By Raanan Geberer

There was a time when getting a “good city job” was good advice. Traditionally, civil service has also provided marginalized populations and individuals with difficulties in their lives with avenues to prosperity they might not have otherwise enjoyed.

Now, however, getting a civil service job, whether it’s city, state or federal, isn’t as easy as it once was — and to an increasing number of people, not as attractive.

New York City’s plan to strip municipal retirees of their traditional Medicare health benefits and push them into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage program will only exacerbate the problem locally.

In November, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office issued a report finding New York City’s municipal workforce had declined by more than 19,000 since 2020 — with attrition outpacing new hiring. Similar declines took place after the 2008 Great Recession, the report added. Mayor Eric Adams has pledged to add 25,000 more employees by June — but he’s also committed to austere belt-tightening.

Last summer, the New York Times ran a story called “Why the City’s Workers Are Quitting in Droves,” which suggested several reasons for the shortfall: “A bureaucratic and lethargic hiring process that makes it hard to quickly fill vacancies; a job market that, in many cases, offers more lucrative and more flexible private-sector options; a pandemic-era hiring freeze that was largely lifted by November…and, according to the city, a rule that an agency can only hire one worker after two have left.”

The Adams administration and the heads of the Municipal Labor Committee [MLC] are hellbent on automatically enrolling 250,000 municipal retirees into Aetna’s new Medicare Advantage plan in September. Supporters tout new benefits including gym memberships and hearing and vision exams. But opponents have rejected the flashy gimmicks citing well-documented evidence profit-driven Medicare Advantage programs nationwide make their money ripping off taxpayers and delaying and denying care.

This week, New York City municipal retirees and their union supporters put roughly 1,000 people into the streets outside City Hall protesting the privatization of their traditional Medicare benefits and demanding the City Council pass proposed legislation aimed at stopping the takeover.

More protests are coming.

Marianne Pizzitola, president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees [NYCOPSR], believes that the Aetna privatization will discourage prospective job applicants who have an eye to the future. “Since the city health program was founded in 1941, you always had healthcare and over the years, they added more plans. You had a choice. Now, they want to force you to take one plan from a private company.”

One reason people “flocked” to civil service jobs in the past, Pizzitola says, is because they knew wages weren’t that high but if they “stuck it out for 30 years” or so, they’d get “great health care” when they retired. Now, this incentive is being systematically destroyed.

Brooklynite Bertram Miller, who worked for the Human Resources Agency [HRA] from 2001 and 2016, agrees. “Historically, civil service has been a trade-off with comparatively low wages, but generous benefits. Now, if there are low wages and low benefits, fewer people will apply.

“The city has attempted this before, and it’s already been defeated in court two or three times. It may be defeated again,” Miller told Work-Bites.

Howard Lewin, a city retiree living in Boca Raton, Florida who worked first for the now-defunct Board of Water Supply and then for the Department of Environmental Protection, supports NYCOPSR, and also says privatization might discourage future applicants from choosing a civil service career. “I want the freedom to choose my own doctors,” he said.

Of course, some people disagree. Jed Natkin is a retiree — not from the city — but from the Social Security Administration where he worked from 1974 to 2018. He has a Medicare Advantage plan from Aetna, one of a variety of “carefully vetted plans” from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and says he is “extremely pleased” with it.

“Considering that many employers offer no health plan to current or former employees and something is better than nothing, I wouldn’t think that this factor alone would discourage someone who believed in public service from applying for a job,” Natkin says. “Now, if they messed around with the pensions, that’s another story.”

Medicare Advantage opponents, however, do liken their traditional Medicare benefits to a pension and insist those benefits are a form of “deferred compensation.”

Who Has Benefited?

Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants who immigrated to New York City during the first half of the 20th century were among those who especially benefited from traditional civil service jobs.

In “The Second Generation from the Last Great Wave of Immigration,” Richard Alba and Nancy Foner note how “In New York City, many Jews entered the civil service after Mayor LaGuardia implemented a merit system in the 1930s for hiring and promotion.”

Today, the City of New York benefits from the commitments many women and people of color have made to civil service. According to Miller, “a great majority of the people” in the HRA unit where he worked were “Black women.”

Another rarely discussed community of people who have traditionally benefited from municipal employment include all those who’ve — for various reasons — had difficulty navigating the private job market.

