A Prayer for the City (24 page)

The meeting took place in Rendell’s family room. The mayor wore an aqua Lacoste shirt and gray running pants, and was eating Chinese food out of four different containers with such frantic and rapacious desire that it was difficult to know, from a purely medical standpoint, how food could travel that fast into the human body without doing severe harm. He was the only one eating, except for his dog, Woofie, who, lying on the floor next to him, took whatever morsels his master was willing to part with. The mayor graciously asked the others whether they were hungry, but given the appearance of things, they responded in a way that suggested they would rather go to their cars and drain the motor oil.

On a one-to-one basis with the unions, Rendell was as affable as ever, just a day earlier OK’ing the use of a platform at a union rally whose very purpose, as he himself put it, was to “beat up on Ed.” “Why create ill will?”
said Rendell when the request was made. “It doesn’t do shit.” But privately he had vowed to “crush” the unions if he thought they were stalling on a settlement, and now it was clear that he meant it.

“The fact-finding was the Rubicon for me,” he said. And this wasn’t just a war of leaks now. In the war of the unions, no weaponry would be banned. The injection and heightening of racial divisiveness among the different unions, the purposeful pitting of union against union so that members of one would begin to hate members of another, the ceaseless ratcheting up of layoff notices, notices of the city’s intent to privatize certain time-honored union functions—every conceivable piece of ammunition was being fed into the cannons now.

Technically there were four unions negotiating with the city. But in terms of negotiations, only two counted, the Fraternal Order of Police and District Council 33, which represented the city’s blue-collar workforce. There was an obvious difference between the two unions in terms of the jobs their members performed. There was also a significant difference in the city’s bargaining strategy toward each of them: District Council 33 had a right to strike, but under state law the police department did not. Instead, unresolved issues on a new contract for the police would be decided by arbitration. There was yet another distinct difference, not articulated but obvious, and as far as some city negotiators were concerned, it could prove a wonderful source of leverage—race.

The head of the FOP, the silver-maned and barrel-chested John Shaw, was whiter than white. So were most of his union’s members. The mayor, of course, was white, and so were all the members of his negotiating team. Conversely, Sutton, the head of District Council 33, was black, and so was the vast majority of his union’s members.

City negotiators assumed that such racial dynamics terrified District Council 33. And one of the keys, as they told the mayor that night, was to stoke those fears to the hilt—give District Council 33 the distinct impression that the mayor, a white mayor, was about to cut a favorable deal with a union head, a white union head, and with the police force, a predominantly white police force, and then take from District Council 33’s hide, a predominantly black hide, whatever it didn’t get in terms of givebacks from the police.

“They are afraid that you are going to cut a deal,” Davis asserted. “You’re white, and John Shaw is white. And [District Council] Thirty-three is black. They fear that they are going to lose their jobs to a cabal between you and John Shaw. It’s a wonderful mind-set.”

In the meantime, there was universal agreement that the machinery of layoff notices should start in earnest on all fronts, with all the notices leaked in various stages through the media to whip up as much hysteria and frenzy among the unions as possible. The strategy called not for just one layoff bomb, but a series of smaller ones, with different numbers of workers laid off each time, leaving virtually every worker in the city in dread and fear as to whether his name or her name would be included in the next round. “Think of all the leaks that come with this,” said Davis. “You have all kinds of stages of pressure.”

The machinery for contracting out union work had to start up as well—not just the little ticket items that the unions might not even care about very much but the big ticket items, the items that the unions had always considered sacrosanct. As a result, Davis urged the mayor to approve sending District Council 33 notification of the city’s intent to contract out sanitation to private companies.

Sanitation?

To District Council 33, that was the same as challenging the existence of God. Of all union functions, none was more inviolable than sanitation, and the idea of a mayor even remotely challenging it, going after it, was just another example of the lunacy threshold. Was he willing to suffer the waves of physical confrontation that would inevitably sweep the city if the sanitation workers, virtually all of them black, found themselves put out of their jobs by a white mayor? On the other hand, if the mayor was serious about achieving fundamental change in the government regardless of the consequences, how could he give up a potential annual savings of as much as $30 million a year?

“I definitely think we should send it out,” said Davis.

“There’s no way we’re going to do it,” the mayor acknowledged, realizing full well that his nickname was Fast Eddie, not Crazy Eddie.

“But they don’t know that,” said Davis.

The mayor pondered Davis’s comment for a moment. As he sat in his family room in his aqua Lacoste shirt and gray running pants, he found himself surrounded by some of the things in life he liked the very best—the razor-sharp minds of men completely loyal to him; exhausted cartons of food; his loyal dog, Woofie, at his feet after another fine meal. Without articulating it, he saw the beauty of what Davis was saying.

How could the unions predict his behavior? How could anyone predict his behavior even at this very moment, when in the midst of one of the
most important meetings of his political career, with the future of the city balancing on the pinpoint of a pyramid, he mused aloud on the topic of death and concluded that “given his proclivities,” his role model for such an exit was Nelson Rockefeller.

He told Davis to go ahead and send out the notice informing the union that its most precious commodity—garbage—was eventually going to be picked up by private hands.

