NYC Parks Employees, Immigrants, and Workers of Color
Battle Two-Tier Park System and Fight for Union Membership

Group representing Black, Hispanic and Asian park workers slams lack of benefits
And management fighting their bid to join District Council 37

Employees of New York City's Central Park Conservancy (CPC) described abuses and harassment from management in response to their efforts to join a the city's largest public sector union, District Council 37, AFSCME, last week at a briefing at the union's headquarters.

"Central Park is a jewel of New York City, but it's flawed because of a two-tiered workforce," District Council 37 Organizing Director Edgar de Jesus told a group of reporters from the city's ethnic and community newspapers. Noting that non-unionized CPC employees work alongside unionized employees of the City's Parks and Recreation Dept., De Jesus said the working conditions imposed by CPC management on non-unionized workers create a serious threat to their health and safety, offer no job security, and provide few benefits.

Most park workers were once in unions. Today only a skeletal public-sector field staff of less than 25 blue-collars workers and some 80 clerical and professional employees are still unionized, while the private-sector, non-unionized Conservancy workforce has mushroomed to 250 to 300 year round.

"It's a matter of fairness," said one CPC employee describing conditions for CPC workers as "modern day slavery" and explaining that since management learned of their desire to unionize, there is an air of "fear and intimidation" in their workplace. "We're spied on during lunchtime, and you can't congregate in small groups with other workers without management looking at you suspiciously," the worker said.

Other CPC workers described conditions in which opportunities for promotion, raises or advancement are at the whim of the employer. Union and non-unionized parks workers include African American, Caribbean, Haitian, Latino, and Asian workers and more. Many are immigrants. CPC employees come from throughout the city to beautify the city's premiere park system even as the parks in their own low-income neighborhoods in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan suffer from neglect and decay.

DC 37 Executive Director Lillian Roberts says the union is committed to helping these workers join the union because, "Every worker deserves to be treated with dignity, respect and fairness in the workplace. They also deserve the right to choose to join a union. Yet, even in a union town like New York, anti-union employers still seek to deny them that right." Roberts recently applauded Council member Joseph Addabbo and his colleagues for approving Resolution #1180 urging Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give New York City workers, including those in Central Park, an important weapon in the fight for economic justice.

DC 37 is New York City's largest public employee union, representing 125,000 members and 50,000 retirees.