The Streets Were Paved with Gold (53 page)

The total cost of these demands, said the city, came to about $750 million extra just for the 18,000 members of the PBA. At the beginning of the negotiations, in March 1978, the Koch administration countered the PBA’s demands with its own list of “give-back” demands. At the end of the negotiations, in July, the city once again “gave in.” Each cop was offered a two-year 8 percent pay boost, or about $2,400. In addition, each would continue to receive a cost-of-living adjustment of about $1,200 annually. The holiday and night differential pay—which Koch pledged to eliminate—rose to match higher salaries. As was true of previous contracts, the city agreed to pay more for less work. City Hall offered to “give back” six chart days off in exchange for lengthening the average daily tour of duty by twenty minutes. Thus a cop would work eight hours and thirty-five minutes daily. Koch claimed cops would still be required to work 2,088 hours annually, so this represented no diminution of police service. But as the city learned when Lindsay granted chart days off in return for fifteen minutes of daily “briefing time,” these extra minutes cannot match six lost days of work.

“It’s a total capitulation,” complained one city negotiator. “Deputy Mayor Zuccotti went through a miserable summer but refused to budge and give back any chart days off. His successor, Don Kummerfeld, wouldn’t give in. Abe Beame, as miserable as he was, at least held the line, refusing to ‘give back’ any chart days. The cops pissed on his lawn, and he took it. Now Koch gives in without a fight.” True, Koch sought and won some changes—the police gave up their day off for donating blood, and their three annual training days at the Police Academy would be replaced by twenty-four one-hour sessions in the station house. But after PBA
delegates twice rejected the pleas of their leaders to support the contract proferred by the city, and after rowdy police demonstrators blocked the delivery of the
Daily News
to protest their sensible editorials, Koch sweetened the pot. He withdrew the city’s demand for a curb on sick day abusers and a provision giving precinct commanders authority to schedule more police during high-crime periods. Both of these demands had earlier been accepted by the leadership of the police union.

The negotiations ended the way most previous negotiations had. Deputy Mayor for Labor Relations Basil Paterson, who acted more like a mediator than an advocate throughout, announced, “There are no winners or losers in collective bargaining.” Pressed by reporters, Mayor Koch, lacking his usual ebullience, declared, “I do not feel that we have caved in.” True, the number of scheduled police hours did not go down. But it was a cave-in because the number of productive police hours did go down. Within days, police officials conceded the pact would result in an average loss of seventy-five cops daily. The important point is that the long-term trend of reduced police coverage continued. To have won a “victory” for the taxpayers, as Koch promised in his campaign, the city would have had to persuade police officers to work more days—not fewer, not even the same number—each year.

The demands made by the Municipal Labor Committee, representing over 200,000 workers whose contracts expired on June 30, 1978, were not as absurd, though Mayor Koch’s behavior was. Like John Lindsay, Koch would prove to be an amateur at the bargaining table—leader of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The jockeying began during the campaign when Koch declared there was no money for pay raises. “The municipal labor unions will no longer run this city,” he announced often. On November 1, 1977, during a mayoral debate sponsored by
The New York Times
, Koch linked the transit and all other labor negotiations, claiming that “whatever is negotiated by the Transit Authority … will be the bottom line for all other contracts.” In March, the Mayor released a list of sixty-one “give-back” demands and said any pay increase for municipal workers would have to be financed from these because he would “not extend the deficit.” The unions parried, demanding a 12 percent pay increase plus new fringe benefits. Koch, sharing Lindsay’s penchant for theatrical poses, said their demands were “outrageous.” In truth, the unions knew the Mayor was posing; the new mayor did not know he was. In December 1977,
a major city labor leader told this reporter, “Don’t quote me, but I would be glad to settle for a straight 6 percent.” That would have been 6 percent for two years. But Koch’s public bluster, like Lindsay’s, hardened their demands, bringing greater membership pressure on union leaders to humiliate their City Hall foe.

