Posted by Doug Turetsky. February 5, 2014

A little noticed report, prepared by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and the Mayor’s Office of Operations and released on the Bloomberg Administration’s last day in office, looks at changes in the compensation and composition of the municipal workforce over the past decade. The report, which is not available on the city’s website but IBO provides here could fuel arguments on both sides of the negotiations to settle the city’s expired labor contracts.

According to the report, the median base salary, which doesn’t include overtime, pension, or fringe benefit costs, for full-time city employees in fiscal year 2012 was $65,299. That’s relatively little-changed from an inflation-adjusted median salary of $64,698 in 2003, Mayor Bloomberg’s first full fiscal year in office. As the report states, “Median [inflation-adjusted] salaries have remained stable over the past ten years, ranging from a low of $59,000 in 2005 to a high of $66,000 in Fiscal 2010.”

While union leaders may look at those numbers and see fodder for arguing that salaries for municipal workers barely stayed ahead of inflation over that 10-year period, that small gain might look pretty good to a large share of the rest of the city. For city residents as a whole, median earnings adjusted for inflation have not yet rebounded to their 2005 level. Median citywide earnings in 2005 were $37,091 and just $34,019 in 2012, according to Census Bureau figures compiled by IBO’s Julie Anna Golebiewski.

The report, New York City Government Workforce Profile Report, covers 39 agencies with nearly 327,800 full-time and full-time equivalent employees. The report includes all the city agencies that report to the Mayor along with the Health and Hospitals Corporation and New York City Housing Authority, even though these two are technically not city agencies. So that means agencies such as IBO and the Campaign Finance Board and employees of other elected officials are not included.

Overall, nearly one-third of the city’s full-time workforce—about 100,000 employees— had base salaries of $50,000 or less in 2012. On the other end of the salary scale, 9 percent of the municipal workforce—about 27,000 staffers—had base salaries of $100,000 or more.

On the agency level, median base salaries also varied. The very highest was the School Construction Authority, where the median base salary for its staff of 660 was $100,400. The uniformed services tended to have substantially higher median salaries than workers in other agencies. At $76,488, the median salaries for the police, fire, and correction departments outstripped the 2012 citywide median. The sanitation department, with a median salary of $69,339 was nearer the median for all city employees.

Conversely, a number of agencies had median base salaries well below the citywide level. The Taxi and Limousine Commission’s 460 full- and full-time equivalent employees had a median salary of $39,205 in 2012. They were followed closely by the housing authority’s 11,500 staff members with a median salary of $40,624.

In addition to information on salaries, the report provides numerous demographic details on the city’s workforce—from gender and racial and ethnic profiles of agencies and various occupational categories to information on employees’ average years of city service, civil service status, and eligibility for retirement. The report’s intent is clearly stated up front: “The goal of this report is to make New York City’s municipal workforce…transparent to the people it serves, and to provide interested parties with the personnel data needed for analysis and planning.”
Somehow that goal of transparency faded away in the waning hours of the Bloomberg Administration and this report—covering the city’s single largest expense, about $37 billion annually on its workforce—went largely unseen.

Posted by Doug Turetsky, July 24, 2012

Are cities and states around the U.S. undergoing a surge in hiring? That was the finding of a USA Today news story earlier this month, which noted that hiring by cities, states, and local school districts during the first four months of 2012 was 20 percent above the rate for the same period last year. This hiring comes in the wake of steep recession-related government job cuts. A just-released report by the Volcker/Ravitch Task Force on state budgets found that state and local governments slashed employment far more than in previous recessions.

 
While New York City government is certainly doing some hiring, don’t expect a rise in the number of municipal workers anytime soon—at least not based the budget that was recently adopted for fiscal year 2013, which began on July 1. Based on the budget for 2013, the city workforce will decline by 1,697 this year and total 294,961 by June 30, 2013 (including the number of hours worked by part-timers calculated to add up to an equivalent number of full-time positions). That’s down from 311,018 in June 2008, just as the recession began to squeeze city tax receipts. The decline has occurred through a combination of layoffs and attrition—not rehiring if a position becomes vacant due to an event such as retirement or resignation.

Proposed staffing cuts played a relatively small role in the recent round of budget debates. That’s far different from last year, when wrangling over the Mayor’s proposed budget for 2012 was largely dominated by his proposal to lay off nearly 4,300 teachers and not replace about 1,900 other teachers who were expected to leave the school system. Although the teacher layoffs were averted in negotiations with the City Council, other layoffs have occurred in the wake of the recession.

 
Determining the number of city workers that have been laid off is difficult because not every employee is in the city’s main payroll database. For example, Department of Education administrators and, as of a few weeks ago, custodians are in the main database. Other education department employees, such as the 672 school aides laid off last year, are in a separate database.

A review of the city’s main payroll database by IBO labor analyst Martin Davis identified a total of 2,031 layoffs among regular full-time and part-time city workers from fiscal year 2009 through May 2012. Most of the layoffs in the database we reviewed were concentrated in just a few agencies, and nearly half occurred in 2010 when there were 940.

