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August 20, 2004
Razzle Dazzle
Cassidy Uses His Leverage
By Richard Steier
Beneath the searing rhetoric, the hints of an “unauthorized”
strike during the Republican National Convention and the public
spectacle of cops and firefighters stalking Mayor Bloomberg at his
public appearances, Steve Cassidy believes he has a workable plan
for winning a contract exceeding the pattern set by District Council
37.
It involves public pressure, political muscle and the belief that,
contrary to Mayor Bloomberg’s insistence that he will not
deviate from that pattern in this round of bargaining, the Mayor
cleared a path for an arbitration panel to do so in his last round
of bargaining with the Uniformed Firefighters’ Association.
Swap Endorsement for Bush Help?
Beyond what Mr. Cassidy is willing to say at this point, there
is speculation – political reporter Bill Murphy’s column
last week – that the UFA president wants to leverage a possible
endorsement of President Bush’s re-election into additional
homeland security money for the city, with better contract terms
for his members as the party of the third part.
“That’s an interesting theory,” was as far as
Mr. Cassidy would go when asked about it prior to the Aug. 10 press
conference at which he announced that the UFA had filed a petition
with the Public Employment Relations Board seeking the declaration
of an impasse in his contract talks.
Four days earlier, Labor Relations Commissioner Jim Hanley had,
for the first time, according to Mr. Cassidy, offered a first-year
wage increase to the UFA, in contrast to the $1,000 bonus that has
been the norm of civilian unions that have reached contract terms
during the past four months.
But where Mr. Hanley giveth, he also taketh away, the UFA leader
said: the city offer of a 1-percent first-year raise was followed
by a 2-percent second-year increase – a point less than DC
37 got. The third year of the proposal, Mr. Cassidy said, was the
same 2-percent raise that DC 37 accepted, with 1 percent of its
cost offset by givebacks for future hires.
It came to the same 4.17 percent in unencumbered raises that DC
37 got, and Mr. Cassidy dismissed it as “unacceptable to Firefighters.”
He has also rejected a proposal by Mr. Hanley that would alter
Firefighter duty charts, scrapping the 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. day tours
and 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. night tours in favor of straight 24-hour shifts
that many Firefighters already routinely work by swapping tours
with each other.
The city was willing to fully compensate Firefighters at time-and-a-half
for the additional 102 hours they would be working each year under
the revised schedules; the change would produce a net savings on
overtime that is incurred now when a tour ends while a company is
out on a run, and also save money by reducing the city’s future
hiring needs.
No Immediate Member Gains
Mr. Cassidy pointed out, though, that there was limited initial
value to Firefighters in making the change, since all the savings
would be prospective, meaning the schedule change would generate
no additional money for his members during the 26-plus months that
they’re already working under an expired contract. In that
contest, he said, “We’re not interested in changing
the chart.”
While the Mayor has claimed that the police and fire unions have
balked at city proposals that would have boosted incumbent members’
pay by as much as 8 percent, Mr. Cassidy counters that half of that
potential increase is contingent on a variety of givebacks.
“Mike Bloomberg thinks productivity is givebacks,”
Mr. Cassidy told reporters at City Hall. “We’re not
going backward. Productivity is when we’re willing to risk
our lives if there’s a chemical or biological attack. We never
had to do that before.”
He also disputed the Mayor’s contention that the DC 37 agreement
represented a pattern the other municipal unions had to live by.
“Firefighters and cops got more last time – that’s
the pattern,” Mr. Cassidy said.
He contended that they had actually gotten “20 to 22 percent
more” in their last contract than other uniformed unions that
negotiated under the banner of the Uniformed Forces Coalition. Technically,
they actually got slightly more than that, although the difference
in reality doesn’t look nearly that great.
During the last bargaining round, DC 37 in April 2001 negotiated
a 27-month contract that provided two 4-percnet raises and another
1-percent “equity” adjustment. With the compounded value
of the raises totaling 8.16 percent, the package had an average
annual value of 4.06 percent.
Three months later, the Uniformed Forces Coalition reached a deal
providing raises of 5 and 5 percent, plus 1.5 percent in “unit
bargaining money,” with part of the added money offset by
a lengthening of the contracts for its member unions to 30 months.
