The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [115]
Space is the least of Russo’s woes. He concurs with the Management Advisory Board’s recommendation that the number of labor bargaining units should be reduced from 122 to 10 or 12. The state bargains with only 6. “It’s the biggest problem we have,” he says. “Every unit tries to outdo every other.” To compound the problem, non-mayoral agencies like the Board of Education and the Transit Authority traditionally bargained separately from Russo’s office. Another problem is the absence of a common data base. Thus there can be no agreement between the city and its unions on how well or how badly workers are compensated. In the past, both sides performed as lawyers in a courtroom, making the best possible case, though the city’s was usually the worst possible case since a couple of junior assistants did the work. Determined to correct these deficiencies, the Koch administration assigned some budget experts to Deputy Mayor Paterson and Commissioner Russo’s office and began to challenge the voluminous briefs prepared by labor consultant Jack Bigel’s firm, Program Planners, Inc. Koch also adopted a policy of tandem negotiations with the mayoral and non-mayoral agencies, pledging the same dollar settlement for each. When the transit workers captured a bigger than expected settlement, the Mayor retreated from this “linkage” policy, claiming the other unions would have to settle for less. Not unreasonably, Victor Gotbaum called him “a bald-faced liar.” By the end of the citywide negotiations, in June 1978, Koch—desperate to produce a settlement to show Washington—awarded the unions more than they ever expected.
A major problem with collective bargaining is perceptual. Russo and many others begin from the assumption that the municipal unions have too much power; union leaders think they have too little. “To a great extent, the servants have become the masters,” says Russo. Bigel, on the other hand, says, “I have a sense of inequality. I sense that management has more power. It is management that determines the economic fruits for its employees. We have the right to grievance. They have the right to layoff. They have the right to determine people’s lives. A union is a defensive instrument.” To say that municipal unions have too much power, argues teachers’ union president Shanker, is to forget the time when individual citizens or groups couldn’t “sue the sovereign. In a democratic society individuals can sue the government as equals.… The issue is one of democratic values in a pluralistic society. In a pluralistic society workers do have the right to strike. The final answer is not the government.” Shanker concedes unions are special interests—“But I don’t think public officials necessarily represent the public interest.”
New York’s fiscal crisis subjects the collective bargaining system to new tests. Traditionally, it is a trading system, a process where workers demand more and city officials, defensively, merely seek to hold down the cost of a settlement. Both sides claimed victories: unions when workers improved their economic condition; City Hall when a strike was avoided. But today there is no more to give. For the first time, city officials are publicly striving to regain management prerogatives and reduce fringe benefits. The rules have changed. Yet it’s unclear whether the game has. Can government reconcile taxpayers’ desire to pay less and receive more services, and the desire of employees to earn more and work less? Will there be strikes? Can union leaders, with an appreciation of the budget crisis, buck the legitimate thirst of their members to at least keep pace with inflation and be reelected union leaders? Does the fiscal crisis provide an opportunity to carve a new middle ground, one concerned with economic justice for citizens as well as workers? One that permits the introduction of radical changes in the delivery of services, including