Besides the Department of Education school aide layoffs, the Administration for Children’s Services accounted for the most layoffs we were able to identify in the 2009-2012 period, with 598. Well more than half of these occurred in 2010.There were 509 layoffs among staff identified as administrators at the Department of Education over the same four-year period. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s layoff total was next at 296.

The Mayor’s initial budget proposals for the current fiscal year projected far fewer layoffs than his 2012 proposals. And more than half of the projected layoffs for 2013 were not actually of municipal employees but rather the result of anticipated cuts in the city subsidy to libraries and cultural organizations—cuts that were ultimately reversed in the most recent budget deal with the City Council.

 
Among the comparatively small number of layoffs that are included in the budget adopted last month are staff cuts at the Department of Transportation as the city makes the shift from single-space parking meters to Muni Meters. The declining number of layoffs here mirrors a national trend found in an April 2012 survey by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence. Twenty-eight percent of responding governments said they had undertaken layoffs this year compared with 40 percent the year before. At least in the short term, layoffs may increasingly have more to do with changes in staffing needs than fiscal needs.

Posted by Doug Turetsky & Bernard O’Brien, October 13, 2010

With Mayor Bloomberg making plain how much he dislikes the City Council bill that would require businesses to provide employees with paid sick leave, it seems like a good moment to look at how much sick leave is used by city workers. In fiscal year 2010 (which ended in June), city workers on average used 8.5 paid sick days—just about the nine days that the Council bill says businesses with 20 or more employees should provide for its workers.

As is often the case, averages can hide some interesting variations. There are substantial differences between the numbers of paid sick days taken by workers at different agencies. Based on data for 34 city agencies compiled by the Mayor’s office and available here, the number of paid sick days used last year by city workers (not including days lost to on-the-job injuries) ranged from 12 by uniformed correction officers to just five by staff members of the department of parks—maybe there is something to the old adage about the health benefits of outdoors work.

Or at least some kinds of outdoors work. Uniformed sanitation workers clocked in a comparatively high number of sick days. Just as working inside a jail may not be the healthiest of occupations, it’s probably no surprise given the nature of their job that sanitation workers used an average of 11.5 sick days last year. What may come as a surprise is that police officers and firefighters used fewer sick days than the citywide average: 6.6 for police and 7.0 for uniformed firefighters.

There are some other seeming anomalies in the use of paid sick days. Maybe it has something to do with being a tax collector, but over at the finance department, workers used an average of nearly 11 paid sick days last year. Perhaps working with musty documents also takes a toll on health. Staffers at the Department of Records used an average of about 10 paid sick days last year.

On the healthier side of the sick leave ledger, Landmarks Preservation Commission staff used a comparatively modest average of 6.2 sick days in 2010. And despite working for an agency whose name and mission is synonymous with stress, staff at the Office of Emergency Management averaged just 6.1 sick days.

The number of paid sick days that city employees are entitled to varies depending upon their civil service title and, in some cases, time on the job. An IBO analyst, for example, earns 10 a year, growing to 12 after five years of city employment.

Citywide, use of paid sick leave has edged downward under Mayor Bloomberg, from 9.2 days on average during his first full year in office to last year’s 8.5.

Posted by Bernard O’Brien, August 13, 2009

More than 200,000 of the city’s municipal workers are members of labor unions. The wage and benefit levels set in the contracts for these workers make up a large share of the nearly $36 billion the Bloomberg Administration expects to spend on labor costs this year. Given the huge cost and the number of people affected, one might think that the terms set in these labor contracts would be online and readily accessible to analysts, researchers, and taxpayers in general. But the fact is you won’t find the contracts on the city’s Web site.

Putting labor contracts online is doable: for an example you have to look no further than Albany, where the state puts its contracts with union workers online along with other information related to employee compensation. In fact, the state site includes current as well as previous union contracts, some dating as far back as 1991.

The state Web site is available via Governor David Paterson’s Office of Employee Relations. The site is also accessible via the SeeThroughNY initiative sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy at http://www.seethroughny.net.

The following questions can be answered by visiting the Governor’s Web site:

Which unions represent which state workers?
Taxpayers can determine that state police officers are represented by the Police Benevolent Association of the New York State Troopers, SUNY faculty members by United University Professions, and certain other categories of state workers by the Civil Service Employees Association. In total, 10 specific unions or negotiating units are identified on the Governor’s Web site.

How much do state workers earn?
The Governor’s Web site provides online access to both current and past state workforce labor contracts for each negotiating unit along with supporting documentation such as memoranda of agreement, salary schedules, and side letters associated with some labor contracts.

What other information related to the state workforce is available online?
The Governor’s Web site also provides certain demographic information such as breakdowns by age, length of service, and gender for each union representing state workers. An overall breakdown of state workers by race is also presented.