Which is what they did. In April, thinking the transit settlement too rich to extend to the other city unions, Koch suddenly denied saying what everyone knew he had said. “There is no linkage” between transit and the other contracts, he now professed. Justifiably enraged, D.C. 37’s Victor Gotbaum called Koch “a bald-faced liar.” “It was,” says Alan Viani, one of D.C. 37’s negotiators, “like having two kids and saying to one, ‘Here’s an ice-cream cone,’ then turning to the other and saying, ‘You can’t have one.’ ” After the Mayor’s turnaround, and because many workers felt he made them scapegoats, Viani and his fellow negotiators were put in a box. “I’ve never seen such disdain for a mayor as I’ve seen at our delegates’ meeting,” he said. “It makes it very difficult for us.”

And Koch made it difficult for himself. Like Lindsay, he promised to come to the bargaining table prepared. He was not. The public would pay for his education. And that of Deputy Mayor for Finance Philip Toia, who told me in June that the negotiations were “a fascinating experience. I learned to lot.” Koch and Toia started by saying there was no money in the fiscal 1979 and 1980 budgets for raises. When the professionals on the union side found temporary cash “surpluses”—additional federal aid and underspending by city agencies, for instance—they began to smell blood. “Koch is already at a higher level than he could have been at,” claimed one city negotiator in early June. “We could have settled for 6 percent if the city had leveled with us in March. Koch turned to Toia and said, ‘Look, I’m the mayor. Tell me what we have to pay for a labor settlement.’ Toia said we had nothing. So as time went on and the unions pulled more and more out of Toia, they got tougher.”

And the price got higher. By May, the same candidate who denounced Mayor Beame for “pulling a rabbit out of his hat” when Beame discovered $1 billion in 1976 to pay off moratorium noteholders, suddenly fleeced $757 million from the city’s budget to pay for a two-year settlement. Under pressure to complete a contract before the start of Senate hearings on the city’s loan legislation, a subdued Mayor Koch, on June 5, announced his unconditional surrender. The contract, he said, called for an 8 percent pay rate raise over two years, but because the city postponed the dates these
raises would begin, over the two years workers would actually receive 6.7 percent in real money. At the start of their next contract period, however, their pay rate will be up 8 percent. In addition, workers won a continuation of their COLA I payments, being raised to an average of $441 per year (from $395). In place of COLA II, the city agreed to drop the productivity requirement and grant each worker an annual “bonus” of $750—$78 more than they received in fiscal 1978 and $550 more than they received in 1977.

Appearing before Senator Proxmire’s Banking Committee on June 6, Koch held aloft a copy of the
Times
front-page story by Jerry Flint. The settlement was, he quoted approvingly, “an enormous achievement”—only 6 percent. (He later amended this to 6.7 percent.) Koch was assuming, as did Flint and others, that since the cost-of-living adjustments were continuations of previously won benefits, they should not be counted as part of the pay hike. Supposedly, they did not represent new money. But they did. The $1,500 in productivity “bonuses” workers would receive over the next two years was $628 more than they received in 1977 and 1978, when they were required to demonstrate productivity improvements.

As is often the case in these matters, it pays to wait until the dust clears and the press’s attention shifts elsewhere, then study the contract as viewed by the workers. The city traditionally understates the cost of contracts. D.C. 37’s point of view was presented in a circular to their membership—“Terms of the Wage Pact.” They claimed the pact called for a 15.84 percent “pay rate” raise. In an accompanying chart, the union explained that they arrived at this total by adding a 4 percent pay raise the first year, 4.34 percent the second, and the annual $750 bonus (7.5%). A worker earning $10,000 in June 1978, they said, would receive an even higher percentage in “actual cash”—an additional $2,525 over the two years. According to Teamsters leader Barry Feinstein, “There is a minimum salary increase of $2,663 in this contract for you.” According to
The Chief
, the newspaper that is the bible of civil service workers, “For an employee with three or more years of service the additional cash or so called “grocery money” over the two year period adds up to $3,279.50.”

This is only part of the cost. The Koch administration also agreed to abandon all its sixty-one “give-back” demands—including uniform allowances for those who don’t wear uniforms, the proposed forty-hour work week, the elimination of excessive sick
days, heat days off and restrictive work rules. “The real question is whether in the context of reality … could I get, without a strike, the give-backs?” Koch told Proxmire’s Committee. What about “give-backs”? “I don’t think there is anything else that could be given back,” Jack Bigel astonishingly told the Committee. In reality, City Hall did more than “give in” on the “give-backs.” Union negotiators actually maneuvered The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight to make “give-backs.” As a result of the agreement, the city administration consented to “give back”: