The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [31]
Jerry Wurf, then Regional Director (now national President) of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, was more than conciliated. A week before, Wurf had threatened a strike of his 25,000 members. When the executive order was signed, he hailed it as “a monumental forward step,” predicting that his membership would double within a year.
Within seventeen years, Wurf’s membership swelled to 125,000. By 1977, all but 4,500 city employees—less than 2 percent—were represented by unions. With this growth in membership came new power. The city came to collect and turn over to the unions the dues of their members, including a political action fund to support union-backed candidates. With city support, in 1977 the state approved an agency shop law requiring all employees to pay union dues, increasing the political action kitty. The city came to fully fund the health and welfare benefits of its employees, allowing the unions to administer these funds and hire small armies for that purpose. By 1977, the city was paying the salaries but releasing 126 employees for full-time union activity; another 96 were released with the union paying their salary and the city their pension, health and welfare contributions; still another 41 union organizers were released on a part-time basis.
The union’s growing strength is gauged by glancing at the budget of the Office of Labor Relations, the city agency responsible for representing 7.5 million taxpayers in contract negotiations. In the last year of the Beame administration, this office had fifty employees and a puny budget of $800,000. That same year, one union—Wurf’s D.C. 37—had fifty-one members released by the city for union work. The dues of all city unions were $32 million, and, in early 1978, one—the PBA—lavished $750,000 to retain an attorney, Richard Hartman.
In addition to their ability to paralyze the city with a strike, as the transit union proved in 1966 and the bridge tenders in 1971, over the years the unions gained management powers and became partners in the city’s governance. Executive Order No. 52, signed by Mayor Lindsay on September 29, 1967, allowed such previous management prerogatives as “workload and manning” to be placed on the collective bargaining table. Everything became negotiable. “Collective bargaining has become a means not only for determining the wages and conditions of employment of public employees,” writes former city Personnel Director Sol Hoberman, “but also for modifying the nature of public service and the role, authority and responsibilities of the Mayor, the City Council, and agency heads.” Union contracts now determine class size and welfare caseloads. The Transit Authority was not permitted to hire part-timers, ensuring that work patterns conformed to employee, not rider habits. The sanitation union successfully insists that three men are required on a truck, though most cities and private carters employ two and even one. Unionization reaches almost to the top. Mayor Koch complains that all but 2,000 of his managers don’t belong to a union. He says he can’t properly manage since most supervisors have divided loyalties because they belong to a union—often the same one as the people reporting to them—and discipline breaks down.
With the weakening of the political party machine, unions filled a political vacuum. “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss,” conceded Victor Gotbaum, who succeeded Wurf in 1965. Unions also now have the ability to be the city’s chief banker. The employee pension funds they control are today New York’s foremost lender, pumping a scheduled $3.8 billion into city securities. With such political and governmental power, it has often been difficult for public officials to distinguish between their personal and the public’s interest, between the danger of a crippling strike and the danger of giving away the public purse.
The people in the middle—the public—got squeezed. Between 1960 and 1975, the Bureau of the Budget reports, wages and salaries jumped 316 percent, faster than the rate of