The administration’s push to assign blame underlines its strained relationship with the union and its executive director, Lillian Roberts. She said she held Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg responsible for the layoffs, calling them “outrageous” and “totally unnecessary,” and she has emphasized that they would disproportionately hit the city’s lowest-paid workers and poorest school districts.  As so often happens in labor disputes, especially when there is bad blood between labor and management, the two sides present vastly different views of events.  City officials maintain that they were forced to order the layoffs, which have upset many parents, because Ms. Roberts was the chief obstacle to a deal proposed last spring that would have used more than $200 million from a multi-union health fund to help plug a budget hole. City officials say all the other municipal unions were ready to accept such a deal.  “We gave D.C. 37 every opportunity to avoid this situation months ago, and they rejected our proposals,” said Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for governmental affairs.  Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, voiced regret about the layoffs, which would include school aides, parent coordinators and other members of school support staffs at nearly 350 schools across the city.  “I am sympathetic to these workers, and we tried very hard during the spring budget negotiations to work with D.C. 37 and the other unions to find savings to make up for huge losses in federal and state funding,” Mr. Walcott said.  He noted that the city had worked out a deal with the United Federation of Teachers to avoid laying off thousands of teachers. In a move that city officials say will save $60 million, that union agreed to suspend sabbaticals for a year and to let teachers in a reserve pool who do not have full-time assignments serve as substitute teachers.  “In part because other unions would not work with us to find more savings, schools had to absorb cuts to their budgets,” Mr. Walcott said.  He said that it was left to the principals to make the best staffing decisions for their schools, and that many of them chose to let school aides go rather than teachers.  In an interview, Ms. Roberts denied that District Council 37 — the city’s largest municipal union, with 120,000 members — was the main obstacle to dipping into the union-controlled health fund, saying two-thirds of the city’s municipal unions opposed the idea.  But she did not hide her opposition.  “The mayor wants to crack into that fund so he can come back and back for more,” she said.  Ms. Roberts, the council’s leader since 2002, said the deal would have meant higher medical co-payments for city employees — something she said she could not support because it would be a big strain for her union’s members, like school aides, who often earn only $14,000 a year.  She said that her union agreed in 2009 to tap the health stabilization fund to help the city with its deficit, but that the city laid off 500 school aides later that year.  “There was mistrust from the get-go in this year’s negotiations,” said Henry Garrido, associate director of the district council.  Harry Nespoli, the chairman of the Municipal Labor Committee and the president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, took issue with City Hall’s version of what happened: that it dropped its push to tap the health fund because of the district council’s opposition.  “I don’t know why they’re singling out D.C. 37, to tell the truth,” Mr. Nespoli said. There was widespread mistrust among unions about the city’s proposal to tap the fund, he said.  Mr. Nespoli added that progress was being made when the Bloomberg administration suddenly pulled out of the talks.  The relationship between the mayor and Ms. Roberts is far worse than that between previous mayors and leaders of District Council 37.  In the 1970s, the union’s executive director, Victor Gotbaum, famously worked with the mayor, Abraham D. Beame, to help rescue the city from default.  In the 1990s, its executive director, Stanley Hill, had a strong relationship with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, once agreeing to a two-year wage freeze to help the city weather budget problems.  Ms. Roberts criticized the city for declining to negotiate over a plan District Council 37 put forward in recent weeks to avoid layoffs; among the union’s offers was to have school aides work no more than four hours a day and to have many take furloughs.  But city officials said those measures would have created havoc for school principals. Bloomberg administration officials said the union’s proposal was too little, too late.
The Bloomberg administration and District Council 37 bitterly dispute the circumstances leading to the impending termination of 700 low-paid workers.