Listen: NYC’s Largest Public Sector Union Has a Crisis of Democracy
No More 24 advocates successfully crashed the May 20 City Hall demonstration District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido organized against the bill. Photo/Joe Maniscalco
By Joe Maniscalco
District Council 37 is the largest public sector union in the City of New York with more than 150,000 members in 62 locals covering over 1,000 job titles.
And in this town today, legislation often lives or dies on the word of the union’s Executive Director, Henry Garrido.
But ask the average rank and file DC37 member if they feel like they have a voice in what their union and its leader does with all that power—and they’ll say no, according to outspoken union delegate Cristina Rodriguez-Hart.
“When you speak to the average member they have no idea what’s going on with the union,” Rodriguez-Hart told WBAI’s Labor and Healthcare Confidential on Monday.
Members might have a sense of the benefits or the services that the union provides, or helps to facilitate—but according to Rodriguez-Hart, who also serves as co-chair of Local 3005’s Contracts and Negotiations Committee— “they have no idea about the life of the union—or what happens at delegates meetings—or what Henry Garrido is reporting out on.”
Garrido led a union demonstration outside the gates of City Hall on May 20 where he vowed to kill Intro. 303—the No More 24 bill sponsored by City Council Member Chris Marte.
The No More 24 bill seeks to mandate 12-hour split shifts for New York City home care attendants currently subjected to round-the-clock job assignments where they are only paid for 13 hours of those hours worked.
Supporters liken the peculiar New York City institution to modern day slavery and have even gotten the United Nations to weigh in on it.
“There has been a lot of misinformation,” Rodriguez-Hart said this week. “If you explain the bill and how home care workers are only paid 13 hours, [members] are shocked and they think it’s really wrong.”
City Council Speaker Julie Menin had pledged to bring the No More 24 bill to the floor for a vote not too long after assuming her lofty post on Jan. 7.
She has since reneged on that pledge, instead allowing Garrido to insert new language into the No More 24 bill exempting unionized home care attendants from its intended protections—essentially gutting the whole thing.
According to Rodriguez-Hart, however, DC37 delegates weren’t told about the May 20 street action against the No More 24 bill until two days prior to the event.
“We never heard about it before,” she said on Monday’s show. “It was a shock to a lot of us when we started getting text messages and emails from DC37 saying, show up to a counter rally against Intro. 303.”
DC37 Local 389 members, Garrido insists, want to work round-the-clock shifts at roughly half the pay—and stand to lose their negotiated union benefits and even their jobs if the No More 24 bill were ever to become law.
He also claims that patient care would be jeopardized because the government funding needed to pay for 12-hour split shifts isn’t there.
No More 24 advocates dispute that arguement.
“I’ve never heard a union leader argue that you should work twice as many hours and only get paid for half,” Labor and Healthcare Confidential host Marianne Pizzitola said this week. “If that was me I would argue that that person should lose their union card.”
Listen to the wide-raging interview with Cristina Rodgriguez-Hart in its entirety below: