Pragmatism Got PBA Deal

The sky was a clear blue and the sun shone brightly last Thursday afternoon, confounding everyone who believed it would be a wintry day in August when the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Bloomberg administration reached a negotiated contract settlement.

PBA President Pat Lynch and Mayor Bloomberg insisted, as they announced a settlement that provides all cops with a 20-percent increase in wages and fringe benefits, including four 4-percent pay hikes, that their past battles had never become personal. They conveniently forgot Mr. Bloomberg questioning Mr. Lynch's professionalism while suggesting he was serving his members poorly at the bargaining table, while the union leader portrayed the Mayor as an out-of-touch billionaire with no appreciation for cops' crime-reduction work.

So why the surprising settlement, less than three months after their third bruising arbitration battle? Our guess is that both sides had begun to ask whether the feud got in the way of their best interests.

From Mr. Bloomberg's standpoint, it grew costly at a time when the city literally couldn't afford it. The May arbitration award, which gave incumbent cops 3.5 percent more than other uniformed workers received for a similar period, forced the city to provide matching hikes to the maximum salary for those other unions when they invoked the re-opener clauses in their last contracts. The city agreed to those clauses as part of a strategy that it hoped would lock in the PBA to a wage pattern set by those other unions.

For the PBA, there were two compelling reasons to get a negotiated deal if the city's offer was right. While the union had done slightly better in arbitration than it would have in bargaining during Mr. Lynch's tenure, most of the gains for incumbent cops came at the expense of future hires.

With each arbitration process concluding about three years apart, there was the potential that another arbitrated deal would not have come until 2011. The most-recent award produced a contract that was already more than 21 months out of date. That allowed inflation to eat up much if not all of the slightly better pay hikes that the arbitration award produced for cops. And with officers who were affected by the reduced starting salary and benefits that were key elements of the 2005 and 2008 arbitrations becoming a growing force in the union, Mr. Lynch would have been taking a real political risk if he had gambled on an arbitration that might bump up against his next run for re-election in the spring of 2011.

Pragmatism brought the two sides together. The terms of the deal appear to fit the pattern for the last four years of the 74-month Sergeants Benevolent Association contract negotiated in July 2007. They might be more generous than Mr. Bloomberg would have liked, but they made sense at the time as a way to corral the PBA's sky's-the-limit demands.

Assuming the PBA deal is ratified — and our guess is that Mr. Lynch is right that it will go over well with his members — the big question is how it will affect bargaining with the civilian unions. Jim Hanley, the city's chief negotiator, has already told District Council 37 that he could not offer it the same pay raises the Sergeants got. And that is without figuring in the 3 points in fringe benefit gains that was part of the SBA and PBA deals. Since other civilian unions, most notably the United Federation of Teachers, are also going to be looking for something close to what the PBA got, any peace on the bargaining front may be short-lived.