A Prayer for the City (28 page)

That night, after an elaborate shell game played to keep the media from finding out the chosen location, a lengthy negotiating session was held between the unions and the city. The following morning, seven and a half hours before the mayor’s deadline, the unions sent a proposal to Cohen. He perused it briefly and took note of some of the demands, such as wage increases of 8 percent over the life of the contract and $76 million in payments to the health and welfare fund. He then organized a little pool among the city negotiators to see who could come the closest to guessing the accumulated deficit such a proposal would create in the budget at the end of five years. (The correct answer was $340 million.)

“I’ve always asked you this question, and you’ve always evaded the answer,” said Rendell to Cohen. “What are they thinking?”

“It is not susceptible to an answer,” said Cohen.

As the hours to the deadline wound down, the pressure on Rendell was incalculable. Regardless of the tough talk over the past several months, he wanted a settlement, not a strike, but now more than ever he was prepared
for the worst. On the phone with an investment adviser from Pittsburgh, he was all too aware of what had recently happened there—acts of violence and horrific headlines as the result of a contentious newspaper strike. “I think the strike will be violent, and that will be bad for the city. Of course, you had your violence. It subsides, doesn’t it?”

Alternating between rage and an uncharacteristic twilight calm, he reacted to the pressures of the job the way he usually did, by going after those who were the most helpless and posed the least resistance. An innocent tailor was cursed with having to measure him for white tie and tails for a wedding. Scurrying in tow like a terrified mouse, he somehow managed to measure Rendell’s massive shoulders and inseam as the mayor gritted his teeth, slapped his hands, and stomped about the room. Away from the tailor, Rendell regained his composure, particularly when the reporter Scott Simon followed him around for a little while in preparation for a segment on the
Today
show.

“I’ve often wondered over the past several years why one with a promising future would want to be mayor?” Simon asked from the backseat of the mayor’s car.

As the car made a slow loop around City Hall, Rendell talked convincingly about the challenges of the job. He talked about how utterly bored he would be as a governor or a senator. He talked about how a mayor of a big city was always in the thick of the action. It was the perfect sound-bite answer, until he added one more thought. “I gotta tell you, I’m not sure how much of a promising future I had. If I hadn’t won this election, this would have been it.”

Simon gave a little gulping laugh and chose another line of questioning. So much for the mayor as sacrificial angel on behalf of the urban time bomb.

At 2:00
P.M.
, with three hours to go before the deadline, Cohen got a revised proposal from the unions so drastically different from the one he had received earlier that it suddenly reduced the accumulated deficit by $140 million. The abrupt turnaround by the unions was mystifying, but there was hope among the city negotiators that a settlement could still be reached.

“It’s not over yet,” said Davis.

“God only knows where we are,” said Cohen.

At 3:30
P.M.
, chief union negotiator Willig called Cohen’s office to speak to Davis. Asked for his reaction to the day’s initial union offer,
Davis was ravenously eager to comply, like a prisoner getting his first meal after a prolonged hunger strike.

“I can start from the top. We don’t like the wages. We don’t like the health care. When you’re talking about scheduling, transfers, working down, classification—all of that are things that we want and we need—there’s none of that in there.” He hung up, and his smile fell over the stone of City Hall like a meteor shower. “It’s conversations like that that make the whole six months worth it.”

At 4:07
P.M.
, fifty-three minutes before the deadline, Ginnie Lehoe, Cohen’s secretary, who worked almost as methodically as he did, typed up a letter from Davis to Sutton officially notifying him of the city’s rejection of the union’s proposals:

At 4:17
P.M.
, forty-three minutes before the deadline, Rendell called Street for one last update.

“There’s no chance, right?”

“They want to set something up.”

“When? We got forty-five minutes.”

Rendell seemed calm after he made his decision. But he knew that the contract he was implementing was so favorable to the city that it would inevitably back the unions into a desperate corner. Sensing his vulnerability, an aide to the mayor told him that articles and television news shows all over the country were depicting him as a hero for having the courage to face the unions head-on. He was clearly the new political flavor of the month at
The Wall Street Journal
. The
Chicago Tribune
had been in town. So had
U.S. News and World Report
, and many others would follow. But in the face of an ugly strike, those clips would be of little consolation.

The mordant sound of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” being played on a flute emanated from the City Hall courtyard through the open window of the mayor’s office. Of all the sounds from the courtyard, it was the only one that carried into the office, as if there were a certain destiny to it. The musician played the same song every day, so lonely in the pierce of its notes that it evoked one of two reactions—a desire to fling oneself into the courtyard or a desire to take the flute and break it over the head of the musician playing it. Rendell did neither. Instead, he tried to be as upbeat as possible. Speaking over the phone to Cohen, he fantasized about the possibility of a prolonged strike, during which he could temporarily dump the mayor’s job, get out of that teak-lined prison where everyone was trying to hold him hostage for something, and just go around the city collecting garbage. “Just think, if we had a three-week strike, I wouldn’t have to do any real work. I wouldn’t have to see any community groups. I wouldn’t have to go to any meetings. I wouldn’t have to give any speeches. It would be fabulous!

“Fuck it, I’m ready.”

