Tough Time to Be Ambitious

The city's fiscal problems are already taking a toll, most notably in the form of ill-advised cuts at the Department of Education that Principals last week lamented forced them to sacrifice key programs.

The prospect of an economic downturn was a strong motivator in many municipal-employee unions reaching quick contract settlements last year - in several cases before their old deals expired. While the Bloomberg administration wasn't offering the moon, the basic wage hikes, generally about 4 percent a year, were reasonable enough to grab before the excess money from a budget surplus evaporated.

The economic good times have faded, in the process diminishing the hopes some unions had of getting deals in excess of the basic bargaining patterns. There is always the chance that the arbitration panel chair hearing the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association case will decide that Police Officers are so underpaid that she will ignore not only more than a century of pay parity between cops and firefighters but the fact that a more-generous award to the PBA would trigger the re-opener clauses of other uniformed unions, placing the award beyond the city's ability to pay. We wouldn't bet on that happening, however.

The financial picture is even more problematical for the Professional Staff Congress, whose president, Barbara Bowen, has insisted her members need wage and benefit improvements in excess of the municipal pattern.

She faces a couple of added hurdles. One is that the state as well as the city must sign off on any deal the City University of New York reaches with the PSC, and the state's fiscal woes are even greater than the city's. The other is that, unlike the PBA, her union does not have the right to binding arbitration.

Ms. Bowen was silent on the matter last week, but one PSC executive board member who's an expert on union issues, Stanley Aronowitz, said the union had two options: reaching a quick settlement with terms similar to those obtained by other city unions, or "using unconventional means of resistance." In other words, strike.

But the PSC would have considerably less leverage than Transport Workers Union Local 100 had when it shut down the transit system 26 months ago, and that walkout was not exactly a roaring success. Our guess is any union looking for a breakout contract will have to wait until the next bargaining round and hope the economic picture has improved by then.