A Prayer for the City (25 page)

Davis liked Rendell. He saw him as mayor the way many people saw Rendell as mayor regardless of whether they could articulate it or not—as a big kid having the time of his life. Absent the yellow feathers and beak, the mayor had become the political equivalent of Big Bird (they even had the same endearing waddle that comes with ample padding), and his comfort in who he was made him a willing participant in just about everything, except hammering a nail into a roof with one of those nail guns to put the finishing touches on a refurbished city recreation center. He’d climb a ladder to the roof, but they could forget about those noisy, nail-spitting guns, given his aversion to anything remotely mechanical, even a pen. “If I used a nail gun,” said the mayor, “I would nail my ankles.”

There were certain moments in the war with the unions that Rendell seemed to relish, like the time he walked from City Hall to his car and union members angrily showered him with copies of the city’s proposed health plan. Sergeant Buchanico had urged the mayor to slip out by another
exit, but Rendell was determined to forge ahead through the same exit he always used, and he was more than just determined—he welcomed the confrontation, particularly since it broke up the monotony of all those meetings. “It was kind of fun,” he said in the car afterward, and he seemed so giddy at the thought of all those health-plan proposals being showered on his head like stale banana peels that he didn’t get angry at the slow response of the car phone and passed up the usual ritual of banging it against the dashboard in frustration. But there were other moments that he did not relish, particularly the thought of a long and nasty strike in which he would be held up as a union buster and an absolute enemy of the common working man. Although Rendell himself had never been a common working man, he knew about the garment factories in New York because of his father. He knew what it was like to sew and stitch and do piece work while racing against production schedules. He respected and admired the skill of those who did it, and of all the things that later struck him about his father’s funeral, it was the way some of those who had worked for Jesse Rendell came up to him and related what a fine and decent man his dad had been.

But the city was in crisis, and more than just in crisis, for Rendell had staked much of his campaign on a willingness to create a new type of government. Although the word was dangerous to use in any labor negotiations, there actually were some principles, and they centered on such issues as the city’s right to lay off workers, a management-rights clause that would actually give the city greater latitude to set work schedules that might enhance productivity instead of hamper it, the right to contract out certain union work on the grounds that it could be done more cheaply and more efficiently privately, the enactment of a so-called zipper clause that would allow the city to “unzip” some of the more ridiculous and corrosive union practices of the past, and the right of the city to transfer workers from one job classification to another without endless hearings and grievance procedures. In most previous bargaining sessions, these issues, the so-called non-economic ones, had inevitably been discarded or watered down to the extent that they had no bite. They were difficult to quantify and had little sex appeal with a media far more interested in such classic economic issues as wage increases. But the Rendell administration, embracing a spirit of reform so sweeping it had been dubbed perestroika, had finally recognized the importance of these non-economic issues and how they could not be traded away if the city was ever to change, if services were ever to improve and government was ever to play more than a role of nominal caretaker and employer of last resort.

“The notion of taking control of the government and restructuring it for effectiveness was at the heart of our campaign platform,” policy and planning head Torsella had written in a confidential memo to Rendell and Cohen several months earlier, arguing that these issues carry the same weight as economic ones.

It was a fine memo, written with precision and thoughtfulness and a strong trace of the good-government piousness that Torsella—a true and earnest believer in the midst of crotchety wolves and coyotes—was known for. But it represented the ideals of government, a government that was proactive instead of reactive and one that determined its own fate instead of waiting for the latest kick in the teeth, so it really didn’t represent government at all. Nor did it represent the reality—the reality of a mayor engaged in a showdown with the unions the likes of which had not been seen in any major city in decades, the reality of a mayor being increasingly enveloped in tourniquets of pressure that only intensified and increased with every hour and every day and every week.

The first signs of what Alan Davis feared took place at the end of July at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Bill Clinton was about to accept the nomination for president, and since Rendell had been an early supporter of the Arkansas governor, it was presumably a heady time. But
Rendell was already exhausted to begin with, from the long days he worked throughout each week, and then he developed an infection in his elbow. When it came to doctors, the mayor had all the dignity of a child, convinced that the minute you saw one, you were guaranteed an amputation or inadvertent organ removal. He took great pride in the fact that he had virtually never missed a day of work due to illness in more than thirty years. Getting him to go to a doctor for a checkup or even for a life insurance exam was virtually hopeless. But when the lump on his elbow steadily grew to the size of a baseball and his arm swelled to the point where his wife, Midge, noted that he was rather ominously beginning to look like the Pillsbury dough boy, even he became scared and knew he had to do something. On a Thursday morning in July, he gave a press conference on South Broad Street, excitedly announcing the groundbreaking for a new theater that in fact wouldn’t occur for at least another year. Then he was quietly driven a few blocks away, to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, for an examination. Afterward it was agreed that he needed to be hospitalized so the infection could be properly drained and cared for. He got out just in time for the convention, but the only way the doctors would let him attend was accompanied by a nurse, which was not only unsettling to Rendell but also somewhat humiliating, perhaps even worse than that moment at the 1980 convention when he addressed the floor to the interest of absolutely no one. After all, what other politician would be showing up at the convention with a woman who
really
was his nurse?

