ew York City police officers are reacting with surprise about the recent collective bargaining agreement. They didn’t expect that the union would be able to negotiate a contract so quickly on the heels of this PBA administration’s third arbitration in as many rounds of bargaining. And they were even more surprised that any agreement at all could have been negotiated in light of the PBA’s past relationship with the city.

But the PBA leadership wasn’t surprised. It saw the negotiated settlement as the culmination of a strategy established back in 1999, right after the Lynch administration took office. It was a multi-faceted approach executed in painstaking detail over the better part of a decade, investing enough resources to counter the city’s powerful campaign to defeat the PBA and its effort to restore an environment at the negotiating table where New York City’s police officers’ unique compensation issues would be recognized.

The strategy’s bottom-line was the understanding that a favorable agreement could only be negotiated when the city finally realized that it was in its best interests to do so. That’s why the PBA rejected the strategy pursued by other unions —that personal relationships alone could persuade the city to do what it viewed as not in its own interest.

Space does not allow us to enumerate every decision and effort we expended to open the door for a negotiated contract, so we will attempt to describe some of the most significant steps along the way, keeping in mind that the PBA leadership discussed and agonized over contract issues virtually every day over an almost 10-year period.

When this administration arrived at the PBA, the leadership understood fairly quickly that, given the city’s 1990s success in suppressing police officers’ wages, the city wouldn’t voluntarily agree to move police officers’ salaries towards market and that below-inflation raises and real salary decreases would continue to be the city’s long-term goal in negotiating with the PBA. When the PBA presented the city with voluminous data demonstrating the lack of competitive pay, the city was unmoved. The leadership also understood that the city had achieved its 1990s wage-negotiating successes by securing the cooperation of its own Office of Collective Bargaining (OCB) arbitration panels.

Those panels performed in lockstep with the city’s wishes, despite being presented with evidence of the substantial pay inadequacies of New York City police officers.

Realizing it would never get the city to agree to an acceptable contract at the table, and knowing that the entity charged with resolving impasses in the event the parties were unable to reach agreement at the table would not favorably resolve issues for the PBA, the leadership’s first stop was securing the right to get its impasses in bargaining resolved under the administration of a different entity, the state labor agency, PERB, and its arbitrators. The belief was that, if the city was unable to impose its will wholesale on the state agency arbitrators, as it had done with the city agency’s, it would at some point be viewed by the city as in its best interest to come to the table and negotiate.

That’s why the so-called PERB bill became the PBA’s legislative and litigation priority. That bill was passed in 1996 and found unconstitutional after the city’s legal challenge. It was rewritten to address the constitutional issues, then reintroduced, enacted by the state legislature and signed by the governor on December 18, 1998. The city’s subsequent legal challenges led to one of the most important judicial battles this organization has ever waged.

The city prepared to file its challenge in New York County Supreme Court. The PBA, aware of the prior negative outcome in that court and the perceived influence the city exercises over local courts, filed its action in Albany County.

Working virtually around-the-clock to prepare court papers, the PBA filed first, beating the city literally by minutes, and ensuring that the case would be resolved in the friendlier and more objective forum of Albany County. And that, as they say, made all the difference. Albany Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality.

The city appealed. Because the trial court had been in Albany, the case went to the Appellate Division, Third Department, rather than the city-friendly Appellate Division, First Department. Again, the PBA prevailed. The city then appealed to the state’s highest tribunal, the State Court of Appeals. There, on far narrower grounds, the court again sided with the PBA and upheld the law’s constitutionality, laying the foundation for the union’s first PERB arbitration.

But the city wasn’t done yet. By employing a tactic called “scoping,” the city attempted unilaterally to remove provisions from the PBA’s contract. In arbitrations a decade earlier, the city had used the tactic to deprive firefighters and others of key contractual provisions, and it continued to wield the tactic as a club intended to deter unions from seeking arbitration.

The city took the position that scoping issues remained within the purview of OCB, while the PBA asserted that, once impasse was reached, PERB was the legal arbiter of all bargaining issues.

This was key for the unions because PERB had a more favorable standard that would prevent the city from pulling provisions out of a contract that were not mandatory but nevertheless important to unions.

Although the PBA was confronted in the proceeding with statements from the mid-1990’s by its past leadership that, in effect, agreed that scoping issues would be resolved at OCB, the PBA again prevailed. All scoping issues would be resolved in the state forum, depriving the city of a significant deterrent to the union’s use of arbitration.

At the same time, anticipating that the PBA would pursue PERB arbitration, the city tried another tactic to impose its will on the bargaining process. It reached agreement with a coalition of other uniformed unions providing 5%, 5% and 1.5% (in extra non-wage compensation) increases over a 30- month period. Recognizing that 5% increases were historically at the top end of what PERB panels would award on wage increases, the city apparently believed that no PERB panel would award the PBA more — in other words, that PERB would uphold patternbargaining and give the PBA exactly the same.

Pattern bargaining was an artifice the city had used to great effect for a decade to artificially suppress the New York City police officers’ pay, and it was an attempt to nullify the PERB arbitration forum for New York City police officers (and all others eligible to use that forum). So, in effect, the city’s bargaining strategy for that round — both for civilians and other uniformed unions — was structured with the goal of defeating the PBA and neutering the PERB option for all other police and fire unions.

As a result, in that first bargaining round under PERB, the city was offering in 30 months almost half of the 20+% it had given all unions in raises in the entire 1990’s.

In the next issue of The PBA Magazine, we will discuss the PBA’s perception of the city’s bargaining strategy in the first and subsequent PERB rounds, the PBA’s efforts to confront the city’s strategies, the resulting arbitration awards and related issues, and the confluence of efforts that resulted in the PBA’s first negotiated agreement in almost two decades.