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RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Hello, I'm Ronnie Eldridge.
Welcome to Eldridge & Company.
The city's 300,000 municipal employees have
been working under expired contracts for about four years.
Their unions have been waiting for a new mayor to
negotiate new ones.
Now that we have Mayor de Blasio,
those negotiations are about to begin.
Richard Steier is a walking encyclopedia about
New York City's unions, their histories and
current struggles.
He's also the editor and featured columnist of the
Chief Leader, an independent newspaper that
has covered city and state governments and their
unions for over 116 years.
I'm happy to say that he's my guest today.
How did you become so much a historian of
New York City Unions?
RICHARD STEIER: I guess it was just something that
developed along the way.
I started out working for The Chief in 1980,
and I thought that I'd spend a year or two there
and then get hired by a daily newspaper,
except it didn't happen that quickly,
and I discovered I enjoyed the work more than I had
expected to, and eventually,
I left in 1989 to go to work for the New York
Post, but four years after that,
there was a strike, and I wrote an op-ed column in
Newsday that didn't call Rupert Murdoch any nasty
names, but people might have drawn some
inferences, and he apparently did,
because I wasn't invited back afterwards.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So then you went back --
RICHARD STEIER: I went back to The Chief briefly,
then I went to Channel 2 for not quite two years,
and then was fired there, and The Chief beckoned
again in '97, and I've been there ever since and
been editor since 1998.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And so you've just accumulated
all this knowledge.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Did you come from a union family?
RICHARD STEIER: My father was active in the
Newspaper Guild at the Post,
and later at the New York Times.
My mom was a teacher, but she was not active at all
in the union, but I mean, early on,
there was an interest, and I couldn't tell you
exactly why, except for the fact that I was
interested in New York City,
and unions, when I was growing up in the 60s and
1970s were very much in the forefront of what was
going on in the city.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And what I remember about the
unions in the 60's was the anti-war movement in New
York was partially led by union leaders.
Victor Gotbaum, UAW, there was Sam Meyers,
then who was the man who worked for the retail
workers, or who was the head of that union?
I don't remember. Anyway.
They were very vocal and around,
and they were obviously leaders.
Not so much today.
If you asked me to name the heads of unions in
New York, I could name the Board of Education in
Lillian Roberts, I think. What is that?
RICHARD STEIER: You've got fewer larger than life
personalities at this point running unions.
The one who came closest to that both in terms of
speaking up for her members and in being a
target of the tabloids was Randi Weingard,
who has since moved on to head the American
Federation of Teachers, whose local union here is
the United Federation of Teachers, known as the UFT.
In terms of other labor leaders,
I think part of it is that you don't have strikes the
way that you did once upon a time,
and you don't have unions necessarily getting
involved in larger causes to a great degree.
Ed Koch put it, 15 years or so ago,
that unions have gone from trying to save the world
to trying to save themselves,
because of some of the pressures that they've
been feeling.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Let's talk about why workers
have been working without a contract.
What happened?
RICHARD STEIER: Basically, what happened was,
in 2008, Mayor Bloomberg decided,
in the middle of a bargaining round,
that the city's finances had worsened enough that
he was not going to give other unions that still
didn't have contracts the same 4% raises that he had
given to every union that had come to the table and
settled up until then, and the one that stuck out in
terms of that was the UFT, partly because it's the
largest city union, and it's the most powerful
city union, and their contract did not run out
until November 1st, 2009, and there was some feeling
that the union did not endorse Bill Thompson,
who was running against him,
partly because it was hoping that a deal could
be reached with Bloomberg, and he may have decided to
dangle them on that notion,
rather than simply say that the sluice gates are
shut, and he simply plowed ahead saying that he
couldn't afford to give anybody any more raises,
and that he would reward teachers by not laying
them off, that they should be happy with that.
Naturally, they weren't happy about it.
So you had teachers without a contract,
you had principals without a contract,
you have school custodians without a contract,
and you have nurses, both registered nurses and
licensed practical nurses who haven't gotten a
contract, and you have this long history in the
city of pattern bargaining,
which means that, first union that makes a
significant settlement, that serves as the pattern
for the remaining of the bargaining round,
so to tell people, well I gave some people this,
but you can't get it, no, and they know that they
can go into arbitration, and more than likely win
the exact settlement.