The compounded value of the raises was 10.35 percent, and the average
annual value of the 11.75-percent package was 4.70 percent.
Shorter Deal’s Value
When the PBA went to arbitration before a PERB panel, it got the
basic UFC terms, but applied over just a 24-month period. This increased
the average annual value of its pact to 5.875 percent – nearly
25 percent more than what the UFC deal averaged.
Those discrepancies offer a recent precedent for the UFA to cite
as a counter to the Mayor’s likely argument that the value
of a Firefighter deal should be in line with other city contracts
to date.
Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Hanley could counter that the UFC deal was
negotiated under Rudy Giuliani, and at a time when the city was
better able to afford a slightly bigger raise for its uniformed
unions. The PBA contract, they could argue, was the decision of
an arbitration panel and exceeded what Mr. Bloomberg was willing
to give voluntarily.
But, Mr. Cassidy said, the fact that arbitrators were willing to
exceed an existing uniformed union pattern last time gives arbitrators
in this round license to do so again and to disregard the DC 37
terms. And, he said; the fact that after the PBA award was issued
Mr. Bloomberg voluntarily consented to give the UFA similar terms
means “the administration can’t say that they haven’t
given Firefighters more than a DC 37 pattern.”
In truth, the city really had no choice on that matter once the
PBA award came down. Given the long history of pay parity between
Police Officers and Firefighters, taking the issue into arbitration
would have cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars extra
to almost certainly wind up with the same UFA terms that it reached
voluntarily.
‘We’re More At Risk’
But Mr. Cassidy, knowing how seriously arbitrators take patterns
and precedents, hopes to exploit that one. He also hopes to convince
a panel that “the risks our people face are dramatically elevated”
compared to a few years ago, and the city has not acknowledged that
at the bargaining table. He is so confident that he can make that
case, he is willing to take his chances on a two-year contract,
which is the maximum duration for any PERB award unless both sides
consent to an extended one.
Mr. Hanley brushed off Mr. Cassidy’s arguments about precedents
from the prior round of bargaining, saying, “The economic
climate and picture for the City of New York has deteriorated significantly.”
One irony of that worsened economic situation, given Mr. Cassidy’s
reported attempts to get help from the highest levels of the national
government in his contract struggle, is that it is in no small measure
due to the policies of the Bush Administration. The President’s
tax cuts, with the greatest benefits concentrated among the wealthiest
Americans, have had a disproportionate effect on New York City and
New York State. And at a time when the loss of revenue for the Federal
Government resulting from those cuts has led to sharp slashes in
aid to localities, Mr. Bush’s costly war in Iraq has been
another drain on the Federal budget.
IAFF Power Play?
But firefighter union politics may also figure into Mr. Cassidy’s
calculations. He is said to be less than enamored of the leadership
of International Association of Firefighters President Harold Schaitberger
who made himself a major labor player in the Democratic Party with
his early endorsement of John Kerry’s candidacy. Of a UFA
endorsement of Mr. Bush helped propel the President to a second
term, it would give Mr. Cassidy similar stature with Republican
leaders and position him as a potential challenger to Mr. Schaitberger
within the IAFF.
IAFF Secretary-Treasurer Vinnie Bollon, a former head of the Uniformed
Fire Officers’ Association, said he knew of no rift between
Mr. Cassidy and Mr. Schaitberger, but said it would be no shock
if the UFA broke with the national union on the Presidential race.
“We believe in local autonomy,” he said during an Aug.
12 phone interview. “We’ve always had somebody go the
other way because they believe they can do more for their membership.”
In fact, Mr. Bollon said it was likely that among firefighters
nationally, more are registered Republicans than Democrats, although
he is convinced that in this election, “we’ll deliver
a lot more votes to Kerry than we have registered Democratics.”
But, he added, if Mr. Cassidy believed he could use an endorsement
to get something more for his members in bargaining, “I would
guess that he’s gotta explore the possibility.”
