At Least They Didn’t Call Them “Non-Essential”

One thing you can’t do is tell city workers there’s a snow day — because of course they’ll take it:

City workers accused the mayor of unfairly trying to dock them a day’s pay after he backtracked on declaring an official snow day last week. On Jan. 27, after a storm blanketed the city in 19 inches of snow, the mayor’s press office issued a statement from Bloomberg announcing that most government offices were closed for the day.

“Because heavy snow fell in the city overnight, all non-emergency city government offices are closed for today, in addition to all public schools,” the statement said. “New York City almost never takes a snow day, but today is one of those rare days. People should stay at home and off the roads.”

. . .

This week employees began receiving emails explaining they could be held responsible for failing to show up last Thursday.

According to guidelines provided by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, any employee who arrived late will not be charged. But “employees absent due to the storm must charge annual leave or compensatory time balances,” a city email instructed. “Annual leave will be advanced to employees who have no annual leave or compensatory time to cover this absence.”

People may remember that the exact same message went out at the end of the week of the September 11 attacks, this after Mayor Giuliani told employees (and basically everyone) to stay out of Manhattan. Now that was shocking . . .

It seems like a game of sorts — a message along the lines of “Don’t get too used to this, my friend.” Which is to say, they’ll eventually backtrack on the backtrack. But what if they did something altogether different? Say, reconceptualizing the snow day by replacing it with something like a voluntary furlough? It might save money in these tight budget years! Not being facetious, either — just the sort of back-of-napkin idea that might work.