Buffalo City Workers Fight Two-Year Wage Freeze

September 13, 2006

September 13, 2006

Enough is enough. That’s the message. Buffalo AFSCME members and their allies have been taking to the streets, and to the doorsteps of control board members who have refused to lift a 28-month-old freeze on the wages of city workers.

 Last month, AFSCME Councils 35, 66 and 82 – with teachers, members of the police and fire departments and other union activists at their side – picketed the house of Dorothy Johnson, executive director of the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority (BFSA). A week later, they converged on the doorstep of another control board member. More protests are planned through the end of September.
 To end the wage freeze, the control board had proposed a 25-cent-an-hour increase for the lowest-paid workers in the Buffalo School District. Their hourly pay would have increased by 3 percent to $8.50. In return, the workers would have to forgo perfect-attendance bonuses. With gas prices, housing and health care costs on a steady rise across the nation, the control board’s offer is even more outrageous.

As expected, Local 246 (Council 35) members turned it down by a 4-to-1 margin. “One member told me to ‘tell those millionaires to take their quarter and stick it,’ says Bill Travis, president of Local 246, which represents 2,000 city employees. “We had demanded that the raises be retroactive to early July, but the board refused. Also, the proposal does not have health insurance or pension benefits for our part-time workers.”

Also angry over the board’s unfair depiction of unions as the cause of Buffalo’s fiscal problems, the workers point out that tax breaks to businesses have cost the city $67 million over the life of the wage freeze. “Those dollars come out of the pockets of working men and women in this city,” says Larry Panaro, Local 246 secretary-treasurer.

The city’s unions have vowed to join forces throughout this campaign. “We want to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters who are the food service workers, who have been asked to give a pound of flesh for a lousy quarter,” said Phil Rumore of the Buffalo Teachers Federation. “We’re not going to let them do that to us.”

 Meanwhile, some state lawmakers have prodded the control board to lift the wage freeze. In a letter rebutting BFSA’s claim that the freeze will stay in place until unions agree to cut costs, Assembly Majority Leader Paul Tokasz and a dozen other legislators wrote: “We believe that city workers have contributed their fair share to your effort of achieving long term stability and that it is time you recognized their effort.”