POLICE PAY-PROBLEM POLITICS

Razzle-Dazzle

Police Pay-Problem Politics

Ray Kelly has a problem: the starting salary for Police Officers.

Pat Lynch has a variation on that problem: the salary for Police Officers already on the job. And while as a career cop the Police Commissioner may feel an added sense of responsibility to pay new officers well enough to ensure that he's attracting good candidates, the PBA president feels the direct pressure of accountability from his rank-and-file, with an election looming next spring.

That difference explains why, while some of their public statements create the impression they're locking arms in common cause, they're in an adversarial position as the PBA seeks a new contract to replace the one that expired 22 months ago.

Working on Different Timetables

Mr. Kelly would like that contract settled tomorrow, provided it boosts the pay scale for new officers enough to no longer be an embarrassment. That desire was reflected in a Bloomberg administration pay offer two weeks ago that undoes much of the damage inflicted on the "unborn" by a PBA arbitration award last June that used the resulting savings to grant two 5-percent raises to cops already on the job.

SEPARATE REALITIES ON PAY ISSUE: Police Commissioner Ray Kelly (left) wants the pay scale for new cops significantly increased immediately to help recruitment. But Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch appears to have concluded that his best hope of winning re-election is through a contract arbitration process that would likely take long enough to force the next two classes of rookies to receive the sharply reduced starting salary produced in last year's arbitration. Bloomberg administration officials believe that Mr. Lynch, on the other hand, would be happy if there was still no contract by this time next year, regardless of how that might affect NYPD hiring. There are two reasons for that belief. Each succeeding police class that the NYPD struggles to fill because the current pay schedule is in effect adds pressure on the city to boost its offer in order to get a deal. And from a political standpoint, Mr. Lynch might be better off with no deal than one his members consider inadequate when they vote on whether to give him another four-year term.

The basic pattern for uniformed employees has already been set for the two-year period at issue here. Unions representing Firefighters, Correction Officers, Sanitation Workers and Detectives have all accepted raises of 3 percent and 3.15 percent. Given the historic parity relationship between Police Officers and Firefighters, that would seem to suggest there's no way out of the pattern-bargaining box for Mr. Lynch, even if he chooses, as he did during his previous two contract rounds, to pursue an arbitration case.

One veteran official from another union put it this way: "That parity is so strong that there isn't an arbitrator that's going to be willing to break it."

Correction Officers' Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook two weeks ago explained his decision not to play out the string in hope of a miracle by saying that "to continue to wait for other unions to negotiate their contracts where at the end of the day everyone ends up with the same thing doesn't make any sense to me."

He has a security blanket to ward off the chill that might ensue if he has calculated wrong: a reopener clause that would allow him to seek additional raises for his members if the PBA winds up breaking the pattern "outside the collective-bargaining process." (That means if the Legislature were to provide a pot of money for police salary increases that exceeded the pattern, the other uniformed unions would have the right to try to recapture parity for this bargaining round. A PBA windfall in arbitration, on the other hand, would fall within the realm of the collective-bargaining process.)

A Blizzard of Paperwork

Mr. Lynch, in contrast to the COBA leader, is not close to ready to bow to the conventional wisdom and accept the "pattern" deal. Instead, he and his lawyers have served the Bloomberg administration with several summons books worth of requests for information on matters ranging from all communications between the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget and city and state agencies to the recruitment and retention data for agencies as far afield as the Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Buildings Department.

Lieutenant's Benevolent Association President Tony Garvey, apprised of some of the materials Mr. Lynch had requested, declined to speculate on his motivation but remarked, "If I was looking to delay [contract talks], I would be requesting minutiae from the city on issues not necessarily germane to the bargaining process."

City officials, none of whom was willing to speak for attribution, describe the data requests as an extended fishing trip on a cruise toward arbitration. They theorize that, much as President Bush used Iraq during his re-election campaign to argue that you don't change Commanders-in-Chief in mid-battle, Mr. Lynch plans to make a similar argument if the arbitration case is still slogging along at the time that PBA members vote a year from now.

If that scenario comes to pass, it's likely that the next three police classes will be filled - and that word is used advisedly - with recruits who ignored the paltry starting salary for a job that includes life-threatening activities. Beyond the discomfort Mr. Kelly feels at paying the newcomers - some of whom may have parents he knows who are ex-cops - so poorly, there has to be some uneasiness that the effect on morale could make it easier for some officers to justify corrupt conduct.