In terms of the rest of the city workforce,
which was under contract and had deals for the
period that the UFT was looking for,
they would have liked to have gotten something,
but the mayor at this point told them that we're
not going to give you anything unless you pay
for it with savings, and at a certain point,
unions realized that he was serious about this and
just decided, let's wait him out,
more than likely a Democrat's going to be
elected mayor, a Democrat is going to understand
that you can't simply go ahead and do that,
so if we've got to wait, we'll wait.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And they've been without it,
so now they want retroactive pay,
but we'll get to that in a minute.
There are certain things I want to know.
We know of the big unions in the city.
What are they? The UFT, DC37 --
RICHARD STEIER: Patrolman's Benevolent Association,
Uniformed Firefighters Association,
Teamsters' Local 237 would, among them,
be the five primaries.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But that's not who negotiates contracts.
It's like 140, or how many people?
RICHARD STEIER: There are, I think it's 153 unions
altogether with unsettled contracts.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So if, take DC37,
that has a lot of unions in it.
RICHARD STEIER: It has 55 locals.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So does Lillian Roberts go to the
negotiations, or does each local go?
RICHARD STEIER: It would be something where DC37
puts together a bargaining committee,
the heads of some of the larger locals would
usually be part of the bargaining committee,
but ultimately, in terms of negotiations,
Lillian might be present, but usually,
you designate someone who's your head of
negotiations and research, who is doing the hard
bargaining for the city, you might be at the table
with them, but you might be called in only when it
looks like you're close to a deal,
that the nuts and bolts get taken care of by what
are sometimes known as technicians.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So the unions,
but they cluster, and the police,
you've got the PBA, then you've got the sergeants,
then you've got, I don't know who else.
What else do you have?
RICHARD STEIER: You have lieutenants,
you have detectives, you have captains.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: You have the traffic guys, are they --
RICHARD STEIER: Traffic guys are part of two different locals,
one belonging to DC37, one belonging to the
communications workers of America.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So they get together,
and they sort of develop a strategy for all o them?
RICHARD STEIER: They will have conversations.
They don't necessarily stick with that strategy.
You've had situations where unions have agreed
to go together in coalition,
and then one of them would suddenly break off and
announce that it had negotiated a contract.
You've had that happen most recently with the
Firefighters' Union.
There was a point 27 or 28 years ago where DC37,
along with Teamsters Local 237 and the UFT all went
in together, but then the UFT did not stay with
them, they negotiated contracts on their own,
and the UFT wound up going to arbitration.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So how many unions do we have of
municipal employees? Do you know?
RICHARD STEIER: I mean, they talk in terms of 153 contracts.
That sounds high.
I mean, my guess is that there are 60 or 70 unions.
Then you'll have locals within some of the unions
that adds on to it, and some of them represent
just 100 or 200 members, that they're not large at
all, and they would simply wait to see what the
overall settlement is and then look to get the same thing.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And then EMS is part of the fire department?
RICHARD STEIER: EMS is part of the fire
department, but EMS locals are part of DC37.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That's very good.
It all makes a lot of sense, right?
RICHARD STEIER: Well, you have to realize that there
was a point where EMS was part of the Health and
Hospitals corporation, and DC37 represented most of
the people there, and so it was a logical place for
them to fit under the bargaining umbrella.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is 1199 Hospital Corporation?
RICHARD STEIER: 1199 actually,
most of its members are working in private sector.
They're in a league of voluntary hospitals,
or they're working in private nursing homes.
They've got about 4,000 city members who consist,
it used to be primarily pharmacists and dieticians.
More recently, they've added some licensed
practical nurses.
But it's a relatively small segment of a very
large and powerful union, but it does not get
greatly involved in the city bargaining talks
because of that.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Can we just briefly describe what
collective bargaining is?
RICHARD STEIER: Sure.
Collective bargaining is the process by which a
union comes in and negotiates with the city
on a contract, that it used to be that unions
would describe what occurred as "collective
begging," that they would go in,
they would ask for a raise for their members,
they would hold demonstrations,
there would be the occasional publicized
situation, there was a case where parks workers
had a rally in which one parks worker was placed in
a tiger cage, because the parks workers deal with
the zoos, and this was supposed to indicate how
they felt in terms of their treatment by the
parks commissioner at the time,
who was Robert Moses.
You have had, you used to have strikes with some frequency.
They became much less so after the [ph]tail law was passed --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Which prohibited,
or heavy fines, what is it?
RICHARD STEIER: Heavy fines is the main problem.
Heavy fines and a loss of dues check-off,
because the dues check-off is something that the
unions were granted under the collective bargaining
law, they have, union members don't pay directly
to delegates or shop stewards who go around to collect.
