TESTIMONY
Arthur Chilliotis, President Emeritus and Current Business Manager of Local 11 80, on Discrimination Against Women and Minorities in Salaries and Promotions in New York City Government
1:55:32
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3 min
Arthur Chilliotis, who has worked for New York City since 1972, discusses the discrimination against women and minorities in salaries and promotional opportunities he has witnessed.
- He explains that when elected president of Local 11 80 in 1975, they focused on the issue of the Koch administration minimizing salaries and making promotions difficult for women and minorities.
- Chilliotis says they filed grievances over out-of-title work not being compensated appropriately and created steps in an EEO case settlement to raise minimum salaries annually for those discriminated against.
- He criticizes the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) for impeding equal employment opportunities by withholding information needed for the EEO case.
- Chilliotis advocates for investing in education for members and expanding promotional opportunities like the recent police officer exam that included various minority-held roles.
Arthur Chilliotis
1:55:32
Good afternoon.
1:55:34
My name is Arthur Chilliotis.
1:55:36
I am the president of Maris of local 11ating, currently the business manager.
1:55:40
I started working through a city in 1972.
1:55:44
Probably before any of you were born sitting on the panel here.
1:55:48
And what I can tell you from the start is it was clear to me that in fact women and minorities were not being treated the same.
1:55:56
When I was elected president in 1975, we focused on that issue because we saw what the Koch administration had done to minimize the salaries of women and minorities.
1:56:08
And to make it difficult for them to get promoted.
1:56:12
And your chart that you had up before regarding the salary ranges and where women and minorities fall.
1:56:18
You should remember that within each job title, there are assignment levels.
1:56:22
And management has a discretion to appoint people to each of those assignment levels.
1:56:27
As some of the staff here can testify, we are constantly filing out of title grievances out of level grievances because people are doing the work at higher levels, but not being compensated for it.
1:56:38
And to to remedy this, one of the things that we had done is we created steps to settle our EEO case.
1:56:45
To make sure that the minimum salaries went up every year to to give the people who were doing the job, getting the experience, but not being given the opportunities of being discriminated against would at least get some increase as they moved up the ranks.
1:57:03
Again, hearing some of the testimony earlier, decast through all the fights that we have had has not been a facilitator even though they're re of of equal employment opportunities.
1:57:16
They've been an impediment.
1:57:18
They have in every turn not provided.
1:57:21
The information that was needed for our EU case.
1:57:24
They claimed they didn't have it.
1:57:26
That's what created this report that you have today.
1:57:30
So the question is what do we do going forward?
1:57:32
We have invested 100 of 1000, if not 1,000,000 of dollars, in giving our member's tuition credits so that they can get college degrees, bachelor's and master's degrees.
1:57:44
And as Glory pointed out, and then what?
1:57:47
Nothing moves along.
1:57:49
And so I think it's up to you to take a a long look at things like promotional opportunities for people that earn degrees.
1:57:57
And the re the recent civil service exam for promotion to police officer included a very interesting thing.
1:58:06
It included traffic enforcement agents, associate traffic enforcement agents, security school security officers, That's a large group of minorities and women who now will have access at a promotional level to be hired as police officers making a demographic difference in the constitution of police officers in New York City.
1:58:25
And that's one example of what can be done.
1:58:28
The other I think that that the dean from from from the school of Labor Studies will talk about is the parrot to teacher program.
1:58:35
And I that I've gone beyond my time, and thank you for listening.
