The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [185]
The negotiations ended the way most previous negotiations had. Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations Basil Paterson, who acted more like a mediator than an advocate throughout, announced, “There are no winners or losers in collective bargaining.” Pressed by reporters, Mayor Koch, lacking his usual ebullience, declared, “I do not feel that we have caved in.” True, the number of scheduled police hours did not go down. But it was a cave-in because the number of productive police hours did go down. Within days, police officials conceded the pact would result in an average loss of seventy-five cops daily. The important point is that the long-term trend of reduced police coverage continued. To have won a “victory” for the taxpayers, as Koch promised in his campaign, the city would have had to persuade police officers to work more days—not fewer, not even the same number—each year.
The demands made by the Municipal Labor Committee, representing over 200,000 workers whose contracts expired on June 30, 1978, were not as absurd, though Mayor Koch’s behavior was. Like John Lindsay, Koch would prove to be an amateur at the bargaining table—leader of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The jockeying began during the campaign when Koch declared there was no money for pay raises. “The municipal labor unions will no longer run this city,” he announced often. On November 1, 1977, during a mayoral debate sponsored by The New York Times, Koch linked the transit and all other labor negotiations, claiming that “whatever is negotiated by the Transit Authority … will be the bottom line for all other contracts.” In March, the Mayor released a list of sixty-one “give-back” demands and said any pay increase for municipal workers would have to be financed from these because he would “not extend the deficit.” The unions parried, demanding a 12 percent pay increase plus new fringe benefits. Koch, sharing Lindsay’s penchant for theatrical poses, said their demands were “outrageous.” In truth, the unions knew the Mayor was posing; the new mayor did not know he was. In December 1977, a major city labor leader told this reporter, “Don’t quote me, but I would be glad to settle for a straight 6 percent.” That would have been 6 percent for two years. But Koch’s public bluster, like Lindsay’s, hardened their demands, bringing greater membership pressure on union leaders to humiliate their City Hall foe.
Which is what they did. In April, thinking the transit settlement too rich to extend to the other city unions, Koch suddenly denied saying what everyone knew he had said. “There is no linkage” between transit and the other contracts, he now professed. Justifiably enraged, D.C. 37’s Victor Gotbaum called Koch “a bald-faced liar.” “It was,” says Alan Viani, one of D.C. 37’s negotiators, “like having two kids and saying to one, ‘Here’s an ice-cream cone,’ then turning to the other and saying, ‘You can’t have one.’ ” After the Mayor’s turnaround, and because many workers felt he made them scapegoats, Viani and his fellow negotiators were put in a box. “I’ve never seen such disdain for a mayor as I’ve seen at our delegates’ meeting,” he said. “It makes it very difficult for us.”
And Koch made it difficult for himself. Like Lindsay, he promised to come to the bargaining table prepared. He was not. The public would pay for his education. And that of Deputy Mayor for Finance Philip Toia, who told me in June that the negotiations were “a fascinating experience. I learned