It's taken out of their paychecks when they are
paid by the city.
One of the powers that the city has,
or any municipality or state entity has under the
tail law is to ask a judge to take away dues
check-off rights, which means they have to go out
and collect it by hand the way that they did in the
old days, and in 1980, you had an 11 day strike by
transit workers, and they were fined
$900,000 by a judge, which sounds like a pretty
severe hit on a union's budget.
That wasn't the big problem for them.
The big problem was that they lost the dues
check-off right, and a lot of members who weren't
happy about what happened during the strike weren't
that anxious to pay, in part because the penalty
that's imposed on individual workers is the
loss of two days pay for every day on strike,
which meant that they were losing the equivalent of
22 days salary, so that financially,
it was a strain to have to pay union dues,
and if you were not feeling good,
then that gave you even more reason not to pay.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So now, we go back to collective bargaining.
So the union comes in, and the city comes in,
and they have to come to an agreement?
RICHARD STEIER: They don't have to come to an agreement.
It's something that, ideally, they want to.
Once upon a time, you had a policy among unions of,
no contract, no work, which meant that if a
contract expired, and a new one wasn't in place,
they were going to go out on strike.
One of the things that the tail law provided for was
the right to binding arbitration,
and binding arbitration was supposed to be a
solution because of the fact that you would have a
third party coming in and, in essence,
working out a settlement, either splitting the
difference between the two sides' positions,
or deciding that one side had a better case than the
other and imposing a settlement that the second
side wasn't going to be that thrilled about.
But this, along with what became a tradition of
providing for retroactivity in raises
meant that the unions no longer had an incentive to
go out on strike and had pretty big disincentives
to walk off the job, simply because you knew
that even if it was delayed,
even if it took a year or two years beyond the
expiration of the contract,
once a deal was reached, that members were going to
be getting money, getting back pay going back to the
time that the old contract expired.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So did the tail law and
collective bargaining come together?
RICHARD STEIER: Yes. Well actually --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Do you support that?
RICHARD STEIER: Actually, I shouldn't say that,
because collective bargaining rights were
actually granted in New York City in 1958.
Things didn't get completely formalized
until 1966, when you had the Office of Municipal
Labor Relations created as well as the Office of
Collective Bargaining.
The Office of Collective Bargaining,
contrary to what it sounds like,
is actually the mediation and arbitration office.
The reason for that is that some secretary got
the two charters wrong, and so she typed "Office
of Collective Bargaining" for what should have been
the "Office of Municipal Labor Relations" and vice
versa, and they just didn't bother to change it.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: They never changed it.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So when people say they don't
understand what's going on,
there's sometimes very good reason,
because nobody understands what's going on, right?
RICHARD STEIER: There's some fairly archaic stuff
in there, yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But the interesting thing about
the collective bargaining is that it followed the
State of Wisconsin, right?
RICHARD STEIER: The State of Wisconsin actually got
a collective bargaining law passed the year after
New York City adopted it.
New York State did not adopt a collective
bargaining law until, Wisconsin was the first
state in the country to bring it.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And now they've undone it.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So we hope --
RICHARD STEIER: Scott Walker, the governor.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: - it won't happen here.
So all of these unions are going to start to
negotiate with the Office of --
RICHARD STEIER: Labor Relations.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: - Labor Relations, right, and they
want, because most of them haven't had contracts for
four years, but some of them have?
RICHARD STEIER: Most of them have been more than
three years without a contract.
There are exceptions.
The Sergeants' Union back in 2007 agreed to a 74
month contract that didn't run out until,
I believe, it's the summer of 2011,
but the largest police union,
the PBA, its contract ran out August 1st of 2010,
same thing for the firefighters' union,
so you're generally talking close to 3?
years for them. For the UFT,
you're talking more than 4 years at this point,
pretty much 50 months under an expired contract.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So the important question on the
table during these negotiations is going to
be the question of retroactive pay,
health benefits, and increase in salary, right?
RICHARD STEIER: Yes, but there's also a division there,
you'll have the situation with unions like the UFT which are
in arbitration for a period before the period in which
the police and the firefighters and most of the other
unions are looking to negotiate, and so in terms of that
arbitration, it's a question as to whether the other talks can
go forward until that's straightened, until it's known--
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But how long does it take,
the process of arbitration?
RICHARD STEIER: The UFT arbitration is pretty much done.
