A Prayer for the City (22 page)

But regardless of the legend that was so rapidly building, even Cohen himself privately yielded every now and then to the feeling that what he now did for a living and the conditions under which he did it were both bizarre and brutal. He luxuriated in work, but from that very first Sunday in January, when he had moved in, it was apparent that the job would require a capacity for workaholic self-abuse and self-imposed torture far exceeding that which had defined his life as a lawyer. Among his office decorations, he put up huge pictures of his two children on one of the walls, and while it was clear to everyone that he loved his children, some privately snickered that the real reason for the size of the pictures was to help him remember what the kids looked like since he almost never saw them. “I’ve worked hard in every job I’ve ever had,” he said one day. “But nothing in life has prepared me for the swirling chaos that goes on all the time.” And for someone as inherently obsessive about detail as Cohen, the possibilities were endless.

There was the Friday night in March when long after everyone else had gone home to wives and kids and weekends, he sat at his desk deep in thought with legal pad in front of him as if he were back in law school—but
now he was determining the seating arrangements for the tickets the Rendell campaign had purchased for the NCAA Basketball Tournament eastern regionals at the Spectrum arena. They were being dispensed to various politicians and contributors as tokens of appreciation for their support, and because there were blocks of seats in two different sections, good ones in Section V near the end line, bad ones in Section B behind the court, the matter was fragile. To the average layman, a bad free seat at a highly prized sporting event was still a good deal, but to the average Philadelphia politician a bad seat was the greatest disgrace, a diss that would not be dismissed, and given the way Philadelphia politicians often voted on the basis of biorhythms, sheer malevolence, bad hair days, or whether or not Punxsatawney Phil had seen his shadow, one seating misstep by Cohen, much like a bomb squad expert cutting the wrong wire, might be fatal.

Businessman Lewis Katz, Democrat fund-raising juggernaut, true-blue Friend of Bill, and the mayor’s biggest moneyman—any damn seat he wanted. State representative Dwight Evans, the most formidable threat to Rendell in the 1995 election—good seats. Hardy Williams, who had endorsed Rendell in 1991 but could make havoc with the group he headed, Blacks Networking for Progress—two good seats, four bad seats. State representative Mark Cohen, who had no clout and never would unless everyone else in the legislature died—bad seats. Ditto for state senator Vincent Hughes.

There was that Tuesday in April when a city councilman asked him to do something about the rowdy homeless people who were drinking and fighting beneath his open window in City Hall. Although it was hard to figure out just what Cohen’s options were in this case—find another office for the councilman, shoot the offending homeless on sight, or maybe just walk two flights up and shut the window—Cohen was faultlessly politic and considered the situation seriously. But later that day, when a member of the mayor’s staff began to complain about the absurdities of what she did for a living, Cohen stopped her short. “You think you have a bad life. You don’t understand what I do.” After he described it, she was speechless.
He
was right. He did have
a bad life
. And even if she had wanted to talk and commiserate, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, because Cohen had a meeting to attend about the budget in some dark and dreary high school auditorium.

Cohen may have felt beleaguered when another member of the city council called to make sure that a lawyer friend of his would be getting some legal work through the Parking Authority. (“It’s a done deal,” Cohen
assured him.) He may have felt beleaguered when he called the police commissioner to see whether there was anything the department could do to locate the stolen car of someone who, in addition to being a victim of crime in the city, was also an old and influential friend of the mayor’s. He may have felt beleaguered when, in response to questions by a city councilman about public use of City Hall bathrooms, he dutifully dashed off a memo that, while not exactly the stuff you would have expected from a former executive editor of the
Penn Law Review
, still showed a lucid analysis of the situation:

After one particularly swirling day, Cohen mused aloud about checking into a psychiatric clinic. “You can’t get phone calls. No mail. No visitors. What could be better?”

But it wasn’t his style. And his blips of frustration were just that, infinitesimal bumps expressed privately and quickly, never publicly. And he reacted to the chaos not by succumbing to it but by somehow seeing whether he could conquer it, taking the puzzle and shaping it into a set of manageable pieces. To an astounding degree, he succeeded. And although it was true that he had become the ultimate javelin catcher for virtually every silly request, he was also depended on to do far more than that, not just the sublimely ridiculous but also the sublimely important—he was the keeper of the city’s future on a day-to-day basis, fixated on everything, distracted by nothing.

He had done it with requests for tickets. He had done it with requests for parking spaces. He had done it with the five-year plan. And now the biggest question of all was being asked of Cohen: Could he do it with the unions?

And even if he could somehow do it with the unions, play his patented game of patience better than he had ever played it, on a bigger scale than he had ever played it, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, not to mention the very success of the administration, then what about the man who would ultimately have to pull the trigger? What about the mayor?

