Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already announced plans to lay off 5,400 city workers in a package of measures that particularly targets public education. The plan would also close a dozen children’s clinics. Ten thousand more jobs will go, the mayor says, unless the city unions swallow another $600 million in concessions and the state government approves a tax for "out-of-towners" who work in the city. The commuter tax rate would be nearly three percent, six times higher than that of a similar tax repealed in 1999.

The police estimated the crowd at 15,000. Organizers said that about double that number of protesters took part.

A group from AFSCME Local 420 carried some hand-made signs that read, "It’s the rich guys’ turn!" It was a reference to the feeling many workers expressed that the city’s 13,000 millionaires will go untouched by the economic crisis. A tax cut proposed by Bloomberg is estimated to bring tens of thousands of dollars in tax savings for the wealthiest families in the city.

"Bush has messed everything up for the working man," said Marcus Hamilton, who lives in Harlem and has been a city maintenance worker for 10 years. "The Republicans are just for big business."  
 
Blame Republicans
Placing the entire blame on the Republican party and the administration of U.S. president George Bush for the economic crisis and the rulers’s attempts to use it to slash wages, benefits, worsen job conditions, and cutback on public services in order to safeguard their profit margins was a central theme presented from the speakers’ platform. The only solution union officials who addressed the rally offered was implicit or outright support for the Democratic Party, which has been as responsible as the Republicans for the attacks on services, and workers wages and living standards in the city.

CSEA president Daniel Donohue, for example, told participants in the rally, "We’ve moved mayors into City Hall, and we’re here to tell Bloomberg we can move him out of City Hall."

"He’s gotten us into two wars already," Raglan George, head of AFSCME State Council 1707, told the rally, referring to U.S. President George Bush. "Wars that should not have been fought," he said to cheers from the crowd. George said the money spent on the war should be used to keep city workers employed and fund services.

"We have been giving, giving and giving," said Nidia Saldano in an interview with the Militant. The 26-year old works at a daycare center in the Bronx. "The cost of everything is going up except our wages. I work at a day care center but can’t afford it for my own kids. I have to depend on help from family members," she said. "That’s not right," she added angrily.

"The mayor wants to be able to contract out more of the work we do to private companies," Roland Hodges explained. Hodges, who grew up in Trinidad, is a member of the union council’s Local 375. "If we continue to allow this there won’t be anything left of the union," he said. Hodges works as an engineer and maintains the city’s traffic lights. When he started there were nearly 2,000 engineers. Only a few hundred remain now.

Several union officials aimed their fire at "contract workers." "They don’t even live in the city," said AFSCME president Gerald McEntee, addressing the rally.

Upon hearing this, Hodges disagreed that "contract workers" are the problem. "They make less than we do. It’s the contractors who are getting the money," he said.

In addition to the $600 million in concessions the mayor has sought from union officials he has also pushed for the state government to increase sales and income taxes which will hit working people the hardest.

At the end of the week Bloomberg and state assembly leaders announced they had reached an agreement for a three-year increase in the sales tax. The plan includes a small increase on annual incomes over $100,000. Those individuals would pay and estimated $32.50 in additional taxes.

The plan also includes a provision to protect the city's bondholders. Albany would back the refinancing of $2.5 billion in debts from bonds issued in the 1970s.  
 
 
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