settlement provided $1,000 cash payments and a raise of 5 percent over three years in exchange for productivity measures, including expanded work hours and reduced starting salaries.
Next week's protest "will serve to highlight further our demands for fair compensation and our complete dissatisfaction with the unacceptable terms of the DC 37 deal, which the city wishes to force on all of us," Stephen Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association said.
Details of the latest protest were being worked out, but the firefighters have asked their members to put in an eight-hour stint at the Garden.
Bloomberg, speaking at a City Hall news conference, said the city would tolerate all peaceful protests before and during the convention, but he drew the line when asked about Internet chatter indicating anarchists were encouraging sabotage.
"My first concern is to protect the civil rights of the 8.1 million people that live here," he said. "If people want to come here and protest, we also want to accommodate them. But nobody's going to take away the rights of our citizens to go about their business, go to school, go to work."
Bloomberg reiterated his opposition to a 250,000-person anti-war protest United for Peace and Justice wants to hold in Central Park. In the past, Bloomberg has cited the damage such a demonstration would inflict on the park's Great Lawn, but yesterday, he rejected it on security grounds.
"I don't think there is any question Central Park does not fit from a security point of view," he said. "You have a vast bunch of people together with no ways to get in and out and no ways to control entrance and egress. From every point of view, it's not something that we will do."
Those arguments infuriated UPJ's organizers, who will meet Friday with police officials to try to hash out a compromise. "The mayor is an embarrassment," said William Dobbs, an organizer with the group. "He is a menace to the First Amendment and clearly intent on destroying the right to assembly in this town."
Bloomberg described Dobbs's tactics as "theatrics."
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