Threat to His Legacy

Mr. Kelly's second stint as Police Commissioner, during which he's been able to further reduce crime despite placing a new emphasis on anti-terrorism work while operating with several thousand fewer cops than were on the job under his predecessor, has him poised to be regarded as one of the best leaders in the NYPD's history. Any wrongdoing by cops who wouldn't have been hired unless the NYPD was desperate for warm bodies could take some of the luster off that image.

Mr. Lynch issued a statement regarding the union's voluminous request for documents that indicated he was not looking to drag out the process.

"The city has failed to provide the PBA with the most fundamental information regarding this round of contracts," he said. "Every piece of information we have requested is being sought for use in our effort to gain a fair and competitive contract for New York's police officers through negotiations. We are moving expeditiously to reach an agreement at the table but we will not disadvantage our position in bargaining to move on a timetable driven solely by the city's inability to fill its academy class."

For Mr. Lynch, NYPD desperation to fill that class is potential leverage, either at the bargaining table or in arbitration. He has three past precedents to encourage him: two special salary hikes, using state funds to pay the excess portion of the raises, for Teachers over the past 21 years, and a similar dispensation, relying on city money, for Health and Hospitals Corporation Nurses in the late 1980s.

Recruitment Woes Key

In each case, the rationale for departing from the municipal pattern was a major problem in recruiting qualified candidates. The 1985 situation with the United Federation of Teachers paralleled the current one with the PBA in one added respect: in each case, the union deserved at least some of the blame for the inadequate starting salary.

The prevailing suspicion was that the leaders of those unions - the late Albert Shanker for the UFT, Mr. Lynch as part of last year's arbitration - had made calculated political decisions to short-change the bottom of their pay scales to get more money for experienced members to secure their votes.

Mr. Shanker's defenders at the time argued that it also made little sense for him to give equal treatment to the lower steps on the UFT salary scale during a period starting with the mid-1970s fiscal crisis when the Board of Education was doing very little hiring. Mr. Lynch can't use that justification, since the NYPD has to hire about 3,000 cops a year just to keep pace with attrition.

The big difference between those cases and this one, however, is that the Bloomberg administration, while acknowledging a recruiting problem with its recent offer to upgrade the pay plan for new cops, has not indicated any willingness to go beyond the bargaining pattern it has established with other unions to address the situation.

No Impact on Streets

One reason is undoubtedly that while the reduced pay scale has forced the NYPD to scramble to attract qualified candidates, it has not yet affected its primary missions. Until that changes, the Bloomberg administration has no incentive to address the complaint by PBA officials that the fate of the NYPD is being dictated by the "bean-counters" who are insisting on treating cops the same as all other city employees at the bargaining table.

City officials counter that it is Mr. Lynch who is being oblivious to the well-being of the NYPD in order to bolster his bargaining position. As evidence, they cite one particularly spicy request from the PBA amid the mountain of data the union is seeking: detailed calculations of how much the city would save if the next contract froze the pay scale at current levels.

Such a freeze would affect only the officers who came on the job since January and future recruits. The fact that the rookies already have been whacked with a reduced pay scale that will cost each of them at least $48,000 during their first six years on the job compared to officers who were hired last July means such a move would not hurt Mr. Lynch politically; it's hard to imagine many of those cops voting for the president who let their loss fund the generous hikes for more-senior officers.

City Cool to Freeze

The city, which last year joined the PBA in signing off on the reduced pay scale because whatever impact it has on recruiting is more than offset financially by the recurring savings it will provide, has no intention this time of voluntarily agreeing to a freeze of that scale. The question is whether any arbitrator could be convinced to grant such a request as a way of paying for more-generous raises to incumbent cops.

The PBA could argue that if the costs even out with other uniformed deals, it should be allowed to have an award structured this way to make maximum salary more competitive with what is paid to cops in neighboring suburbs. The arbitrator would have to consider, however, the impact this would have in disrupting salary parity with Firefighters, which has historically been pegged to the maximum pay for each rank. (Rookie Firefighters actually advance to the second step on the pay scale, from $25,100 to $32,700, nearly three months sooner than their NYPD counterparts as a result of Uniformed Firefighters' Association President Steve Cassidy's determination to upgrade their pay as soon as they completed their shorter training period.)

All these factors raise questions as to whether Mr. Lynch has a realistic hope of breaking the existing uniformed pattern, or is delaying the inevitable for political reasons.

Case Against Stalling

A case could be made that waiting actually hurts his chance of re-election, notwithstanding the fact that, as one union insider noted, a serious challenger to Mr. Lynch has yet to emerge.

