A Prayer for the City (23 page)

To city negotiators, the absurd flavor of the bargaining did signal some clear and calculated method in the unions’ strategy. Workers might be ready to strike, but not when the contract expired at 12:01
A.M.
on July 1. Instead, the unions were apparently hoping to hide beneath the umbrella of a state-mandated sixty-day fact-finding process. If such a process was in
fact allowed by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, it would effectively push back to August 25 the earliest deadline for a possible strike. It would also allow the unions to continue to work under the favorable terms of the existing contract. For the city administration, such a delay would mean the continued bleeding of money it did not have, $1 million to $2 million a week. It would also mean increasingly disquieting glances from Wall Street municipal-credit analysts, who would inevitably wonder whether the mayor, like virtually all mayors of Philadelphia before him, was just another paper tiger whose only real distinguishing characteristic was a great capacity for convincing bluster. Finally, it would have the effect of throwing Rendell’s grand pronouncements about massive layoffs straight back at him.

If he was serious about laying off thousands of workers, then he could do it and in all likelihood watch a city under his stewardship ignite in unholy chaos, with every dire prediction in the “Strike Contingency” notebook—and dozens more that had not been predicted—becoming a reality. The public would support him for a while, following along with his rallying cry that short-term pain meant long-term gain, but as garbage piled up in stinking stacks and fights flared up on picket lines and the remaining city services barely functioned, how long could the public be expected to keep following him?

Beyond the tactic of delay, the unions’ strategy seemed to hinge almost exclusively on political history and the inevitability that Rendell, in choosing an alternative to that grisly spectacle of chaos, would fall obediently into line and would do what every politician ultimately did: place his own survival above the survival of the city, avoid the hard choices, figure out a way to fall to his knees with enough spin and polish that no one would dwell too long on that stirring inaugural speech, and by using a legacy of phantom budgets, creative bookkeeping, carefully timed tax increases, and blame placed on previous mayors, give the unions much of what they wanted in a new contract. In the long-term, such a strategy would hasten the fall of the city by perpetuating the budgetary mess that made governance so untenable, but in the short term, which was the only time most American politicians ever lived by, it would avoid
Today
-show footage of striking workers in the City of Brotherly Love going for the throats of those trying to cross their picket lines.

And yet, despite what the union negotiators were expecting, Rendell’s stomach showed an iron lining. Instead of buckling in the slightest, he
seemed to be doing the very opposite, acting as if he were crazy enough to do all the things he said he would do if the unions did not accept the reality of the city’s fiscal situation. And the city negotiators began to see a wonderful point of leverage in all this—the lunacy threshold, the absolute lunacy of the mayor in thinking he could take on the unions and survive to tell about it.

“There’s no motivation like fear,” said Kenneth Jarin, a lawyer in the city and a member of the negotiating team. “People are always more scared of someone they think is crazy than someone who is rational.”

While Rendell worked the unions from the outside, Field General Cohen and high-ranking officers from the city negotiating team led a stealth campaign from the inside, planting mines and hurling Molotov cocktails in every conceivable place they could think of, performing like expert saboteurs in their camouflage of lusterless blue suits.

Of all the elements in the union negotiations, none was more important or more controversial than the health and welfare plan. Under a system that embodied the way cities all over the country had sold their souls to the municipal unions in return for peace and political support, the city of Philadelphia contributed an average of $475 a month per employee for health and welfare benefits. In comparison with the amount contributed in the private sector, that figure defied any rational economic explanation. Even more outrageous was the way in which the money was dispensed by the city: it went straight to the unions. The city had no rights of administration, no way of making sure that the money it doled out each month was being used solely for health and welfare benefits. And the distinct suspicion of the city negotiators was that although some portion of that $475 a month went for benefits, some portion of it also went for everything else besides benefits, such as patronage, consulting fees, and mortgages on various union-owned buildings.

