The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [43]
The police/fire pay parity dispute is a classic case of buck passing. For years, police sergeants complained that fire lieutenants—who they believed did comparable work—should not be paid more. On January 4, 1967, Mayor Lindsay’s Office of Collective Bargaining (OCB) passed the dispute on to an impasse panel for study. The panel recommended a compromise, one which rewarded police sergeants less than fire lieutenants but widened the gap between a sergeant’s and a patrolman’s pay. Lindsay accepted their recommendations. The result was a truce.
A brief one. Two years later, sergeants again complained that they should be equal to fire lieutenants; patrolmen complained that the gap between their pay and sergeants’ pay was too wide. The patrolmen’s union, the PBA, threatened to strike. Their timing could not have been better. Lindsay was seeking reelection, and the last thing he wanted was another strike. On April 29, 1969, Herbert L. Haber, Lindsay’s Director of the Office of Collective Bargaining, quietly initialed an agreement with the PBA granting patrolmen what they wanted, including a $2,700 retroactive bonus.
In an attempt to keep the sergeants happy, Lindsay appointed another impasse panel, this one chaired by Theodore Kheel, one of the “power brokers” Lindsay denounced in 1966. The panel waited until after the mayoral election before recommending that the ratio determined by the first panel be raised. “The Lindsay administration accepted the second OCB recommendation as well,” wrote Columbia Professor Raymond Horton in a book on municipal labor relations, “despite the fact that it clearly conflicted with the PBA agreement reached in February.”
After the election, the city had second thoughts and reinterpreted their February 1969 agreement with the PBA. Gone were the $2,700 bonus and the higher pay ratio of patrolmen to sergeants. The PBA immediately took the initialed agreement to court and eventually won. The city appealed. Understandably irate that the city broke its word, patrolmen went on strike for six days in January 1971. Shortly thereafter, the city lost its case in court.
But the city lost more. Since the pay of all the uniformed services is pegged to the parity principle, an increase for sergeants or patrolmen ensures an increase for everyone else. Sanitation men, for instance, are supposed to be paid 90 percent of what a patrolman gets—when patrolmen’s pay goes up, so does that of sanitation men. “By the time other groups, like firemen and sanitation men, came forward with their related demands,” Horton wrote, “the cost to the city was considerable—variously estimated from $150 million to $215 million.” That is the additional cost each year.
The dispute helped convince elected officials to free themselves from responsibility for ticklish labor disputes. Soon, under the state Taylor law, compulsory arbitration of public disputes was called for. The buck was passed to nonelected mediators, who in the future would command even more generous settlements.
And the city paid another price for the pay parity debacle. New York had suffered strikes from its transit workers, its teachers, its sanitation men, its hospital and welfare workers. Some of these strikes, particularly the 1968 teachers’ strike, savagely polarized the city and reminded citizens that their government did not necessarily represent their interests. But until 1971, it had been almost unthinkable that those responsible for public safety would strike. Police are our last bastion against lawlessness. Hell, it was against the law to strike. But cops struck anyway, and with that strike went another piece of the city’s social fabric. What’s happening to New York? was a question everyone asked. How could cops strike? Who will protect us? Where’s the government? Do I want my kids to grow up in a place like this? If my business has a future, and this place doesn’t, why should I stay? As people asked these questions, they picked away