Saving the Endangered City Worker
By Michael Boyajian
There is an old saying that goes what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If you’re the billionaire mayor of New York though, this axiom does not apply.
You see it was alright for the mayor to bend the rules and abolish term limits so he could run for a third term yet if you are a city worker who has left the city bounds you automatically lose your job because of Mayor Bloomberg’s strict residency rules for city jobs. You must live in the city to work for the city with few exceptions.
Now hold on before you say too bad these workers chose to leave the city for the suburbs let’s look at why they did leave. The main reason was because they could no longer afford to live in the city due to the high cost of living and meager city salaries.
Thanks to the mayor’s pro landlord rent control board rent controlled and rent stabilized apartment rents have continued to rise. Landlords cite a wide range of reasons in needing higher rents every year like rising fuel prices. Yet when the price of oil drops rents still remains high, they are not variable.
There is also a scarcity of affordable middle income housing because the administration is promoting the construction of low income and high income housing leaving the middle class to eat cake as the mayor spends his weekends dining on escargot and champagne at sidewalk cafes in Paris.
Long time city workers, dedicated pubic servants all, are losing their jobs after serving up to four different administrations. You have to be a pretty good worker to trapeze your way through the Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations only to hit the wall because of the city’s archaic residency rule.
There is a famous photograph of two hikers reaching the summit of an Adirondack mountain. The hiker who reaches the top first swings around to help the second hiker to the top. One suspects that if it was the mayor in that photograph he would knock the second hiker, the city worker, back down the mountain and that just doesn’t seem right.
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