On a Saturday morning in May, several members of the city negotiating team had sat in a law-firm conference room, their elbows leaning on a table so long and so heavily lacquered that it could have been used by a bowling league. There, in the corporate splendor of the clouds on the thirtieth floor, among portraits of lawyers and sycophantic proclamations, with an unblemished view looking west toward the massive stone of the Thirtieth Street Station, they pondered ways of outflanking the union enemy. Cohen was there, of course. So was Joe Torsella. And so was Alan Davis, who held the title of chief city negotiator. Wise and wonderfully laconic, Davis
had a bespectacled, gnomelike physique that belied his long years of experience in the hand-to-hand combat of union wars. But he played the games of camouflage and subterfuge so well that one had to wonder whether underneath his button-down shirt, on the cusp of his shoulder, there wasn’t a little tattoo in the shape of a smiling devil that said, “fuck collective bargaining.”

Within the next several days, the city would formally propose to the unions a $332-per-employee cap on health and welfare benefits. Since such a proposal was nearly $145 less than the city’s current contribution, it was a safe assumption that the union leaders would be sickened by the proposal, not because it was insufficient for health and welfare benefits for the rank and file (some health care providers, eager for the business, had already offered managed-care plans right around that figure) but because it would put a significant dent in the funding of these other activities and create serious cracks in the empire. After all, if a municipal union couldn’t use health and welfare money for mortgages and patronage jobs, then how could it call itself a union?

Now Davis fretted over what the media coverage would be like when the city made its health-plan presentation to the unions. It would be made in private, but in the endless war being waged by both sides to win the hearts and minds of the public, leaks to the media were so fast and furious that keeping up with them was hard. In Davis’s view, as in the view of the others at the long and lacquered table, the unions clearly had a pipeline to the city’s newspapers, in particular to Kathy Sheehan of the
Daily News
. Unsmiling and sullen in a way that was impressive even for a reporter, Sheehan greeted every city pronouncement about the negotiations with deadened nonreaction. While most reporters seemed both dazed and dazzled in Cohen’s presence when he went into one of his numbers riffs, Sheehan seemed quite uninterested in him, as if he were just some policy wonk with better than average stamina. She also did have good contacts within the unions. Earlier in the week the city had given the unions the wrong location for a negotiating session. It was a pure and simple accident, but a story about it had found its way into the
Daily News
under Sheehan’s byline, told from the point of view of union outrage and insult.

“That’s what you’re dealing with,” said Davis, and Cohen readily agreed.

“Anything we put in front of the unions will be in the newspapers
the next day,” he said, and the fear was obvious: the unions would be able to spin a story to the media about how the city’s health-plan proposal was draconian, indecent, and an outrage to working men and women everywhere.

No one at the table thought there was a way to rub out Sheehan’s machine-gun nest, but by using their own campaign of sabotage, they were confident they could render the bullets harmless. To counterbalance the unions’ spin on the health plan, Davis felt it was important for the city’s “propaganda machines” to get up and running as quickly as possible, weaving as many stories as possible about how a sizable portion of what the city contributed to the unions for health care did not
even go
to health care. It was one thing to pay for illnesses, but should the city also be paying for patronage?

“We will be prepared with whatever propaganda machines we have going—editorial boards—so that we win this thing publicly,” said Davis. “We’ll have to engage in media education here.”

“I’m not sure I agree that the proper place is editorial boards,” Cohen countered. Instead, he wondered whether the best way to neutralize a reporter such as Kathy Sheehan was by fanning the flames of various antagonisms that he felt existed, in effect pitting reporter against reporter by playing on their jealousies and egos. “There are reporters other than Kathy Sheehan we can go to. She is not particularly respected by her colleagues. Three
Daily News
reporters have independently come to me and have criticized her—and two from the
Inquirer
. If we want to play this game, one thing to do is sit down with these other reporters.”

