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To the editor:
"DC 37 members' next target: 6 percent [yearly] raises and a $30 [an hour minimum] wage" (July 17 Chief), are certainly reasonable and modest goals. No one will jump into the middle class on $62,400 a year. But it would be a big improvement for some workers who make as low as $18 an hour.
But DC 37's Executive Director Henry Garrido is unhappy that these goals have been promoted in a survey organized independently by hundreds of workers rather than going through his official channels. This is the same Garrido who has put so much effort into trying to force city retirees to accept Medicare Advantage as a replacement for Medicare.
Garrido does not get to lead his union through direct election. DC 37 workers vote for delegate members who select their leaders.
Perhaps if they had union democracy, it would be easier to vote this bum out.
The July 31 Chief presents as the "JOB OF THE WEEK" the city hiring EMS trainees starting at $36,330 a year. That's $17.47 an hour. If being mobile street doctors and facing dangerous situations for a poverty wage is the best job available for that week, that's slim pickings. For this job, $30 an hour would be way underpaid.
"Parks unions sound alarm about City Hall-backed outsourcing," (July 31 Chief) are correct to feel that their own workers, doing the job they specialize in, should be the ones doing the extra work created by multiple damaging storms.
Now I've learned long ago to judge people by what they practice as opposed to what they preach. Also, it's early in the term of Mayor Zohan Mamdani. But so far, his record on justice for workers is not off to a good start.
Richard Warren
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Valete
The city functions because men and women wake early to tend its moving parts. To ask for a six percent raise and a thirty-dollar minimum wage is not a grand ambition. It is a modest plea for dignity in a town that grows costlier by the afternoon.
Yet a strange distance has grown between the workers and those who speak for them. Executive Director Henry Garrido seems to have misplaced the compass, steering the ship toward grander, vaguer horizons while the crew asks only for enough to live on. Leadership means standing firmly on the baseline of survival.
Meanwhile, City Hall offers smooth words about equity but short measures in practice. The Mayor’s record on worker justice looks increasingly like an exercise in rhetoric rather than relief. A city cannot buy peace by starving its servants, nor can a union thrive when its leaders forget the simple, honest needs of the rank and file.
Thursday, August 13 Report this