Razzle Dazzle: PBA an Unintended Catalyst

Razzle Dazzle
PBA an Unintended Catalyst


The cold war between the Bloomberg administration and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association has had one distinctly positive side-effect: it has made contract negotiations for other unions notably more timely than in the previous quarter-century.

Back in 1980, a coalition led by the major civilian-employee unions reached contract terms with then-Mayor Ed Koch 12 days before most of their old deals were due to expire, and the larger uniformed unions came to terms on July 5, just four days after their prior agreements had run out. It would be the last time that a deadline - other than the one for Transport Workers Union Local 100 - seemed of much concern to either the unions or the city.

Waited on Civilian Pattern

Uniformed union leaders in particular took a casual approach, in part because Mr. Koch had made clear by then that he was inclined to give them slightly more than their civilian counterparts. They grew accustomed to waiting for the first civilian union contract to be ratified before they even began their own bargaining, with the result being that uniformed union deals were routinely reached more than a year after their old ones expired, regardless of whether there was a major conflict with whomever was Mayor.

And so when Lieutenants Benevolent Association President Tony Garvey stood in the City Hall Blue Room with Mayor Bloomberg Aug. 7 to announce a tentative 26-month pact that will not actually take effect until Sept. 1, it seemed the municipal bargaining world had veered off its axis. It wasn't nearly as far in advance as the United Federation of Teachers deal last fall that was reached 11 months prior to its current agreement expiring, but in some ways it was more surprising.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow NOT BETTING ON A LONG SHOT: While Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Pat Lynch (left) has members working under a contract that expired three years ago because he believes he can break a uniformed union bargaining pattern in arbitration, Lieutenants Benevolent Association President Tony Garvey settled early because he is convinced that pattern will hold up. As Yogi Berra might put it, in the past, even when the Lieutenants settled early, they were late. This could be seen by the their contract deal as part of the Uniformed Forces Coalition six years ago, which set the pattern for uniformed unions but was reached more than eight months after the prior LBA agreement expired. Last July, when the LBA reached a successor contract, the old deal was more than three years out of date.

This time around, Mr. Garvey said following the announcement of his 26-month accord, "We wanted to get in and get this deal done."

He became the fifth uniformed union leader in a four-week period to agree to contract terms - an impressive number given that most labor leaders are not famed for overworking themselves during the summer and that in three of the cases their pacts were no more than five months overdue. But unlike the other two police union leaders who reached pacts during that time - Ed Mullins of the Sergeants Benevolent Association and Captains Endowment Association President John Driscoll - Mr. Garvey was not a surprise visitor to the podium with Mr. Bloomberg.

In December 2005, after Detectives voted down a tentative contract accord reached by their union, Mr. Garvey made clear that this would have little effect on his own strategy if Firefighters ratified their own pending contract, based on his belief that the history of police and fire pay relationships meant a finalized Uniformed Firefighters Association deal would wind up setting a binding pattern. Slightly more than six months after the Firefighter pact was approved, he made his own deal.

Anger Didn't Extend to Terms

When UFA President Steve Cassidy negotiated a new agreement in March, Mr. Garvey expressed anger that he had stepped away from a uniformed coalition without notifying his partners of his intentions, but he didn't criticize the terms of that two-year contract. And where Mr. Mullins and Mr. Driscoll both opted for unusually long deals that run through the middle of 2011, Mr. Garvey's if ratified would end Nov. 1, 2009, with the 26-month duration most closely approximating Mr. Cassidy's.

"Once we saw the pattern evolving, we decided on a two-year deal," he told reporters in the Blue Room. The additional two months gave him the latitude to add key benefits on top of the two 4-percent wage hikes, so that Mr. Garvey could bring back a $3,000-per-member lump-sum contribution by the city to the union's Savings Incentive Plan, along with increases in longevity and welfare fund benefits. For the Mayor, the most tangible gain was bringing another union under contract for almost the remainder of his time in office. The intangible one was that it allowed him to say that if the deal was ratified, "We will have new contracts with every police union but one."

The exception, of course, is the PBA. That's a rather large exception, since its members are the most visible, as well as the largest, group of uniformed workers. But the flurry of police union deals has turned the tide in the public-relations war Mr. Bloomberg has been fighting with PBA President Pat Lynch.

