NEW YORK – More than 1,000 applicants flocked to a hiring hall held here Monday in conjunction with AFSCME’s Staff the Front Lines bus tour.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams joined AFSCME President Lee Saunders, District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido and AFSCME members at a press conference to highlight the urgent need to fill open public service positions in the nation’s most populous city.
A hiring hall was held at a Brooklyn high school at the same time. Spearheaded by DC 37 and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), the event gave more than 1,000 job seekers the chance to interview and get hired on the spot.
From nurses to sanitation workers to corrections officers, chronic short staffing is undermining the effective delivery of public services that all New Yorkers rely on. That’s why AFSCME launched the Staff the Front Lines initiative this year, to partner with elected officials on recruiting and retaining the essential workers who keep our communities running.
The Staff the Front Lines bus is stopping in more than 20 major cities across the country this summer and holding recruitment events in many of them.
“We want to show individuals: Don’t only live in New York, be a part of New York. Sixteen hiring halls later, thousands of people have been touched. Hundreds of people have been able to start their employment in good-paying, civil service jobs,” Mayor Adams said. “We want to be part of this national movement in getting people into these jobs.”
Saunders noted that some 970,000 public service jobs were available nationwide, as federal data from June show.
“That’s why we’re taking our Staff the Front Lines tour all across the country, and we’re meeting with elected officials and talking about how we can support and help candidates move into the public service,” Saunders said. “These are good jobs, quality jobs. We just got to get the word out, and that’s what we’re doing here in New York City.”
Garrido said: “We said from the beginning that we were going to concentrate on what Dr. King called the ‘dignity of work.’ And we have been true to our word in our partnership with the mayor, with the speaker, with the City Council – we have been leading the charge on Staff the Front Lines.”
Saturday marked the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the seminal civil rights event in 1963 on the National Mall in Washington, during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Council Speaker Adams said city jobs offer good benefits and a pension and can help “unlock the economic mobility for us as New Yorkers.”
“There are vacancies in our city agencies that need to be filled,” she said. “And who better to fill them than the smart, talented, hard-working New Yorkers who call our city home?”
To learn more about AFSCME’s national bus tour, visit StaffTheFrontLines.org.