Questions about a Sanitation slowdown during the Boxing Day Blizzard aside, many sanitation workers are in position to get hefty overtime payments. Some workers earned around $2,000 for 100 hours of work the week after the blizzard; as one veteran told the Daily News, "That's when we make our money." Oh, and they're not done yet!
Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty says they haven't calculated just how much will be spent on OT pay, but it will definitely go up when factoring in the time spent collecting garbage after the blizzard. He estimates that about 2,000 employees were working 10- and 12-hour daily shifts for two weeks. And according to city records, 48% of the snow budget since 2002 has been spent on OT. And though workers claim they weren't slowing down to collect more OT and punish City Hall, the Bloomberg administration did make some bad decisions right before blizzard season.
As we've mentioned before, City Hall made the decision to demote 100 Sanitation supervisors to street duties instead of hiring more workers, a decision one source says was "a dumb thing to do." "Everyone knows you don't mess with Sanitation before the snow season," the source told the Post. "It sends everyone up the wall. It certainly irritated a lot of people." A spokesman for Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith says those demotions had not yet been put in place at the time of the blizzard, but that doesn't mean Sanitation workers could not have been acting out. Another union source said of Bloomberg, "Anything that diminishes this guy's credibility works for us." Well then do we have a scandal for you!