Mr. Lynch can make the case to the general public and editorial writers that his members are underpaid, severely so when compared to cops in Long Island and at the Port Authority. But it's much tougher to sell the argument that his members are working under a contract that's three years out of date because the Bloomberg administration lacks sufficient appreciation of the police force when it has just completed significant wage deals with unions representing the three ranks immediately above Police Officer. The Mayor several times emphasized that Sergeants had ratified their deal by a margin of nearly four to one.

Alone in His Belief

Mr. Lynch has declined comment on all three police union deals but previously made clear he believes he can break the uniformed pattern in arbitration. The willingness of his colleagues - most notably Sergeant Mullins, who had been a close bargaining ally - to make deals rather than awaiting a PBA award, however, suggests that they don't buy the argument, and they no longer believe in Mr. Lynch.

There is a residue of bad feeling from his 2005 arbitration, under which Police Officers got two 5-percent raises but a significant part of the cost to the city was offset by sharply reducing starting salary and the pay scale. Mr. Lynch had promised other uniformed union leaders he would not agree to such terms, and they were not mollified by his claim afterward that this guarantee only covered negotiations and not an arbitration process.

Relations were not helped any when a lengthy manifesto was released in early 2006 under Mr. Lynch's name - although most people believe the actual author was PBA bargaining counsel Mike Murray - accusing other police union heads including Lieutenant Garvey of lacking the fortitude to take a stand against the Bloomberg administration while sopping up the gravy of the PBA's deals even as they complained about them.

Lightening Load on Tours

Because virtually all the other uniformed unions have higher attrition rates than the PBA, they were forced to make bigger givebacks to even out the city's costs, leaving the new promotees who were affected less than thrilled.

Mr. Garvey, unlike his colleagues, under his last contract refused to reduce the pay scale for new members, instead opting to have them scheduled for 13 more appearances annually during their first seven years in the rank. He hopes to soften the blow through an experimental program under which Lieutenants who are platoon commanders in eight precincts will begin working 12-hour tours, cutting the number of annual appearances they must make from 216 to 155. If the program is successful enough to be expanded citywide, even the new Lieutenants would wind up working far fewer tours than incumbents have until now.

For the moment, he took satisfaction from a provision of the new deal that reduced the number of added appearances for new promotees to 11 a year. "We're going to chip away; we will eventually get them all back," Mr. Garvey said.

In the meantime, as Labor Relations Commissioner Jim Hanley noted, after a delay in implementing the 12-hour-tour program that is partly the result of an arbitrator's ruling against the PBA as to whether tour length was a mandatory subject of bargaining, the initiative is expected to begin within "a matter of weeks."

No Love Lost

Earlier, Mr. Garvey had told reporters that he and his board were determined to "not rely on an independent arbitrator who knows nothing about the needs of our members." Since, as Mr. Garvey later noted, he has never sought arbitration in more than 15 years as president, you might interpret that comment as skepticism that anything could come out of the PBA arbitration that would benefit the LBA. And if the LBA deal turned the screws a little tighter on Mr. Lynch by strengthening the Mayor's claim that he wasn't the intransigent party in the dispute with the PBA, that didn't figure to cost Mr. Garvey any sleep.

Although the PBA five years ago got an arbitration award that was slightly better than what the uniformed coalition negotiated - the wage terms were the same, but Police Officers got them over 24 months compared to 30 months for their supervisors - there was a significant difference back then. At that time, Firefighters had not approved contract terms. This time, the UFA has an agreement that runs for two years beyond the period at issue in the PBA dispute, making it especially unlikely that the arbitration chair, Susan Mackenzie, would be willing to ignore more than a century of pay parity between the two jobs.

Not Worth Waiting

That was what made Mr. Garvey willing to cut a deal along the same lines as the UFA's rather than waiting a year to see whether the PBA's roll of the dice was worth the gamble.

Standing outside the Blue Room, he was asked whether he thought Mr. Lynch still believed he could break parity, or if the PBA leader might have placed himself so far out on the ledge that he couldn't climb off and make a deal with a Mayor who seems to have outmaneuvered him.

"I think he's taken a position," Lieutenant Garvey said of Mr. Lynch. "Whether he can deliver on the position, nobody really knows."