An arbitration for nurses represented by the New
York State Nurses' Association is wrapping up
later this month, and then it becomes a question of
how soon the panels turn around and issue awards
that should be --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And they're two separate entities, though.
RICHARD STEIER: Two separate arbitrations,
and what's important about the nurses' arbitration,
which is for a much smaller group of
employees, the UFT process is non-binding.
It's recommendations.
Very often, they serve as the framework for an
eventual settlement, but it's not something that
the city or the union is locked into.
In the case of the nurses, it is binding.
So once it comes down, it's pretty much final.
The city could always have the option of appealing it
to court, but courts generally give very short
shrift to appeals of administrative rulings.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So these nurses are nurses from where?
RICHARD STEIER: They are nurses who work in,
they work in the Health and Hospitals Corporation.
School nurses are actually represented by different unions.
There's, I think DC37 represents some of them.
I think the UFT has a contingent as well,
but most of the nurses who work in the city hospital
system are represented by the New York State Nurses'
Association, or to a lesser and more recent degree, 1199.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is there a chart? Like a family tree?
Could we ever have that?
RICHARD STEIER: You would probably be best asking
the Office of Labor Relations if it had something.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: That would be interesting.
So if you were to raise, they have figures for each
point that is raised in a salary that costs the
city, what, do you know what is --
RICHARD STEIER: At this point, I think on a citywide basis,
it probably comes to several hundred million
dollars, but I can't give you a --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Do you have a guess as to
what's going to happen with these contracts?
RICHARD STEIER: I do. I think --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Yes, let's have it.
RICHARD STEIER: I think that the arbitrators are
going to give the UFT and the nurses the same 4%
raises that other people got based on a long
history of pattern bargaining,
which is a history that has been not only adhered
to by mayors in the past but has been championed by
them when unions like the UFT and the PBA would look
to make a case for greater raises because of higher
salaries being paid in the suburbs in Long Island and
Westchester, and these mayors would talk about
the importance of preserving a bargaining
pattern, and Bloomberg did that as well,
and this is something that,
one of the things that arbitrators don't tend to
be impressed by is a mayor coming in and saying,
well, that was then, this is now.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So what happens to the UFT salaries?
So they say, all right, 4% increase. On what?
Does that go back retroactive then?
RICHARD STEIER: Unless there was a drastic
change, and I've talked to people in the business who
say they'd be very surprised if the arbitrators decided to go
against that. Then there's a great chance that you will have
that money being retroactive to November 1st of 2009,
which is when the first year's increase would take effect, and
the second raise would be effective November 1st, 2010,
and you're talking a whole lot of money --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Is that going to kick into the
pattern bargaining?
RICHARD STEIER: It would not, it would simply
conform to the pattern that --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: With the other unions, you mean.
RICHARD STEIER: - had already been set by the
mayor with most other unions.
The other unions, what they're looking for is
something that picks up from where that UFT
arbitration will leave off.
I mean, one of the interesting questions
that's come into play, you have a new administration,
and it may want to get things done and know what
its costs for rather than waiting for those to come
down, because then you begin anew the process of
bargaining with everybody for this new round,
which by now is an old round,
so the question becomes, Bob Lynn is a former chief
negotiator under Ed Koch, and he's now de Blasio's
chief negotiator.
I asked last week whether he would look to talk to
the UFT and the nurses to see whether they could
settle things quickly, rather than waiting,
and he basically demurred and said he wasn't going
to talk about any approaches right now,
but there is that possibility.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: What's implicit in all of this, though,
is the public opinion has really not, has turned.
It's not supportive of, I don't think,
of the union members, is it?
RICHARD STEIER: It all depends.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: It's been so presented to us as the
reason we're in fiscal crisis,
which is so insane, because everybody talks
about the middle class, we've got to help the
middle class, and the union workers are the
middle class.
And yet, they fire them, or lay them off,
or do punitive things like not giving them raises.
I mean, isn't that contrary to --
RICHARD STEIER: Well, the perception is that,
unlike most workers in private industry,
these are people who, they're getting raises out
of the pocket of the taxpayer,
and some people would say, well,
I haven't gotten a raise at my job in years,
so why should these people be getting raises?
And you had the mayor, basically with a
well-orchestrated campaign against the unions.
He was going back looking to take away pension
benefits from cops and firefighters as well as
pension related benefits going back to 2009.
