In a surprising boost to Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign, the city’s largest union, District Council 37, endorsed him for re-election yesterday.

In the 2001 mayoral race, the union, which represents 121,000 city workers, endorsed Peter Vallone in the primary, Fernando Ferrer in the runoff, and Mark Green in the fall campaign – all of them Democrats. While the union successfully negotiated a contract with the administration last year, some members protested the agreement in front of City Hall. They said the agreement, which provided for a one-time $1,000 payment, a 3% raise in the second year, and a 2% raise in the third year, didn’t satisfy their needs.

Standing in the union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, District Council 37’s executive director, Lillian Roberts, said members of the union’s executive board debated the endorsement before voting 14 to 12 to endorse Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election.

Ms. Roberts acknowledged that most members of the union are Democrats and said many members “didn’t get what they really wanted” out of the 2004 contract. She said, however, that she believes future negotiations with the may or will prove fruitful. She also said Mr. Bloomberg’s commitment to public hospitals heavily influenced the vote.

The union’s vice president at large for uniformed EMTs and paramedics, Patrick Bahnken, said the mayor’s support for workers in his field has improved medical response time, ambulance skill, and employee housing benefits.

“Race relations are better than I can remember in a long time,” Mr. Bahnken said. “This mayor has earned another term.” On Monday, the Doctor’s Council-SEIU also endorsed the mayor for re-election.

Ms. Roberts said now – not after the Democratic primary – was the appropriate time for the endorsement.

“It came down to the fact that if we were going to endorse him later, why not do it now?” she said. “Because we are out to win by any means necessary.”

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The former top political consultant for the C. Virginia Fields campaign, Joseph Mercurio, circulated e-mail messages yesterday that he said show that the Democratic candidate and her campaign manager, Chung Seto, and deputy Manhattan borough president, Barbara Baer, had a role in approving the printing of the controversial flier over which he was fired last week. That flier included a doctored photo of Ms. Fields with an ethnically diverse group of supporters.

Mr. Mercurio said in a telephone interview that the e-mails show he had later endorsed printing a different brochure that included a newer, authentic photo. He said Ms. Seto took the older, doctored piece to the printer to save time and the approximately $2,000 or $3,000 that it would have cost to print the newer, vetted flier.

“It is not much of a defense to say it was printed earlier,” he said in a telephone interview. “They used it for weeks until someone raised an objection. Magically, last Wednesday everyone disowned it.”

In a statement, Ms. Fields’s campaign communications director, Kirsten Powers, said the candidate does not review drafts of campaign literature in e-mail, only in hard copy, and never knew the photo was doctored.

“She was paying Joe Mercurio $15,000 a month for his political services, and this included overseeing the campaign literature process and the use of the photo in question was his decision,” the statement said. “His attempts to blame this on other people are shameful and must stop.”

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The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, said yesterday that if elected mayor he would fight to shift responsibility for the city’s subway security from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to a task force headed by the police.

During a speech at Hunter College, Mr. Miller, one of four Democrats running for mayor, attacked Mayor Bloomberg for not forcing the MTA to act faster on security and for failing to deliver funds from Washington and Albany.

Though New York City has for decades received less state and federal money than it turns over in taxes, Mr. Miller said, Mr. Bloomberg has made things worse.

“For the last four years Mike Bloomberg has allowed Republicans in Washington and Albany to walk all over us,” he told a group of students. “He let them walk all over us when Republicans turned homeland security into a red-state gravy train that spent seven times more per capita to protect ranchers in Wyoming than to safeguard subways in New York.”