The irony of public service is that public employees often have to defend their jobs--and the services they provide--against attacks from politicians who think in terms of dollars rather than sense. Nowhere is this irony more evident than in New York where the FPE/AFT-affiliated Public Employees Federation (PEF) is in an escalating battle with Gov. George Pataki over the conditions of psychiatric facilities run by the Office of Mental Health.

Last fall, registered nurses, social workers, rehabilitation specialists and other PEF members testified at assembly hearings over safety issues at state-operated mental hygiene facilities. The union's bottom line: staffing. Pataki's response to PEF's fall 2000 pleas for more staffing was delivered in the executive budget earlier this year. The governor proposes to cut 296 jobs by closing two adult psychiatric hospitals and consolidating four children's centers and one forensic center. Now PEF is not only fighting for adequate staffing, it is fighting for the rights of the mentally ill. "This year's executive budget clearly represents a bargain-basement approach to the care of the mentally ill," says PEF president Roger Benson.

In January, Benson urged lawmakers to keep the facilities open; keep the children's centers separate from adult facilities; and increase direct-care staffing levels for all the state's psychiatric facilities. He says the state could improve care and improve safety for patients and staff by hiring more workers instead of making staff work overtime to the tune of $42 million a year. For those same dollars, Benson says, the state could hire 550 additional mental health care workers, filling vacancies in facilities throughout the state.

"We have prepared a plan that utilizes PEF's greatest strength: its membership," Benson says. "We will combine our mobilization effort with a public relations and legislative campaign to fight this proposal and expose it as an attack on the state's mentally ill."