Someone then came up with a strategy that would be used throughout the war of the unions: when in doubt, douse a leak with another leak. As a result, it was suggested that Rendell write a heartfelt letter to city employees, giving his explanation of why health care benefits had to be cut. That letter could then be leaked to certain reporters in perfect sync with the unions’ leak of the city’s health-plan proposals and their claims of how outrageous they were, thus creating a veritable rainstorm of leaks and leaving reporters confused and conflicted about whose leak was the better leak.

“Sutton and Cronin will walk out and immediately call the papers, and there will be a story the next day,” said Cohen of the two union leaders. “Can we send the letter the same day we meet with the unions and give it to the reporters that we want to?”

In the midst of discussion of the Rendell heartfelt-letter leak, another
discussion quietly developed between Davis and Torsella, about the crazy-work-rules leak. City administration propagandists had assembled much of the material for this leak already, packaging it in the camouflage of a memorandum to the city negotiating team explaining why the city needed better management-initiative proposals. Written in exaggerated bureaucratese by midlevel officers Feeley and Michael Nadol, the cautious and stultifying three-page introduction served as the perfect smoke screen for what followed: a litany of outrageous work rules compiled not for the benefit of the city’s negotiators, since they obviously knew all about these rules already, but as a document to be leaked to the media. It was marked
CONFIDENTIAL
at the top in underlined boldface type, not because it was meant to be confidential but because city propagandists knew that the very word creates an almost orgasmic effect among reporters.

Almost all the examples cited in the memo were powerful, but a few entered the realm of the twilight zone, including the one about the programmer for the Revenue Department who was dismissed by the city after his six-month probationary period because he repeatedly left work to play pinball and video games at local arcades. His union filed a grievance based on the theory that the employee’s preference for arcade games was a gambling addiction and therefore should be treated as a handicap. After the time and expense of nearly three years of hearings, it was held that the city did in fact have the right to dismiss the employee on the grounds that playing pinball was not a handicap or a gambling addiction but something that shouldn’t be done during work hours. Of course, after his separation from the Revenue Department, the employee went to work for the city’s Board of Pensions and Retirement.

This example was sublime, but no more sublime than the difficulties faced by the city’s Commerce Department, where the old joke of how many people it takes to change a lightbulb was apparently no joke at all. Because of union job classifications, the answer at Philadelphia International Airport was three: a building mechanic to remove the cover of the light panel, an electrician to actually replace the fluorescent-light fixture, and a custodian to clean up any dust or debris that might fall to the floor during the light-changing ritual. And the city’s difficulties with lightbulbs may not have been any worse than the intricacies of cleaning various city walls. Custodians had no problems doing it, but only to shoulder level. Above the shoulder threshold, the job had to be done at increased pay by a category of workers called wall washers. If no wall washers were available,
then custodians of course would do it, but at the extra pay accorded those with enough pride and skill to call themselves wall washers.

As a leak, the twenty-page memo was the equivalent of several direct torpedo hits on a submarine. The
Daily News
wrote about it. So did the
Inquirer
. Then, in the ultimate case of sabotage,
The Wall Street Journal
reprinted excerpts on its editorial page, and one could almost hear the unions, in their halfhearted defenses and denials, gurgle and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Toward the end of June, members of the city negotiating team met privately with Rendell at his house in East Falls for a pivotal strategy meeting. At this point, the contract was only five days away from its June 30 expiration date, and everyone knew that there would be neither a settlement by that date nor a strike. The city may have been achieving a rout in the media war, but the unions, in their efforts to use delay as a weapon against the city, had also been successful. Despite Rendell’s best private political wangling, it seemed clear that the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board would in fact impose the sixty-day fact-finding period, thereby extending the terms of the current contract. Negotiations could continue during that period, but there could not be a strike, and the bleeding of the city’s budget would continue. The imposition of fact-finding was a blow to the city, and the men who gathered at Rendell’s house were hell-bent on besieging the unions from every conceivable angle.