Here in New York City, some municipal labor contracts are available in hard copy and can be photocopied at City Hall Library located at 31 Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. Yet none are available online for public review in the manner now made possible at the state level.

It should be noted that the city does annually publish its Civil List online each April. The most recent Civil List, an alphabetical snapshot of all city employees and their respective base salaries, can be accessed at www.nyc.gov/html/records/pdf/govpub/CIVIL_LIST_2008_Public.pdf.

New York City is often favorably compared with the state when it comes to matters such as budgetary transparency and fiscal reporting. But when it comes to information about labor contracts, the city has quite a ways to go to meet the standard being set by the state.

Posted by Doug Turetsky, March 6, 2009

When Mayor Michael Bloomberg released his budget plan in January, many observers were scratching their heads over one number in particular: $200 million in pension savings. That’s the amount the Mayor said the city would save in the next fiscal year alone if a new pension arrangement first proposed by Governor David Paterson was approved in Albany.

This so-called Tier V would require newly hired city employees to pay more into the pension system than current workers and make the new hires work longer before they become eligible to retire with full benefits, among other changes designed to lower public pension costs. Given that these changes would only apply to new municipal workers and that the city’s current budget malaise makes it unlikely there will be many of them in the near future, the Mayor’s savings estimate seemed very high.

It appears that the savings number in the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget is inconsistent with other estimates provided by the Bloomberg Administration. A Memorandum of Support of the Tier V proposal for city uniformed employees—police, firefighters, correction officers, and sanitation workers—based on information submitted by the Bloomberg Administration to the state Legislature cites much lower estimated savings. The memo says, “This bill will result in savings to New York City of approximately $25 million in the year after enactment. Savings would increase by approximately $25 million per year as new employees are hired, such that the annual savings will be $500 million in 20 years.”

So maybe most of the savings will come from the rest of the city’s workforce, including teachers and other civilian employees? A memo from the Mayor’s budget office to the state’s budget office puts that supposition to rest. Sent last January 9—just 21 days before the Mayor presented his Preliminary Budget—the memo estimated that savings from a new pension tier for teachers and civilian workers would be $10 million in the first year and grow by $10 million annually in subsequent years and reach $200 million in 20 years.

So how does a combined estimate of $35 million in first year savings morph into $200 million? It seems the Bloomberg Administration is hoping to get an agreement to “frontload” some of the expected savings by taking the average over a relatively long term and applying it annually rather than allow it to accrue on a year-by-year basis as current employees retire and new employees with lower pension costs for the city are hired.

Why the Mayor would want to do this is a matter for conjecture. But one thing is clear: whatever its longer term fiscal merits, a Tier V wouldn’t really save $200 million in 2010.

Posted by Doug Turetsky, January 21, 2009

As Mayor Bloomberg wrestles with the city’s projected budget gaps, pressure to reduce the size of the municipal workforce—by far the city’s biggest single expenditure—is growing. In the wake of the last recession, full-time city staffing dropped to 239,616 in 2003 from a previous high of nearly 251,000 in 2000. Since 2003, full-time staffing has grown steadily, reaching 280,649 at the end of the last fiscal year, a rise of more than 41,000 over five years.

While full-time staffing has grown at nearly every city agency, a large share of the growth occurred at just a few. The Department of Education saw the biggest rise in total number of employees: the number of teachers, principals, and other classroom staff (pedagogical employees in budget speak) rose by nearly 19,000 from 2003 through 2008, when it totaled 112,852; the number of non-pedagogical employees also jumped by nearly 4,000 over the same period, reaching 10,760 in 2008.

But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. While the city has steadily increased the ranks of teachers, a significant share of the rise in education department staff isn’t really due to new hiring—but rather from a reclassification of about 15,000 paraprofessionals who were previously listed as part-timers and not included in full-time staffing levels. The same holds true at the parks department, where the official full-time headcount nearly doubled to 3,702 by 2008 as many so-called seasonal workers who were really working full time were added to the count.

Still, the staffs of many agencies increased because more people were hired. Under plans to beef up its inspection and enforcement efforts, the Department of Buildings has grown 45 percent since 2003 and had 1,162 full-time employees in 2008. Full-time staffing at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has grown even more since 2003 in both percentage and absolute terms, rising by 60 percent to 5,202 in 2008. The Mayor’s office has also gotten bigger, growing by nearly 11 percent since 2003 to a full-time headcount of 923 in 2008.

Not every agency saw growth in its full-time staff. The number of uniformed officers at both the police and correction departments declined during the 2003-2008 period. The number of police officers fell by 715 to 35,405—though the number of civilian employees grew because school safety agents were reclassified as full-time workers. The number of correction officers dropped by 404 to 9,149. At the Commission on Human Rights staffing has declined by more than 25 percent, to 79 in 2008.

So while the total city workforce has certainly grown since the last recession, the number of workers newly added to the payroll is not as high as the numbers indicate at first blush. Nor are the increases equal across all agencies.