The following day the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board approved the sixty-day period for fact-finding for the nonuniformed unions. Negotiations could continue, but there could not be a strike until the end of August at the earliest. True to the strategy that had been embraced at the meeting at the mayor’s house, Cohen then spent the weekend hammering out a series of agreements for a new contract with FOP head Shaw. The agreements were minor, the kinds of concessions the city knew it would have to give up in arbitration anyway, but that wasn’t the way they were cast to the media at a press conference the following Monday. The agreements were presented as major, and Shaw himself was depicted as a union man of reason and integrity and honor. The appearance of a white mayor and a white union leader standing together and congratulating each other on their ability to work with each other toward the common goal of a new contract was hardly subtle, and it was aimed directly at the black membership of District Council 33.

“I think they’ll be scared to death,” said Cohen.

But if they were scared, they had a funny way of displaying it. Several hours later as many as five thousand union members gathered at a massive rally on Dilworth Plaza in front of City Hall. The day was hot and sunny, lugubrious and slow, the way most summer days in the city were, but there was an edgy and excited mood to the crowd that transcended the heat. Union leaders spoke one after the other, none of them more powerfully than Jim Sutton.

Ed Rendell has shown that he has no respect for the labor movement! We intend to make him have respect! If he can’t do anything else, he will hear this crowd, he will see around.

We intend to fight with every ounce of strength that we have in our bodies. And I say to you, Ed Rendell, if you think that L.A. had a bad time, mess with District Council Thirty-three.

If you don’t play by the rules, we will take whatever action we have to take!

Sutton was posturing, as all union leaders posture in the heat of battle when playing to the rank and file, but there was something in his voice that had never been there before. Rendell had always considered Sutton something of a soft heart when it came to union leaders, at one point half-jokingly suggesting in private that he was going to have to teach Sutton to “beat up on [Rendell] a little bit more” to make him seem more credible to his own union. But as Sutton spoke now, his voice rising sharply over the soup of the afternoon heat, it was clear he didn’t need any training.

The crowd erupted, and in that moment the strength and the solidarity of the unions seemed greater than they ever had before, coming together as a potent force that would neither bend nor break under the city’s artillery shells and campaign of propaganda and injections of race, even if it meant riots in the streets. Somehow, some way, Fast Eddie would be brought to his knees, cowed and bloodied.

“No contract! No peace!”
someone in the crowd yelled. Another voice picked it up, and suddenly it became a rousing chorus:

No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace!

The chant continued as union workers blocked traffic and walked around the nape of City Hall with their arms interlocked and their fists held high.

No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace!

As the workers marched, another chant started up:

Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

As Rendell waited for an elevator on the second floor of City Hall, he watched the rally making its slow circle. He just stared silently, without giving his usual broadcaster-like commentary—one of those rare moments when he seemed to have a need for privacy and introspection and the sorting
out of conflicting emotions. He wore a kind of weakly bemused smile, as if it were hard to imagine that he, a man who had spent so much of his life getting people to like him by coddling them and sucking up to them and suffering all fools gladly, had somehow managed to whip up such a frenzy of hate. He later claimed that the remarks and the chants didn’t bother him at all, that they were all part of the war of the unions. But it wasn’t true, and the look of Ed Rendell as he peered out that grimy window by the elevator was the look of a man trying bravely to remain calm, trying to be a politician and not a person and not take personally the attacks being heaped on him.

Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

As he lumbered onto the elevator, the chants of those below him reverberated and echoed.

Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

A
lan Davis had privately worried that it would happen, perhaps because he was a seasoned fatalist with the wisdom of Merlin and the doe-eyed sadness of Marcel Marceau, but also perhaps because he knew better than anyone else in the city the delectable temptation to dance and deal. Fifty-five years old, Davis had long been a keen observer of city labor negotiations, and it was his unvarnished perception that mayor after mayor had consistently
traded long-term gains for short-term ones, economic issues always taking precedence over the non-economic ones, the ones that over time could truly change a city’s destiny. He had no illusions about politics, and he understood the impulse that had guided other mayors. So why should Ed Rendell be any different, particularly when it seemed as if the war of the unions might drag on forever, past June now and into July, when most citizens had the wise sense to flee for the Jersey shore and the city had all the energy of a drooping eyelid, barely able to keep itself awake.

Davis’s perception was based not just on observation but on active participation. As the city solicitor in the early 1980s under Mayor William J. Green, Davis had negotiated for the city in nasty labor disputes with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. It was also during the Green administration that nearly a thousand police officers and firefighters were laid off to close a budget deficit. “We traded work rules for economics in the early eighties, and I was ashamed of it,” said Davis. It was an incomplete part of his agenda, and when Rendell asked him to serve as the city’s chief labor negotiator, Davis, despite the comfort of his practice at Ballard Spahr that made him one of the most respected lawyers in the city, accepted the challenge. Although almost diminutive in appearance, he was hardly a lightweight. Labor negotiations with the schoolteachers had resulted in two strikes, and regional commuter-train lines went dark for four months when he represented the transit system. “I would like to make love, not war,” he told an interviewer, but union leaders who dealt with him in the past could only figure that he had his fingers crossed when he said that.