There's been probably a backlash among some people
who don't think that much of Bloomberg,
and who thought that he increasingly favored the
rich in his policies during his last four years
in office, and thus a greater sympathy towards
city employees, but it has always been tough,
and you will always see editorial letters pages in
the tabloids complaining about,
why should these people be getting any additional
money, that they're lucky they have jobs.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Right. Let's talk about unions.
They all operate differently, right?
Even the unions under the umbrella.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So you have a book out that,
it's very interesting, and I've read it,
and I hope people will look at it also.
You give histories of some of the things,
DC37 has a long history, and when they vote,
they're as corrupt as politicians, or as mediocre.
They're running parallel to our elected officials these days.
RICHARD STEIER: They can be.
It's something where, when I was first working for
The Chief in the 80s, and friends of mine would ask
me about corruption within the unions,
I would say, you know, it's nothing like what you
would see in the private sector teamsters,
or in terms of the longshoremen's union,
or some of the other unions that were known to
have mob connections, or simply were bad actors,
that the unions seem to be remarkably clean compared
to private sector counterparts.
But then in the 90s, you'd start to see some of this
corruption bubbling to the surface,
that you had the Transit Police Union,
which was basically giving business to lawyers and
then taking kickbacks from those lawyers in return
for that business, you had a massive corruption
scandal in DC37 in which they manage to rig a
contract vote under an agreement with the city
that froze pay for the first two years of the
contract, and you also had massive stealing going on,
and there was some speculation that the
reason that some of the union officials who were
stealing were also involved in the attempt to
fix the contract was because they thought that
Giuliani might suspect that something was amiss,
and if the contract had gone down and messed up
his plan to get his budget in line by having a two
year wage freeze, that he would start drawing
attention to some of the stuff that they had been doing.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: What I was amused about,
they got kickbacks from buying the turkeys that
they gave to the union members for Christmas or
something, but anyway, people always steal too
little, it seems to me, except some of the big ones.
What are we going to do in this country,
though, and generally in the city,
to really bring some democratic principles to
some of the unions that don't have really
democratic elections? There's no body to do that, is there?
It's all within the unions.
RICHARD STEIER: International unions have that possibility.
When DC37 had this scandal, its national union, AFSCME,
came in and cleaned up the union's financial house,
but they did not change the system under which you
don't have union members voting for their leadership.
Lillian Roberts is elected, not by the 100,000+ members that
she represents, but by about 300 delegates who very
often are being given stipends and committee
positions that allow them to go on trips and collect
extra money, and that's all that they care about.
They're not worried about whether she's really
serving the members well, and this was the thing
that created the problem back during the 90s,
and the reason that the international did not make
the change is because it's easier to control things
when you just have, you're not worried that you're
going to have some renegade --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Some upstart --
RICHARD STEIER: - come in who's going to give
you a hard time down in Washington
as well as in New York City.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: So it's all self-interest,
not all, we shouldn't generalize.
There's some very good people doing very good things.
RICHARD STEIER: There are some very good people
running unions.
There are also situations where you have enough
union involvement on the part of the rank and file
to keep the leaders honest.
One of the problems with DC37,
many of its members are not particularly well
paid, and in situations where they're single
parents, they're just not going to have the time,
they're not going to have the ability to arrange day
care for them to take an active role in the union,
and so they're pretty much passive observers of
what's going on.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And then they have things like
having to come to the headquarters to vote,
rather than being able to mail in a ballot.
That story in your book is fascinating.
So it has to come from within the union.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes. Or, if somebody in the
Central Labor Council, which is the umbrella group for the
city, or the AFL-CIO tells people,
we've got to clean things up because we have real
problems, there are forces that are out to hurt us,
and not having a good image is not helping at all.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: But the Central Labor Council has
had its share also.
RICHARD STEIER: Well, Brian McLaughlin was one
of the biggest thieves in municipal --
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Yeah, that was unbelievable.
That was really unbelievable.
RICHARD STEIER: And he was someone who was actually
capable. He was the best leader
that they had had in 15 or 20 years, and then he--
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: People talked about him as a
mayoral candidate.
RICHARD STEIER: Yes.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And look what happened.
Silly, stupid things.
RICHARD STEIER: Greedy things.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Greedy.
So once again, we come up with the question of greed
and of rich people, of high incomes,
and other people struggling to make a
living and make a decent life for themselves.
Well, we've got so much to talk about,
we'll have to come back when we are in these negotiations.
RICHARD STEIER: I'd be happy to.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: And thank you for all the lessons
and explanations.
RICHARD STEIER: Thank you.
RONNIE ELDRIDGE: Thanks, Richard Steier.