There was big money on the line when Mayor Bloomberg decided that maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea after all to shut down most government offices during last week’s snowstorm.
After announcing that city agencies would be shut except for those delivering emergency services, Bloomberg hurriedly backtracked and asked all municipal workers to come in if they could make it.
It turns out that if he hadn’t done that, taxpayers would have been on the hook for millions of dollars in bonus pay.
“There is an issue which the public, some people, don’t know about,” Bloomberg said yesterday. “If you give some people a day off and some people have to work, the people who have to work — by contract — get an extra day’s pay.”
The same issue came up in 1996, when then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani made the decision to shut the government during a January blizzard.
Mayoral aides say municipal unions tried to get double pay back then but lost an arbitration ruling. In at least one other case, however, involving transit workers, the unions won.
“The bottom line is a city worker who came in when the city offices re-opened is not going to get an extra day because we really weren’t closed. We said we’d close. An hour and a half later, we changed our mind because the weather was better,” said Bloomberg.
Additional reporting by Rita Delfiner