These are workers who may have been on track for advanced degrees but experienced personal setbacks; people who suffered a devastating layoff; people squeezed out of a shrinking job market; people with gaps in their employment record; people with disabilities; and people who just do not perform well in job interviews — among others.

Miller is one of these. At one time, he was in a PhD program in the social sciences — but his plans did not work out. “I knew there were jobs in social service,” he says, “but until a friend of mine told me, I didn’t know there were any jobs that didn’t need a master’s in social work.” Miller took the HRA caseworker test and immediately put the same idealism that had fueled his academic career into social service work.

Lewin graduated with a BA in chemistry from Brooklyn College. In 1963, he was studying for his master’s degree in the evening and working for Revlon, the cosmetics company, during the day.

“I was working for Revlon in Passaic,” he explains, but was missing classes “because they had a lot of last-minute overtime.” Chemistry jobs were very specialized and as a new graduate Lewin says, “It would have been difficult to get a job in New York in the private sector.”

He ultimately worked for the Board of Water Supply in various positions, then took a job with DEP after that agency absorbed the BWS. He retired in 1996.

Lewin’s sister Rhea Lewin-Geberer, meanwhile, started working for an HRA caseworker back in 1987 after being laid off from her programming job. She enjoys volunteering at community organizations and has for many years, most notably at a free clinic in Chelsea. “Programming paid well,” she says, “but there was no satisfaction of helping people.”

Others make the decision to pursue civil service careers right out of the gate. Natkin worked for the Social Security Administration in a variety of roles for 43 years

“I could have worked anywhere else and made more money, but I chose civil service,” he says. “In college, I took the [now-defunct] Federal Service Entrance Exam in the fall of 1973. I was getting a degree in economics and I was interested in public service.”

Natkin took a job in private industry while waiting to be called for a federal job. But after three months of selling shirts and ties, he realized that wasn’t the way he wanted to contribute to society.

Fewer Opportunities, More Cutbacks

The proposed privatization of NYC retirees’ health system is not the first attack on civil services as it once existed. Opportunities that once existed for all kinds of communities are evaporating on all levels.

Take the Internal Revenue Service for instance. The recent Inflation Reduction Act gives the IRS money to hire thousands of employees over the next 10 years. It’s got a lot of ground to recover. According to Pro Publica, the IRS had just 9,510 auditors in 2017 — down a third from 2010.

Natkin says there are now about 20,000 fewer people working for the Social Security Administration than when he was working for the agency.

According to the New York Times, both Republican and Democratic officials alike are to blame for cutting municipal workforces over the last several decades in an effort to make up for budgetary shortfalls. In December 1983, for example, then-Governor Mario Cuomo announced plans to cut the New York State workforce by 14,000. In the end, he settled for 821 employees.

In February 1991, as many as 6,000 city employees got layoff notices. According to the Times, the layoffs were part of then-Mayor David N. Dinkins’ efforts to “put pressure on the unions to come up with money-saving concessions to help close the budget gap.” In the end, 3,000 workers were axed.  

In 1988, when the City of New York sought to create the School Construction Authority [SCA], it sponsored four bills in the State Legislature — none of which guaranteed civil service protections for its employees. Eventually, according to the City Journal, legislators had to cut a deal with District Council 37, in which the city agreed to transfer Board of Education employees, who were unionized, to the SCA without any job losses.

“If you can do the job with fewer people, it saves taxpayers money,” Natkin says. “Automation has taken the place of the need for more hands on deck. The problem is that we have a growing population; we have a population that is more diverse. Reduction in force has been detrimental to public service."

Longer Wait Times

Once upon a time, this writer applied for a civil service job with the City of New York. After my name came up for a NYCHA test, I was immediately placed into a training class. By the time Miller was called by HRA, he had to endure a ”one-in-three” interviewing process. Writing in the Amsterdam News in 2007, Lillian Roberts, then executive director of District Council 37, said the one-in-three rule enabled agencies to “pass over the most successful test-takers” and let supervisors choose a personal favorite out of the top three.

Bet that as it may, the days when one could take a civil service test and expect to be hired in four or five months — if one had a fairly decent score and met the education and work experience requirements — are quickly vanishing and the avenues to prosperity are diminishing. NYC’s drive to privatize its healthcare obligations to municipal workers is about to make municipal employment even less attractive.