Carrots Trump Stick In Mayor’s Labor Harvest

After David Yassky lost the Democratic runoff for City Comptroller two weeks ago, he lamented the difficulty created by his opponent, John Liu, having “all of organized labor on his side.”

This was no shock: Mr. Liu assiduously cultivated the unions and had the backing of the Working Families Party, while Mr. Yassky had taken the position that a cheaper Tier 5 pension for new city workers should be imposed rather than negotiated.

This won him kudos from newspaper editorial writers, who reportedly had also been advised that Mayor Bloomberg would be a lot more comfortable working with him than with Mr. Liu. But their endorsements didn’t amount to much in both a primary and a runoff marked by low turnout. And in taking that hard-line stand, Mr. Yassky put himself not only to the right of his opponent—who said the change should be bargained with the affected unions—but of Mr. Bloomberg himself.

HARD RHETORIC, SOFTER BARGAINING: One reason City Comptroller Bill Thompson (left) didn’t get the endorsement of what would have seemed to be a natural ally in Teamsters Local 237 is that Mayor Bloomberg has sounded like a fiscal hawk on wage contracts and pensions but in practice has been pragmatic and flexible. Mayor Met UFT Halfway

Because while the Mayor has been the driving force behind the push for Tier 5 legislation, when push came to shove he negotiated a modified, less-onerous version of it with the United Federation of Teachers.

And so while Mr. Yassky stands as an object lesson of what happens when smart guys engage in dumb politics, Mr. Bloomberg has been able to carve out both a hard rhetorical line and a generous slice of union support at the expense of his opponent, City Comptroller Bill Thompson. Each union leader who has endorsed him in recent months could point to his most-recent wage contract as reasonable enough (conservative critics have called them generous) to want to continue with the current administration. For the most part, the municipal unions bucking the Mayor to this point are those he has been willing to alienate, notably Transport Workers Union Local 100, District Council 37, and the Uniformed Firefighters Association.

There was not much surprise to Mr. Bloomberg’s picking up the endorsements of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association and the police unions representing every cop beyond the entry-level rank. But he pulled two coups on successive days last week when he won the backing of Service Employees International Union Healthcare Chair Dennis Rivera and Teamsters Local 237.

Mr. Rivera is no longer in charge of SEIU’s giant Local 1199 here, but his enduring popularity and his close ties to President Obama mean he has lost none of his impact among its members. “Dennis is very significant because his union members are activists, and it really helps in the Latino community,” said political consultant George Arzt.

Local 237 President Greg Floyd, who gained his first full term just two days before the Oct. 7 endorsement, doesn’t have the same cachet as Mr. Rivera, but Mr. Arzt noted, “Having an African-American labor leader coming into your tent really helps when you’re running against an African-American Comptroller.”

Mr. Floyd is not an unabashed Bloomberg booster. He made clear during two interviews that he was not thrilled about the manner in which the Mayor got the right to seek a third term and took a particularly dim view of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority challenge— strongly encouraged by Mr. Bloomberg— to a TWU Local 100 arbitration award.

Despite those qualms, he said following the endorsement, “You still have to weigh who’s the best person at the present time to run the city.”

Cites Other Cities’ Woes

In throwing the union’s support to the Mayor, he told a room full of shop stewards at Local 237’s headquarters to consider the way in which Mr. Bloomberg’s fiscal stewardship had “minimized layoffs” while other cities had large-scale dismissals. “When you find a way to keep what you have, that’s what you do,” he said.

It’s a sentiment shared by the Mayor, who told the gathering, “We may not agree on everything, but we’re working for the same thing—a greater, safer New York.”

He argued that electing Mr. Thompson would produce a “return to the days of politics as usual, when government was full of finger-pointing and empty promises.”

You could dispute those assertions, just as surely as the Mayor’s commercials attacking Mr. Thompson’s tenure at the Board of Education invite criticism for offering a misleading picture of his power at the time and the extent to which he was to blame for problems in the system.

But the problem for the Democratic challenger is that fighting the battle on that terrain is not particularly to his advantage. Arguing that he was hamstrung by an unfair funding formula for state aid and a Mayor in Rudy Giuliani who did not make improving education the priority that he did public safety highlights Mr. Bloomberg’s greater devotion to the public schools and his role in providing them with more money.

And Mr. Thompson, in the days leading up to his Oct. 13 debate with the Mayor, was not doing much to thrust himself into the public consciousness. His silence on Governor Paterson’s focusing a new round of budget cuts on reductions in the state university system offered one substantive explanation for why he has yet to gain the endorsement of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents more than 20,000 faculty at the City University of New York.

A Likely But Unpersuaded Ally

The PSC would seem to be a natural part of Mr. Thompson’s constituency: it is one of the city’s most-liberal unions and has criticized city and state officials for not making higher education a priority, while noting the impact that budget cuts have on minority students in particular.

