The Streets Were Paved with Gold (52 page)

Tradition. As always, the duel was perceived as a contest between labor and management, with the public unrepresented except through its officials, who placed a lid on all public discussion of issues and costs once the negotiations became serious. Samuel Pierce, Jr., chairman of the mediation panel and a law partner of the ubiquitous Theodore Kheel, didn’t sound like an impartial referee when he said, “I’m sure both sides realize it’s important to keep the fare as low as is humanly possible. But it’s a very difficult thing to do because you have 33,000 transit workers who have the problems of inflation thrust upon them and need to meet that problem through increased wages.” Pierce seemed to be dismissing the Transit Authority’s contention that raises should come out of increased productivity. As always, he implied that maintaining the fare was less important than providing raises. Like almost everyone else, Pierce ignored the study which found that over the three years of the fiscal crisis most transit workers kept pace with inflation.

The negotiations ended on April 1. The union captured a 6 percent pay raise over two years, plus a $250 bonus for each worker, plus a cost-of-living boost, making it a 9 to 10 percent pay hike. Over the two years, the average transit worker was expected to jump from $17,092 to $19,542. In a letter to its members, the union leadership proudly declared, “We gave back absolutely nothing.” Also, they wrote, the Control Board would no longer “have any voice in evaluating our productivity.” In its place, a friendlier three-member panel would make that determination, with a union leader as one of the members. “Even making allowance for inflation since 1968,” the letter intoned, “this new contract—won without a strike—is better than the contract that cost twelve days on the picket line twelve years ago.”

The city and the Transit Authority won labor peace without a strike, as was not the case twelve years before. But that’s about all they won. Faced with the Hobson’s choice of paying more for a contract or a crippling strike, the Carey and Koch administrations decided to sweeten the state’s contribution by $80 million and the city’s by $18 million. A settlement was reached, but not before the Koch administration backed down on all its demands for “give-backs.” The dollar cost was relatively modest. The cost of failing to win modifications in work rules was expensive. How much so can be gauged by recalling that the Authority spent $55 million for overtime in fiscal 1977—more than half the cost of the new settlement. The only “victory” the formerly tough-talking Mayor
claimed was that the Authority had won the right to experiment and hire up to 200 part-time change booth collectors. But closer inspection reveals what kind of “victory” this was. “Their sole assignment can only be to open booths not now in service,” declares the union letter. “Clearly, this is not a ‘give-back,’ since any hiring of part-time railroad clerks can only mean an additional cost to the TA. What the TA really fought for was the right to hire part timers as bus operators and in other titles to cut down on overtime. That right they did
NOT
get.” The proclaimed give-back was really a “give-in.” As ever, the workers got more; the city got peace; and the public got higher costs and no improvement in service.

It was the same with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Negotiating separately from the other municipal unions, the PBA insisted on once again becoming the “number one” paid police force in the nation, issuing a thick powder-blue loose-leaf book containing its demands for $10,000 pay and benefit hikes for each cop. Perhaps no single document speaks more eloquently of the reality gap than this; none better underlines the assumption, shared by other special-interest groups, that the city prints money which, somehow, taxpayers don’t have to pay for. The police demands included: