Bill De Blasio cuts first sweet deal labor contract — with environmental officers giving them 50K each back pay

Mot a bad deal for this union! 

So in addition to de Blaio making NYC very business unfriendly, he’s hooking up his buddies in the labor unions at the expense of NYC taxpayers.  

NY DailyNews reports the de Blasio administration has settled its first labor contract, a quick deal with 200 environmental officers that could signal a smoother period of labor relations after the cold war between the unions and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The officers, whose duties include patrolling the city's watershed upstate, had been working without a contract for an astounding nine years. Under the new agreement, they will receive an average of more than $50,000 each in back pay.

Kenneth Wynder, who represents the officers as head of the Law Enforcement Employees Benevolent Association, praised the de Blasio administration for its "fairness."

"We got treated with respect," he said. "We felt much better compared to the nine-year battle we had with the old administration," he told the Daily News.

Bloomberg left office on Dec. 31 without any of the city's 300,000 unionized workers under contract, creating a major challenge for Mayor de Blasio. The city's unions are demanding more than $7 billion in back pay, a sum that could break the city's budget.

The situation of the environmental officers, however, represented a special circumstance. Theirs was the only union that had not reached a contract with the city for the years 2005 to 2007. As a result, the terms of their settlement are not expected to set a pattern for the city's other unionized workers, whose contracts expired beginning in 2008.

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