The UFA leader is also aware, as is PBA President Pat Lynch, that
the Boston police union was able to get a quick and surprisingly
generous new contract through an expedited arbitration that was
spurred by its protests outside the Fleet Center in Boston just
prior to the Democratic National Convention last month. In effect,
those rallies and their perceived effect became a blueprint for
the recent militancy displayed by police and fire unions, stalking
Mr. Bloomberg at his outside appearances and showing up outside
national network talk shows that are filmed on city streets to make
their case to an audience that goes far beyond local taxpayers.
The unions are counting on the Mayor going personally embarrassed
by the protests while also getting pressure from national Republican
leaders to soften his stance.
Of course, the situation in Boston is not necessarily analogous
to the one here. For one thing, Republicans, unlike Democrats, generally
don’t get embarrassed by labor unrest, some of them revel
in it. And Mr. Bloomberg has to be aware that overtly bowing to
the unions on this battle would be a political disaster for him,
since it would suggest that he was vulnerable to pressure.
Caving Via 3rd Party
Again, the unions realize this, and so what they have to be hoping
is that Mr. Bloomberg might be willing to cave out of public sight.
For years, County Executives in Nassau and Suffolk have done this
through an arbitration process that was stacked in favor of the
police unions: the cops got generous raises while government officials
got the political cover of saying that they were granted by a third
party.
People who know Mr. Bloomberg don’t believe he will take
that easy way out. They are less confident about Governor Pataki’s
resolve on that issue, however, and there are two things that argue
for his bending. One is that Mr. Pataki would not be directly connected
with any arbitration award; the other is that he has already agreed
to terms with state unions that are significantly better than those
the Mayor granted to DC 37.
For years, uniformed unions led by the PBA argued that they could
not get a fair hearing before the city’s Board of Collective
Bargaining because its members were afraid of displeasing a Mayor
and then being denied reappointment. That believe had been fueled
by then-Mayor Ed Koch’s decision in the early 1980s not to
reappoint a couple of BCB members who had ruled against him –
quite justifiably – that the city was required to retroactively
pay raises that the unions agreed to defer during the fiscal crisis
of the mid-1970s.
Insulated From Harm
Even if BCB deputized outside arbitrators the members of its panels
risked losing future business if they made an award that either
the city or the unions concluded was too one-sided. Arbitrators
chosen by PERB, on the other hand, were more likely to make their
living from public-sector cases not involving the city. And not
incidentally, the PBA and UFA have politically supported Mr. Pataki,
the man who exerts the same kind of control over PERB that Mayors
could exercise with the BCB.
Muscle-flexing isn’t the most artful way to make your case.
But then, Mr. Cassidy isn’t looking to win style points. Echoing
a point previously made by some of his delegates, he contends last
week that the Mayor’s bargaining position suggested “we’re
not better than people who push paper. That’s a joke!”
This barb was aimed at DC 37, notwithstanding the fact that in
addition to its large contingent of members who are clerical employees,
that union also represents a wide variety of blue-collar titles,
not to mention social service Caseworker titles that, if not as
physically dangerous as firefighting, are at least as grueling emotionally.
It also skips over the fact that Mr. Cassidy’s members include
some who have non-firefighting assignments that, in fact, often
require them to “push paper.”
Consistency, however, is rarely coin-of-the-realm in bargaining
battles. If it were, you would not have Police Officers and Firefighters
in particular and, to a lesser extent, Teachers, marching and protesting
in solidarity just two years after the PBA made an arbitration case
that firefighters and Teachers were already being paid on a par
with other jurisdictions while its own members were vastly shortchanged.
Mr. Cassidy said last week that when Mr. Bloomberg has accused
union leaders of taking a tough stand in contract talks for their
own selfish political reasons, it has made his members angrier than
they already were about the city’s bargaining stance. Undoubtedly
that is true; the anger from the union leadership reflects rank-and-file
unhappiness with the DC 37 terms.
But union presidents win and lose elections based on the quality
of the contracts they negotiate, and Mr. Cassidy will be up for
re-election a few months before Mr. Bloomberg next year. And so
he will soldier on, counting on the political leverage he can exert
even beyond convention rallies right up through the November election,
and if that fails, on the precedent he believes Mr. Bloomberg handed
him and the UFA back when they were still on civil terms.
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