LYNCH STRIKES OUT AGAIN

Lynch Strikes Out Again

Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch is lashing out again, this time at our supposed lack of fairness.

On page 7 of this issue, a full-page ad from the union head accuses us of being a "management mouthpiece" in our editorials and claims that this bias even spilled into a news story last week about the PBA's ongoing battle over a contract arbitration with the Bloomberg administration.

Mr. Lynch offers few facts to support his claims, and those he does offer are distortions of the truth. This should not be surprising, since during the past year he has used the same kind of disingenuousness to attack the integrity of the city Office of Collective Bargaining and the state Public Employment Relations Board.

This quality also was displayed in his attack on two other police unions that he claimed were in bed with the Bloomberg administration, and in his assertion that he did not break a pledge to fellow uniformed union leaders two years ago not to pursue an attrition-based contract, even though the PBA contract that resulted from a June 2005 arbitration award forced them to make more concessions to get the same wage terms because it was pegged to the higher attrition rate among his members.

All these criticisms stem from a desire by Mr. Lynch to position himself as the victim of a vast conspiracy of forces marching under - or in thrall to - the Bloomberg banner. The reality is that the leader of the most powerful uniformed union in the city creates his own messes by being needlessly confrontational, and then tries to deflect blame by making irresponsible charges.

We'll deal first with the ones he levels against us. He takes issue with a Jan. 5 editorial that asserted that he was stalling the contract arbitration by refusing to participate in selecting the chairman of the panel. The excuse given by the union was that two of the nine arbitrators submitted for consideration were part of the panel that issued the 1997 award that contained a two-year pay freeze for cops as part of a five-year contract.

In the union's view, this marked those arbitrators - both of whom are well-respected among fellow practitioners - as irredeemably biased against Police Officers. What bothered Mr. Lynch was that our editorial about the union's decision not to participate on that basis made similar points to those stated by Labor Commissioner Jim Hanley.

There was a reason for that: Mr. Hanley's remarks in this instance were unassailably logical.

Mr. Hanley pointed out that both arbitrators were presented by PERB among the panelists for the union's contract disputes in 2002 and 2005; in both cases, rather than boycotting the selection process, the PBA merely exercised its right to strike them from consideration in narrowing the field from which to pick a panel chairman.

Given that discrepancy, we were inclined to share the view that has been expressed by several union leaders, as well as other city officials, that Mr. Lynch wanted to stall the arbitration process to prevent a pay award from being issued prior to the PBA election this spring. He claims that PERB had pledged that no arbitrators involved in previous PBA contracts would be on the arbitration list, but Richard Curreri, PERB's Director of Conciliation, denies such a promise was made.

Mr. Lynch also claims that last week's news article is not objective because it "repeats the city's naked assertion" that it had gained the power to appoint the arbitration chairman because the PBA "defaulted." Contrary to Mr. Lynch's claim, the article did not assert this as a "done deal." It made clear that the city's position to that effect - which it has since pursued in court - was an assertion rather than a fact, and prominently quoted Mr. Lynch in response accusing the Bloomberg administration of trying to "stack the deck."

We welcome Mr. Lynch's promise to run a monthly critique of our coverage and thus enhance our ad revenues. What is less welcome, and accounts for some of our sharper criticisms of him, are the unrelenting attacks on the integrity of public institutions such as OCB and PERB.

Both agencies were created to give public-employee unions a place to have their contract grievances redressed without having to strike. Repeatedly questioning OCB's integrity, as Mr. Lynch has done, has the potential to undermine its credibility - at least in the eyes of his members.

That's bad for the collective-bargaining process, and we have called him to account for it. This is not a change in editorial stance by this paper. When a prior PBA regime orchestrated an attack on OCB's impartiality 22 years ago, the then-publisher of this paper, the late Frank Prial II, stated in an editorial, "There is a total lack of supporting evidence. It's a matter of you win some and you lose some."

Mr. Lynch is less philosophical, because consistency does not suit his political purposes. His most recent call for OCB's abolition concerned its delay in ruling on whether the NYPD's switch to using hair samples to test cops for drug use without negotiating the matter was improper; when OCB ultimately decided in favor of the police unions, Mr. Lynch was curiously unavailable for comment.

In contrast, when three different courts ruled against the PBA regarding abolition of the 48-hour rule, he did not advocate for the abolition of the judicial system. Our guess is Mr. Lynch realized that such a call might have led his members to conclude that he was just spouting irrationally.

It would be better for them if he dispensed with the attacks on others' integrity and focused on getting them a decent contract.