By the time elections are held next spring, another 3,000 cops whose pay scale marks them as second-class union citizens will be PBA members. Even if as many as one-third of the officers who came in under the reduced rate become disillusioned enough with their salaries to quit the NYPD, that would still leave 3,000 out of a group of 4,500 with a strong motivation to vote against Mr. Lynch.

That's a significant bloc of opposition voters to start with. Add in the anti-incumbent votes that are inevitable in a work force where even veterans are frustrated about their salaries, and Mr. Lynch's task becomes particularly formidable if a sizable segment of his rank and file starts asking whether it can realistically expect a pending arbitration to give cops a better deal than what Firefighters got.

One veteran of the negotiating wars with no involvement in the PBA dispute put it this way: "Norman Seabrook is a lot better-connected [politically] than Lynch is, and he's taking 3 and 3.15. That should tell you something."

PERB No Magic Carpet

Mr. Lynch has counted on his previous arbitrations being before the state Public Employment Relations Board, the result of legislation one of his predecessors got approved that removed the PBA from the jurisdiction of the city Office of Collective Bargaining. For years, PBA officials suggested PERB held the key to the universe; that if their members' aspirations were measured primarily against compensation for other cops statewide rather than against what other municipal unions got, it could break the chains of pattern bargaining.

In practice, the union has had limited success in fulfilling those predictions. The PERB legislation, it should be remembered, was pushed hardest during the 1990s by PBA lawyers and a bargaining consultant who later went to prison for bribing Transit Police union leaders for business. The PERB law has continued to hold its greatest attraction for those union service providers who get paid for arbitration work, no matter how good the results.

The one significant break the PBA got from a PERB arbitrator came in 2002, when he granted the same two 5-percent raises over a 24-month period that most other uniformed unions received under 30-month contracts.

Second Time a Mess

Last year's arbitration produced two more 5-percent pay hikes, but in return the union had to accept concessions affecting future members that knocked four points off the deal's cost to the city. The salary reduction and the stretching of the pay scale also caused major problems for other uniformed union leaders, who because of lower attrition rates could not offer the city the same savings under the stretch as the PBA. That forced them to agree to other givebacks to get the same raises. Compounding their anger was the pledge Mr. Lynch had given not to pursue a contract that had a component tied to attrition. Mr. Lynch subsequently said that commitment applied only to the bargaining table, and that once the dispute moved to arbitration it was beyond his control. Some officials argue, however, that his determination to get 5-percent annual raises for veterans was unrealistic unless he or his bargaining counsel, Michael Murray, were figuring all along on selling out the unborn and the other uniformed unions.

Pattern Too Low for 5s

Unlike in 2002, when he entered arbitration knowing that the worst he figured to do was two 5-percent hikes because that was what the Uniformed Forces Coalition had negotiated, the pattern staring at the PBA throughout last year's arbitration came from a District Council 37 deal that featured a nonpensionable $1,000 bonus and a 3-percent increase in its first two years. That lower baseline meant that unless the unpredictable chair of last year's arbitration panel, Eric Schmertz, decided to pay no attention to the city pattern, Mr. Lynch's only hope of getting the two 5-percent hikes was to take it from the hides of his unborn.

This time around, the existing uniformed bargaining pattern makes the chance of a runaway arbitration award less than slim, and he can no longer count on the Bloomberg administration being complicit in a maneuver to reward veteran cops at the expense of those not yet on the job.

Maybe a third trip to arbitration will prove to be the lucky one. Maybe his members, like the American public, will buy the argument that whatever gripes you have with your leader, you don't cast him off in the middle of a conflict.

The danger there, of course, is if PBA members ask themselves how happy the American public now is that it took President Bush's advice along those lines.

Cheap Trick Might Work

There's one other possible explanation for Mr. Lynch's unwillingness to fall into line behind his uniformed brethren. It might be called the Seelig Principle, in honor of its most faithful adherent, former COBA President Phil Seelig.

Mr. Seelig developed a habit of waiting out other labor leaders and then settling for similar terms well after his old contracts had expired. The trick behind this strategy was that he seemingly orchestrated the settlements so that his members received paychecks containing the large sums of retroactive money to which they were entitled at roughly the same time that COBA election ballots were sent out. His members may have sensed that they were being manipulated, but their good spirits over the big checks tended to trump such misgivings: rather than being voted out of office, Mr. Seelig was able to leave under his own steam almost immediately after getting his law degree.

It's a cynical gambit, to be sure, but none of Mr. Lynch's alternatives for breaking parity with Firefighters holds greater promise of electoral success.