Get stuff done on the cheap

Gothamist

A mounting staffing crisis facing New York City, the country’s largest municipal employer, is raising questions about City Hall’s approach to hiring and whether the city is doing enough to compete for workers at a time when many critical agencies are being stretched thin.

Most city workers have blamed the city’s abnormally high attrition and difficulty in hiring on a lack of a remote working or hybrid option.

However, some current and former city agency officials and hiring managers say the challenge in hiring top job applicants also comes from a relatively recent practice of lowballing new hires. According to a source in city government, the policy stems from a union rule that was rarely enforced until the pandemic spurred belt-tightening measures from City Hall.

Six people familiar with the hiring process spanning across five different agencies, including the Department of Transportation and Department of Sanitation, told Gothamist they were directed to offer candidates with no prior experience working in New York City government the minimum salary of the range published on the job posting.

The individuals who spoke to Gothamist did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the City Hall and concerns over their job prospects.

All recall that the policy was verbally communicated, although one city worker shared several emails dating back to August 2021 from their human resources department that said employees in their first two years of city service should be paid at a “new hire rate.”

The practice, they said, prevents their agencies from hiring the most qualified candidates at a moment when the private sector has ramped up hiring following a pandemic-spurred lull, often with offers of higher pay and, in many cases, flexibility around remote work.

“They are shooting themselves in the foot,” one municipal employee said.

THE CITY 

City Hall is trying a novel approach to address a shortage of attorneys willing to work at the lower salaries offered by municipal government — by getting lawyers to work at no cost.

Documents show that Mayor Eric Adams tapped his chief counsel Brendan McGuire, a former partner at the global law firm WilmerHale, to lead an effort to recruit pro bono attorneys from private law firms. 

“The initiative seeks to encourage City service among junior attorneys at private law firms and to alleviate the City’s current attorney hiring challenges,” the documents say. “It proposes to accomplish this goal by enhancing pro bono engagements to expose junior attorneys to the full range of the City’s legal work.”

The Conflicts of Interest Board granted McGuire approval to oversee the initiative, which could include conducting business with his former law firm. In the approval letter, the board says the city is also developing a fellows program under which private law firms would lend junior attorneys to the city for a year.

The measure comes amid a City Council review — including at a public hearing this past Friday — of city government staffing shortages, which took hold during a 2020 COVID hiring freeze and have persisted into the ninth month of the administration of Mayor Eric Adams.

A Council report in connection with last week’s oversight hearing identified nearly 1,200 vacancies at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene — about 19% short of the agency’s budgeted headcount — and more than 2,200 open positions at the city’s Department of Social Services, roughly a 17% shortfall.

At the hearing, Saul Fishman, president of the Civil Service Bar Association, which represents attorneys working in 40 city agencies, said his union’s membership has fallen by 22% since the start of the pandemic because of departures from government  — from 1,057 to 831 people. 

City lawyers handle everything from police misconduct lawsuits to foster care cases.

The majority of the losses came after former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s full-time return-to-office mandate, which went into effect last September. Adams and his top staffers have doubled down on that mandate this year, and on Monday, the mayor reiterated his stance.

“I’m not just a chorus about returning to work — I wrote the song,” he said at a press conference. “It’s time to get back to work. You cannot hang out in the nightclub on Sunday but you’re afraid to come to work on Monday.”