The following night, Rendell and Street got on the phone to each other and went through the elaborate choreography of the mayor begrudgingly giving in on two outstanding issues: one involving the use of prison inmates for volunteer work and the other an agreement to notify the union of the intent to contract out any work that cost more than $10,000. Rendell was convincing in expressing his reluctance, in showing how much it killed him to give up on these two issues. It was vintage Rendell, and it was also a vintage bit of Rendell acting. Before the call, the mayor and the city council president had agreed to give up on these issues. But they also assumed that Sutton and Willig would be listening to the conversation, since Street was calling from the union camp. The mayor and the council president went through the charade to give Sutton the opportunity to report to his union membership that he had faced down the mayor on these two pivotal issues. So close did the mayor and Street feel to a settlement, a settlement that would be incredible for the city, that one of their primary worries had become how they could make Sutton look like a union president who had shown some backbone and not like a union president who had flung away his membership. They knew he needed victories, something he could take back to the executive board as a show of toughness, and they were trying to feed them to him. Along the same lines, the mayor also agreed to a union request that former labor secretary Ray Marshall come to Philadelphia,
go through the transparent act of bringing the two sides together, and then proclaim the contract a fair one. The way the plan would work, according to city negotìators, was that Marshall would meet with the mayor for a grand total of five minutes, but his presence in the city would give Sutton further strength with his executive board.

Despite the flurry, there was still no settlement by Friday. During the previous three nights, Cohen had slept a total of three hours, but he seemed utterly unaffected by the deprivation. As he told someone over the phone, “Actually I don’t feel too bad.”

Despite the sense of optimism that everyone on the city side felt, Cohen was still the ultimate realist. “There’s actually a lot that’s agreed to,” he told the mayor. “The problem is they are so unhappy with what they’ve agreed to, moving a comma at this point is enough to make them throw up their hands and say the hell with it.”

Early that afternoon, Rendell, Cohen, and Street convened around the table in the mayor’s office. Street was hunched over the table, clearly luxuriating in his role as go-between for the city and the unions, the perfect man in the middle. “I like this shit,” he said at one point, sounding like the Robert Duvall character in
Apocalypse Now
waxing enthusiastic over the smell of napalm in the morning. Expansive in private in a way that he almost never was in public, he told a story about his son, how he had lost count of the number of laps in a track-meet relay and so had stopped in the middle. The more he exposed his son’s utter confusion, the happier he became, and by the end, tears of laughter were running down his face. He told another story about the city councilman named David Cohen, admitting that he didn’t have the heart to yell at him since he was old and somewhat frail. “I don’t want to be responsible for him having a heart attack,” said Street, and he continued in his unique vein.

“I did that once.”

Rendell and Cohen nodded.

Through the open window came the sound of “Amazing Grace” from the courtyard flutist.

“Fuck him!”

Street was referring to Tom Cronin, the head of District Council 47.

“He’s a piece of shit.”

Rendell and Cohen nodded.

Street was angry with Cronin for his general bombast as well as for blasting proposed efforts by Street and Rendell to reform the city’s charter. Street said he had once worn the same style straw hat that Cronin fancied
but then gave it up when someone from a distance mistook him for the union leader. Now he was reveling in the fact that Cronin, as head of a major union in the city, was being virtually shut out of the negotiations. “Crone Pain-in is being subjected to a humiliation that is completely justified,” said Street.

“He’s getting paid back for shit that he did.”

Rendell and Cohen nodded.

Street estimated that there were still nineteen issues the unions and the city had not resolved. But he was supremely confident they could be resolved. “There is no way this thing shouldn’t be done today,” he said.

Cohen showed the same sense of urgency, born not out of confidence but out of a feeling that it was only a matter of time before the unions would wake up to the reality of what they were doing. “We really should aim to get it done today. The longer it sits, the worse it smells.”

“What?” asked Street.

“This deal.”

And quite clearly there were some within the unions who were the embodiment of Cohen’s very fears. The day of implementation of the city’s final offer, Rendell had sent a letter to all city employees, outlining the administration’s position on the negotiations. The letter was humane and decent, expressing sadness and regret that the negotiations had escalated to such a point. Several days later his office received a message for the mayor that had been scribbled in raw and stilted print on the back of one of the letters:

Ten days later the unions and the city were
still
negotiating, still attempting to effect the terms of a surrender. Progress was being made, but it was slow and inchlike, fraught with paranoia and suspicion—not to mention that from a union perspective this contract, if actually agreed to, would likely go down as the worst ever in terms of public-employee bargaining. Or as Cohen told the mayor in one of his status updates on the union’s approach,
“This is half my labor negotiations. This person can’t meet with that person. We have to talk about that issue, but not with this person.” Every time a settlement seemed within reach, the union backtracked or stalled or came up with a totally different proposal snatched from the mists, and city negotiators became convinced that the strategy of the unions was exactly the same as it had been since the end of June—to stall and obfuscate and pray for some sort of natural disaster that might kill Rendell and Cohen and Davis and all the rest of those bastards.

It got so bizarre that the union lawyers did not even show up for the hearing on their request for an injunction against implementation of the city’s final offer. Their absence made no sense to Rendell, and he, like virtually everyone else, was growing frazzled. “Part of me says if they’re not serious about [the court case], go on strike and get the fucker over with.” But inch by inch, progress had been made, to the point where there was confidence that the economic issues had largely been settled. Under the tentatively agreed upon new four-year contract, there would be no wage increases in the first two years, a 2 percent increase in the third year, and a 3 percent increase in the fourth year; a contribution of $360 a month per employee to the health and welfare fund; and an up-front lump-sum payment of $39 million to District Council 33. All in all it was a remarkably favorable deal for the city, close to what had been asked for initially, and in past negotiations it would have been cause for celebration. But the commitment that Rendell had made to Alan Davis and the rest of the negotiation team over the summer had stood, and the non-economic issues, instead of being given away, were still being negotiated with ferocity. Among the myriad of issues, significant differences still existed over the city’s right to lay off workers as well as the city’s right to contract out work.