* * *

Labor negotiations in a major city were always tortured and tenuous, an unpredictable Crock-Pot-ful of ingredients ranging from race to politics to the courts to the media. But given the public pronouncements of Rendell from the very beginning—that this would be a different kind of negotiation, with concessions that went far beyond the normal fixation on wages—the stakes had already been driven beyond the outer reaches. Although Rendell had vainly tried to underplay the war of the unions in the blindly optimistic hope of reaching an amicable agreement, the assault against the city’s four major unions was as remarkable as it was dangerous, a multipronged attack in which the city administration wanted to hold the line on wage increases, drastically decrease health and welfare benefits, reduce other time-honored benefits, and seek unprecedented change in the areas of management rights and work rules. On a practical level, the city was seeking labor savings of about $110 million, but more than just savings, it was also seeking a sweeping and fundamental change in the very way the city government conducted itself, a frank and startling acknowledgment that the city had made concessions to the unions so absurd and so politically motivated that it did not even have the right to unilaterally set schedules for its own workforce. As for the quality of service the public was getting from the unionized workforce, it seemed to be aptly summed up by a slight oversight over at the nursing home, where a dead body went undetected for four days because no one had bothered to look behind the curtain where it lay in repose. What happened or didn’t happen in Philadelphia would also be a bellwether for cities everywhere, a crucial test of the ability of government to reverse a long trend of out-of-whack public-sector spending. Throughout the 1980s, the average rate of compensation for state and local government workers had increased more than four times the rate of compensation for comparable private sector jobs. In the private sector, the annual increase had been 3.4 percent, or $960 a year. In state and local government, the annual increase had been 14.6 percent, or $4,031. The anomaly was glaring in Philadelphia, where the taxpayer cost of employee compensation had more than doubled in the last ten years, from roughly $25,000 a year per employee to more than $50,000 a year.

There was something breathless about what the city administration was trying to accomplish, but there was danger, a real danger. As explained by Jim Sutton, president of District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the union representing most of the city’s blue-collar workforce,
each
of the areas where Rendell was seeking
significant change—wages, health benefits, other givebacks—would be grounds for a strike. But taken together, said Sutton, the seeds were there for an urban riot much like the one that had taken place just a few months earlier three thousand miles to the west in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict. “You can have an L.A.,” he said, and the impetus would be a white mayor trying to eviscerate a workforce that, in the case of Sutton’s union, was primarily black.

The stark reality of what was at stake in the war with the unions was embodied by the black notebook that sat on a corner of Cohen’s desk. It was barely noticeable in the right-angled piles that took up every inch of available lacquered surface. But unlike the other paper on Cohen’s desk, which got read, processed, and filed just before the next avalanche hit the in box, the black notebook never moved. It had the title “Strike Contingency Plans,” and the thick sheaf of confidential memos from department heads clearly depicted a city administration that was in the throes of war preparation and that, in the event of a strike at the stroke of midnight on June 30, would be in a state of war, simultaneously trying to keep the city running and warding off possible acts of sabotage and violence that could take place anywhere at any time. Among other precautions, the “Strike Contingency Plans” called for stockpiling a fourteen-day supply of toilet paper; backing up hard disks and systems software in case of computer sabotage; issuing nonstriking employees temporary ID cards that would be changed periodically to guard against enemy infiltration; changing locks on certain key buildings; providing security to fire department employees willing to cross picket lines under secret cover; providing police escorts for persons delivering certain key city documents, such as incoming revenue checks; assigning police officers from Narcotics, Highway Patrol, and the Marine Unit to the prisons to ward off riots; ensuring the availability of two jeeps equipped with snowplows to clear streets of trash; preparing secret contracts to handle removal of sewage sludge or, in the event that no contractor would touch such a job because of the attendant risks, arranging for the National Guard to truck the material.

All the material in the black notebook had been compiled by early June, on the obvious assumption that if there was no contract settlement by the June 30 deadline, there would be a strike. But as the deadline neared, the
unions seemed in no rush to negotiate and instead seemed to derive a certain pleasure from making negotiating sessions as counterproductive as possible. On some occasions, the entire session seemed to be dominated by the question of where various members of the District Council 33 negotiating team should sit. Since the team was quite large and union protocol had a Kremlinology all its own, negotiators seemed to take forever to find the right seat. And once they were seated, they never seemed to have much to negotiate anyway since the unions were steadfastly refusing to take the city’s bargaining stance seriously, and the city was steadfastly refusing to show any crack in that stance whatsoever, except for some minor concessions.

Other sessions degenerated into name-calling, with union negotiators livid and enraged and city negotiators mildly amused, as if they were watching a third-rate sitcom. “You assholes!!” Tom Cronin, the leader of the city’s white-collar union, District Council 47, reportedly screamed at one such session at a Holiday Inn in the middle of June, less than two weeks from the contract’s expiration date. The constant arrows from Rendell and Cohen in the media had gotten under his skin, particularly since every politician, when it came to election time, suckled the teats of organized labor with unabashed shamelessness, squeezing them for the honey of their support. “Fuck the Democrats!” screamed Cronin. “Fuck the Republicans!”

It was because of negotiating sessions such as these that Joseph Torsella, the deputy mayor for policy and planning and an integral member of the negotiating team, came to the conclusion that there would eventually be a strike. “I don’t think there’s any fundamental acceptance of the reality of the situation,” he said. “They’re talking to us, but they don’t accept our contention about the fiscal situation.” One of the unions, in its initial demand to the city, reportedly asked for an 18 percent wage increase—
in the first year of the contract
. When city negotiators tried to remind the union that the city was broke and was thinking more along the lines of no wage increase for the first year, the union did come back with a counterproposal: it would settle for 14 percent.