CWA 1180 - News

Building a united municipal labor movement

Unenthusiastic response to contract settlement puts coalition bargaining back on the agenda
July 2004

"What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong"

"Personally, I don't feel that it's fair," said Lester Woods, talking about the new contract Local 1180 settled with the city in May. "Costs of living are increasing faster than our wages are going up. And the $1,000 bonus is actually an insult." In sum, said the shop steward from the Administration for Children's Services, "I'm not thrilled."

"Not thrilled" is pretty much how everybody at 1180 feels about the settlement, which is patterned on the agreement reached by DC37 in April. Indeed, it seems to be how everybody throughout the municipal labor movement feels. The system of pattern bargaining—where the first union to reach an agreement with the city sets the terms that other unions will get—has left people feeling unsatisfied, frustrated, even powerless. "It could have been better, much better," said Velma Dickson, about the contract. Dickson, a steward at the NYPD, served on the bargaining committee that negotiated the contract.

Yet she added, "I don't think we could have done better. DC37 sets the pattern and everybody else has to follow. I don't think we could have done better, it would just have dragged on. And members are hurting. Housing costs, Con Edison, everything is going up. It was kind of hard, but we had to take it because members have to get something."

Dorothy Harris, a steward from Bellevue Hospital, was "taken aback," she said, by the bargaining process. Serving for the first time on a negotiation committee, she said, "bargaining is supposed to be pros and cons, back and forth, but they walked in and said, 'this is the contract we got with DC37, take it or leave it, this is all you're going to get.'" Reflecting on the entire process Local 1180 went through to develop its own bargaining demands, Harris said the experience left her feeling "like we did all this work for nothing."

The mediocre terms of the DC37 pattern contract (see page 5 for details) and the inability of Local 1180 to break it and do better are both a reflection of the weakness of the municipal labor movement. To be blunt, city unions are not united and all of them are weakened by that fact. It is the most basic tenet of unionism that labor power comes from solidarity: united, together, workers and unions have leverage against their employers, while individually they are powerless. This is true for individual workers in a workplace, and also for individual unions dealing with the same employer. In our case, the many unions that make up the municipal labor movement, dealing with the City of New York as our employer. As labor's most famous anthem, "Solidarity Forever," puts it: "When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run / There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun / Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one / But the union makes us strong."

All of this is leading members and leaders in Local 1180 to advocate more strongly than ever for coalition bargaining. "Union heads need to get together with other unions and get back to coalition bargaining," says Woods. "If we go in one at a time, he [the mayor] is going to beat us to death, because we have no power."

Michael Pricoli, a steward at the Human Resources Administration, noted that the unenthusiastic response throughout the city workforce to the new contract could nudge municipal unions back to greater coordination. "I think this might bring back coalition bargaining, if the police, fire fighters and teachers are willing to do it. I remember back in the 80s, we all came together for rallies and such. You don't see that anymore."

In fact, there have been various levels of coordination and degrees of solidarity in the history of bargaining by city unions. During the last two rounds of contract talks (the one just completed, and the one for the 27-month contract running from April 2000 through June 2002) all of the city unions bargaining jointly on healthcare and pension issues. Under the umbrella of the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), both uniform and civilian unions worked together. This makes a great deal of sense, since the main health and pension funds are citywide funds. Joint bargaining on these fronts gave MLC unions more power, but at the same time, the fact that heath and pension negotiations were handled separately from wage and general bargaining undercut the unions' leverage. Once these benefit negotiations were done, those issues could not be brought in to the main bargaining talks, depriving negotiators of potential bargaining chips.

Wage bargaining for the 2000-2002 and 2002-2005 contracts, however, was handled individually by each union on its own. At the same time, these individual negotiations were bound by the unwritten rules of pattern bargaining. The first union to settle sets the pattern for the contract. Particularly during the last two city administrations, it has been virtually impossible for any union to break the pattern. Even the teachers and the cops, who generally make a special effort to improve on wage settlement, have been unable to do so (in the case of the teachers, their last contract included additional compensation above the pattern wages, but this was entirely funded by concessions they made or additional funding provided by the state; it was a variation of the pattern, but not a breaking of it).

An additional factor that binds city unions together even when they are bargaining in isolation is that non-economic issues, such as time and leave policies, are bargained citywide in a single contract. Pursuant to the New York City Collective Bargaining Law, this citywide contract is bargained by the city union that has the most members, which is DC37. For the most recent round of talks, in addition to the economic improvements in the pattern agreement set by DC37 that no one was thrilled with, DC37 also made concessions to the city in the citywide contract that none of the other unions have any say in. This, too, is one more reason why coalition bargaining is once again being discussed.

Prior to the last two rounds of negotiations, coalition bargaining was more the rule than the exception in city negotiations. Coalition bargaining dates back to the fiscal crisis in the 1970s. At the time, business and political leaders wanted to use New York City's financial problems as it hung on the brink of bankruptcy as an excuse to curtail the power and rights of labor. The city's municipal labor movement fought back, walking a fine line between helping the city out of a genuine crisis and not letting that crisis become the excuse for further assaults on city workers. It was then that the unions first bargained together, in one big coalition that included the civilian, uniform and teachers' unions. They gave up painful concessions, but they stopped the Financial Control Board from abrogating the city's labor contracts, which, many say, would have been worse.

In the 1980s and 1990s, MLC unions, not including the teachers and uniform workers, tended to bargaining together in coalition.

The challenges in holding together a genuine coalition, especially one that includes uniform as well as civilian unions, are considerable. There are some issues on which uniform and civilian workers disagree and on which their interests are in conflict (e.g., civilianization). There is a sense among many civilian workers that the teachers and the cops in particular feel that they always deserve more than other city workers; and while other workers understand the problems associated with salaries that are not competitive with surrounding suburbs, they also feel a certain dismissiveness in the UFT's and PBA's demands for greater increases, as if they don't truly value the important contributions made by other city workers.

Yet for all these difficulties and frustrations, city workers across the board have more in common than they don't, and like it or not, their fates are tied together. The alternative to building a genuinely unified city labor movement and coalition bargaining is what we have now—the status quo that no one is thrilled with.

"We need all of us coming in together. Like we did a few years back. All of the groups coming out together, we need something that would hit them with a strong impact. Something forceful," said Dickson. "Together is the only way it's going to be forceful. And it's all of us as municipal workers who are suffering."

Harris echoed these thoughts, and reminded us of the strength we have together. "We need to work together. We need to really pull together and find out what their concerns are. Because our concerns are their concerns. There's strength in numbers. There's not much the mayor can do if the whole city is together."

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