NEW YORK (AP) — A judge nixed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision to change the pay structure for about 10,000 municipal workers and lower wages for some, saying in a ruling released Thursday that the move violated civil service law.
Unions cheered the decision as a strike against an inappropriately sweeping move that would harm thousands of people. The city called the change a way of putting a fraction of the city workforce on par with the rest of it, and city lawyers vowed to appeal the decision.
The move involved about 3 percent of city workers, mostly in skilled trades. For more than 100 years, their pay reflected “prevailing wages” set by the city comptroller and intended to echo the going rate for comparable jobs in private industry.
Then, in April, the city put their jobs into a system of salary grades, with the pay subject to collective bargaining in the future. Incumbent workers kept the same pay, but salaries declined for some new hires.
Indeed, the maximum salary for a boilermaker supervisor in the new system topped out at $105,000, though some have made as much as $114,587, according to Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Manuel J. Mendez’s ruling. Sick leave, holidays and other benefits also were reduced, he wrote.
The change was made “without notice, hearing or a determination confirming the adherence to statewide standards of merit and fitness” and “has no rational basis,” the judge wrote.
Vincent Alvarez, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, a union umbrella group, called the decision “a great win.”
“It was an inappropriate action from the get-go and would have hurt thousands of workers and their families,” he said.
The city’s chief lawyer, Michael A. Cardozo, said the wage-structure change sought “to undo an expensive anomaly” in city government.
“These workers should bargain for their wages and benefits like other city employees, as well as other public employees around the state,” he said and argued that the city had solid legal authority for the move.
Comptroller John Liu, meanwhile, said through a spokesman that he agreed with the judge’s decision, noting that the comptroller’s office had set prevailing wages for more than a century.
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