But on the day that Mr. Floyd endorsed the Mayor, PSC President Barbara Bowen said in a phone interview that union delegates on Sept. 24 had “voted not to do an endorsement at this time.”

Her members are concerned about Mr. Bloomberg’s push for Tier 5, believing that imposing a lesser pension plan for future workers would hurt recruitment and retention of good staff at CUNY, as well as his opposition to what the PSC leader called “a moreprogressive tax structure.”

But, Ms. Bowen continued, while the union’s delegates were “very aware of the policies of Mayor Bloomberg that have not been helpful to our members, CUNY, or workers,” they had yet to “see some public leadership from Thompson on higher-education issues. We would like to see a morevisionary platform.”

“Visionary” is not a word that has been attached to the Comptroller in the past, however, and his campaign to this point has not advanced his persona beyond that of a decent, experienced public official with no exceptional achievements.

Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Working Families Party, which is backing Mr. Thompson, when asked whether there was anything the Comptroller wasn’t doing that he should be, responded, “I’m not taking the bait on that one.”

PSC: Keeping Pension Door Open

Ms. Bowen said Mr. Yassky’s position that Tier 5 should be imposed without bargaining was “a big part” of why the PSC endorsed Mr. Liu, and that one consideration in dealing with Mr. Bloomberg was that “we would hope to keep those doors open and explain to him what a disaster Tier 5 would be for higher education.”

But she insisted that her union’s neutrality was not rooted in a pragmatic judgment that the incumbent was a likely winner and there was no point in incurring his bad will by endorsing his opponent. “I would not say that there’s a sense [among her union’s officials] that it’s impossible that the Mayor could lose,” Ms. Bowen said.

Indeed, a poll last week showed Mr. Thompson closing to within eight points of the Mayor after one taken in September showed him down by 15. Mr. Cantor predicted “this election is gonna get tighter. Thompson is obviously pushing the rock uphill, but if turnout in the black community is high” and he can mobilize the rest of his more-progressive Democratic constituency, an upset is not impossible.

But the endorsement by Mr. Floyd, following a summer in which Mr. Bloomberg picked up the backing of a number of influential African-American ministers, seems to indicate that black voters are unlikely to be as monolithic, or as mobilized, as they were when David Dinkins twice ran against Rudy Giuliani.

Mr. Cantor said, “The Mayor would like everyone to think his re-election is preordained and inevitable.” He questions that presumption, and with some justification, since Mr. Thompson has been able to get within single digits without doing that much to define himself to voters so far. To this point, it’s been almost as if Mr. Bloomberg is running against himself, and losing ground because of lingering anger about the manner in which he altered the Term Limits Law.

Can He Connect?

But the Comptroller’s inability to make a distinct impression with just three weeks left in the campaign, and the vast difference in resources between the two candidates for the stretch run of the race, has raised doubts even among those who think the contest could get tighter as to whether in the end Mr. Thompson can actually win.

He will get a psychic shot in the arm on the morning of the debate with the endorsement of Correction Officers Benevolent Association President Norman Seabrook, who in the past has backed underdog candidates including George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama more than a year before the 2008 race for President, and Mr. Bloomberg himself eight years ago. Even so, Mr. Seabrook spoke at greater length about his disillusionment with the incumbent than about what he regarded as Mr. Thompson’s strengths, aside from citing the challenger’s “human touch.”

Ms. Bowen said her delegates will meet again Oct. 29 and there was still the possibility of an endorsement at that time. But it would come just five days before the actual vote, limiting how much it might benefit the Comptroller. And the PSC’s sister union, the United Federation of Teachers, is sitting on the sidelines with no indication that it will gravitate to Mr. Thompson between now and Election Day.

Mr. Arzt remarked, “If you were risk-averse, you would either say ‘I’m not going to endorse’ or you would get aboard the [Bloomberg] bandwagon.”

Ferrer Knows the Feeling

Freddy Ferrer got a first-hand taste of that sensibility when he opposed the Mayor’s re-election in 2005. Municipal union leaders taking what they regard as the course of least resistance are looking, he said, at how it might affect matters from wage talks to health-care negotiations.

Shying away from endorsing a challenger whose positions are closer to their own in order not to anger the favored incumbent is “a very potent thing; I can attest to that,” said Mr. Ferrer, who lost that contest by 18 points at a time when the city’s strong fiscal condition and lack of the bad will that ensued after the term-limits change left Mr. Bloomberg considerably less vulnerable.

As to those who side with the incumbent for pragmatic reasons, he continued, “Does it always redound to the benefit of members? No, but it’s one of those things that money can buy.”

Oct. 13, the day this newspaper hit the stands, began promisingly for Mr. Thompson, but if it didn’t conclude with a breakout performance in the debate, he would be staring down the barrel at all the advantages of incumbency without having demonstrated he had the firepower to make his shots count.