PBA OUT-OF-BOUNDS ON OCB

PBA Out-Of-Bounds on OCB

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch, who recently took on other police union brethren with a lengthy dissertation questioning their bargaining strategies and their political courage, last week lashed out again, this time at the Office of Collective Bargaining.

In this case, Mr. Lynch took umbrage at the ruling by OCB's adjudicative arm, the Board of Collective Bargaining, that Mayor Bloomberg did not commit an improper labor practice when he suggested two years ago that Police Officers would do better in bargaining if they chose new leadership.

The BCB's ruling was not a surprise for a couple of reasons. At the time, the PBA and the Uniformed Firefighters' Association, both seeking more in bargaining than Mr. Bloomberg was willing to offer, were organizing informational pickets at the Mayor's public appearances which featured at least as much heckling as information.

If the administration's responses - from Mr. Bloomberg's remarks on his radio show to the characterization by then-Press Secretary Ed Skyler of the protesters as "thugs" - weren't exactly gracious, they were nonetheless consistent with the tone established by the unions. And so there should have been no shock to the BCB's finding that the Mayor's comments "were an understandable response" to the union campaign.

From a practical standpoint, Mr. Lynch has good reason to know that Mr. Bloomberg's suggestion to his rank and file wasn't likely to jeopardize his own political future. Union members who are frustrated with the way they are treated by management are not inclined to give much credence to advice from the boss, and the PBA president benefited from that reality when he was first elected.

Back in 1999, when Mr. Lynch was the only one of the four candidates seeking the PBA presidency who was not a veteran of the union's executive board, then-police Commissioner Howard Safir spoke glowingly of another candidate, Jim Higgins. His praise was echoed by Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, a key adviser to then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Their endorsements impressed PBA members so much that Mr. Higgins finished dead last in that election.

And so a case could be made that the PBA leader would have done well to regard Mr. Bloomberg's criticism as something that wouldn't hurt him with his rank and file and might even help him. Instead, he took the issue to OCB, had it treated no more seriously than it deserved to be, and now is trumpeting the ruling as a sign that the city's mediation office is in the tank.

Mr. Lynch issued a statement last week saying, "The Office of Collective Bargaining is supposed to be impartial, but the steady stream of anti-union rulings demonstrates that it is not," he said. "In practice, OCB is an arm of the Mayor's Office of Labor Relations."

If that were true, then how is it that in the last significant case involving the PBA before the BCB, the board disallowed Mr. Safir's attempt to pay a special differential to cops without negotiating the terms and conditions with the union?

This isn't the first time that the PBA has questioned the BCB's objectivity. The initial attack came 21 years ago, when then-PBA President Phil Caruso and his attorney, Richie Hartman, orchestrated an attack by other uniformed union leaders. They claimed the BCB had been cowed by Mayor Ed Koch's blocking the reappointment of two of its members a few years earlier because they ruled against the Mayor and ordered the payment of raises that city workers had deferred during the fiscal crisis.

There was a certain element of hypocrisy in the PBA puppet show back then: Mr. Caruso was charging that Mr. Koch had succeeded in intimidating the BCB while simultaneously throwing his whole-hearted support behind the Mayor's reelection. Why back someone if you believed they had damaged your bargaining position? In retrospect, the hoariness of that spectacle would grow: Mr. Hartman's later criminal conviction for paying off another police union leader in return for business made a grotesque joke of his having been responsible for questioning anybody else's integrity.

Mr. Lynch, like Mr. Caruso before him, has the difficult task of representing members whose on-the-job frustrations are compounded by the belief that they are not adequately compensated for the stressful work that they perform so well. Costly contract arbitrations, even after the PBA succeeded in moving them from the jurisdiction of the BCB to the state Public Employment Relations Board, have done little to address the disparity between salaries for city cops and those working in Nassau and Suffolk counties.

So it may serve some political purpose for Mr. Lynch to vent his frustration about the situation he finds himself in by unloading on OCB. It is not helpful to the city bargaining process, however, to raise unfounded questions about the fairness of the municipal office that resolves labor disputes.

The professional sports leagues impose huge fines, and sometimes suspensions, on players, coaches and owners who criticize the calls by officials, even in cases where they appear to have justification for doing so. The reasoning behind those penalties is simple: if the public begins believing a sport has an integrity problem - as opposed to an occasional error in judgment - its financial health is likely to decline.

Such sanctions are not part of the city bargaining process. But Mr. Lynch is way out of line on this one, and his careless comments reflect more on him than on the BCB.