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In a stinging slap at Comptroller John Liu, a Manhattan judge has ruled that a formula his office used to set pay rates for movers hired by the city was ridiculously slanted to favor the unions that represent the movers — a move that would have doubled the cost to taxpayers.
Supreme Court Justice Alice Schlesinger found that Liu would have required the city to shell out as much as $38.90 an hour to hire movers who make as little as $12 an hour in the private sector and $15.90 to $20.14 an hour in federal government jobs.
“As the petitioners correctly point out, the comptroller’s prevailing wage schedule risks producing inconsistent and arguably absurd results . . . ” Schlesinger wrote in a decision dated March 29.
Based on Liu’s calculations, the judge continued, “a moving company awarded contracts on a municipal job, a private job and a federal job would need to pay its workers twice as much for the municipal job as compared to the private and federal jobs.”
Acting on a lawsuit brought by the Metropolitan Movers Association and five moving companies, she ordered the comptroller to go back to the drawing board to come up with more sensible figures.
Under the law, Liu is responsible for establishing what are known as “prevailing wages” in selected industries such as the building trades that do business with the city.
In heavily unionized workplaces, that’s relatively easy. Most employees are paid union wages, so the union scale also ends up being the prevailing wage.
But in a survey of 2,334 workers in the moving industry his office conducted last year, Liu determined 57 percent were non-union.
That didn’t stop him from adopting the pay scale of Teamsters Local 814, which represented 31 percent of city movers in the survey, and Local 1212 of the United Service Workers Union, which represented 12 percent.
Liu declared that top pay was to be $24.35 an hour, plus $14.55 an hour for benefits, for a total of $38.90.
To get to that number, however, he had to do some fancy financial footwork.
He accepted a request from Local 814 to exclude lower-paid, entry-level employees in his calculation based on the union argument that they “required supervision and were not used unless the employer had exhausted its seniority list.”
Schlesinger said it was “particularly concerning” that about 80 percent of the moving workers Liu surveyed earned less than his lowest recommended wage.
Liu, a leading contender for mayor in 2013, has close ties to the city’s labor unions and was elected with the support of the union-dominated Working Families Party.
He declined to comment on the judge’s ruling, with a spokesman saying it’s still being reviewed.