On a spiritual level, it was clear that the negotiations were taking their toll on the mayor. Once the smoke had lifted, he could see that the all-out offensive by the city had gained barely an inch of ground. Threatened layoffs, secret communiqués sent across enemy lines, legal appeals—none of it was working. During the sixty-day fact-finding period, the union was continuing to work under the existing contract, and a city that was on the edge of bankruptcy was losing roughly $2 million a week. In a sweet stealth strike all their own, the unions also had a little surprise in store for Rendell when he arrived at the convention in New York: a protest in his honor on Seventh Avenue that tied up rush-hour traffic. City workers carried signs labeling Rendell a
REPUBLICRAT MAYOR
and a member of the antiworker hall of fame, along with Frank Lorenzo, the former head of Continental Airlines. After the protest, they carried the signs into the convention itself in an attempt to embarrass the mayor in front of a national audience. Subsequently various national union leaders privately cornered Rendell at the convention. He later denied feeling any heat in the slightest
and instead said he found all the protests amusing. But it was at the convention, according to Davis, that Rendell gave the union leaders an indication that in return for full concessions on health and welfare benefits, he would be amenable to wage increases of 10 percent over the life of the contract.

Ten percent?

It was a catastrophic statement, one that ran counter to every tenet of the negotiations. If the city was on the verge of bankruptcy, then why was the mayor committing it to such healthy wage increases? And if that was the mayor’s private stance, then what about the stance of Alan Davis and the other members of the city negotiating team, who all along had been arguing that any wage increases in the life of the contract would be negligible at best? To the union leaders, the answer was clear: all the city’s posturing over bankruptcy and no more money had been a bluff, the kind of transparent negotiating that always went on before a new contract was sniffed out. And every mayor in America had an epiphany in which he or she realized that choosing public considerations over political ones was just plain stupid if there was any interest in surviving beyond one lousy and meager term.

Davis forgave Rendell for what happened. He had known Rendell for thirty years, and he understood that the mayor had an almost compulsive need to be nice and generous. The mayor knew it too, lamenting once that his weakness for people was such that, “if I was a woman, I’d be pregnant all the time.”

Whatever he told the national union leaders, it created a significant stumbling block in the negotiations. Rendell may have assumed that he was just musing in private, but national union leaders were far too experienced to let something like that remain informal. Almost as soon as he uttered “ten percent,” according to Davis, they faxed the utterance all over the place, as if he had made an official contract offer. Davis thought there was a way to overcome it, in part by taunting the unions, by telling them yes, maybe they could have had wage increases totaling 10 percent, maybe they could have had a lot of things they desired—but that was before they had been dumb enough to stage their blockade of delay, before they had been stupid enough to try to hide under the cover of a fact-finding process that everyone knew was worthless.

But what happened next was much harder to forgive.

It happened toward the end of July, just a few days after the convention. Davis was on the phone with a labor mediator from the state. By coincidence,
the chief negotiator for the blue-collar and white-collar unions, Deborah Willig, was in the mediator’s office when Davis called. Davis and Willig didn’t like each other, in part because they were adversaries in a volatile standoff, in part because their personalities seemed a toxic mix of worry beads and steel ball bearings—Davis quiet and whimsical with a soulful view of the city, Willig full of punch and vinegar, a lawyer who relished the opportunity to tweak Davis’s nose whenever she got the opportunity, just to remind him that she was bigger and tougher than he would ever be. They got on the phone with each other, and it wasn’t just a tweak that Willig was delivering but a hard taffy pull, to the point where Davis looked as misshapen as Cyrano de Bergerac.

“Don’t you know what’s going on?” asked Willig. “The mayor has agreed to a contract.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Davis.

“Obviously you don’t,” gloated Willig. “And all of this stuff you’re shoving down our throats—work rules—is all bullshit.”

She then went on to say that as they were talking, Rendell and Cohen were in Washington putting the finishing touches on a contract agreement with Gerald McEntee, the national head of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. It was a done deal, Willig was saying, and Alan Davis, the lead labor negotiator for the city, the man who knew more about labor than Samuel Gompers himself, Mr. Negotiations,
didn’t even know about it
. Even worse, the source of the information was
Debbie Willig—Willig
, a name that after a while, if you said it enough times, really did begin to have a resemblance to
earwig
. As for all that stuff about changing the culture of city government and redefining it, Alan Davis could take all of it and shove it up his ass if Willig was right.

The mayor and his wonder boy had sold him out. Davis was stunned and also offended. He and the other members of the city negotiating team had been working for months. The hours had been long and the issues myriad and complicated, but they had been guided by their faith in a mayor who they believed not only grasped the importance of the principles at stake but also wanted to honor them. For Davis, these particular negotiations were not just exhausting. Given that his father had been a machinist and a union organizer in Philadelphia in the 1940s, they also created a personal conflict. A union lawyer involved in the negotiations had asked Davis how he could be involved in a scorched-earth war such as this one, in which the city seemed so intent on destroying every right and benefit that workers had built up over the years. Where were his heart and his sense of history?
Davis had replied that wage increases and benefits would be worthless if the city went bankrupt and thousands of workers had to be let go, and rather than taking away jobs, he was actually trying to save as many as possible. But the question gnawed at him, in particular because as a young boy in the city the nexus of life had always contained its share of civil servants, cops, and firefighters, who gave the neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion a history and character as intrinsic as the cracks in the pavement. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t help but feel a little bit traitorous to what had made him all that he was as a husband and a father and a lawyer. But he had taken such a leading role in the negotiations because he thought it was right—and more than just right, crucial to the future of the city. If it was to have a future.