To the
surprise of many, Mayor Giuliani and AFSCME DC 37 announced a
tentative contract settlement on April 11, covering over 100,000
city employees. Days later, the 500 librarians of the New York
Public Library Guild made headlines when they won an additional
raise. But talks between the city and public school teachers
seemed headed in the opposite direction: An impasse was declared
and the resulting mediation process might last for months, perhaps
even to the end of Giuliani’s final term.
The
agreement with District Council 37, made up of 56 different
locals, calls for a 27-month contract with increases of 4% in the
first year, another 4% in the second and 1% in the final three
months for an “equity fund” that each bargaining unit will
decide how to distribute. Since DC 37’s previous contract
expired in March 2000, the 27-month agreement will have little
more than a year to run. Members will thus receive much of their
raises in a large retroactive payment.
In
addition, a majority of members will see their pay go up by an
additional 3%, a result of a change to the public employee pension
plans passed last year by the state legislature. The proposed
contract also includes a no-layoff clause and improvements in
health benefits. (The health and pension gains were secured by the
Municipal Labor Committee, a multi-union coalition that includes
the PSC.)
UFT
bargaining team at April 25 session with mediator. Armbands
say "No Contract = No Respect."
“Sisters
and brothers, we have just moved a mountain,” DC 37
Administrator Lee Saunders said in a message to members. When
combined with the pension and benefit gains, “the pay raises and
no-layoff protection are a monumental achievement for the members
of DC 37,” Saunders said, noting that the agreement came “amid
daily reports of an economic downturn.”
“We
surveyed our members and asked them what they wanted,” DC 37
spokesperson Chris Policano told Clarion. “The top priorities
were salary increases, job security, and health benefit
improvements—and we got them all.” Policano said the
bargaining process had been unusually open: “All 56 local
presidents were on the bargaining committee, so they were all in
the room,” and he added that a 300-member bargaining caucus was
also involved.
DC 37’s
last contract was approved in a vote that was later found to be
tainted by fraud. Several former DC 37 officials are now in jail
as a result, and the episode led AFSCME to appoint Saunders as
Administrator. Saunders stated that the vote on this proposed deal
would be entirely conducted by the American Arbitration
Association, “a highly respected, independent outside
monitor,” and he stressed that “every member’s vote will
count.” The votes had not been tallied when Clarion went to
press, but approval by a wide margin was expected.
When the
MTA settled with the transit workers union in December 1999,
Giuliani had said that the deal—a three-year agreement with
raises of 3%, 5% and 4%—“has nothing to do with us.” He
insisted that “the overall percentages would be much too high
for the city and it would cause significant deficits.” In
January 2000, Giuliani declared that city workers would receive no
across-the-board increases whatsoever: “That era is over,” he
said, explaining that “the city will only agree to merit pay
increases.” Both statements proved to be wrong.
“As much
as he said the transit settlement wasn’t a marker, it was an
absolute marker,” said a source close to the negotiations.
“Transit was three and five, ours was four and four. The
bargaining committee made it clear from the start that the transit
settlement was where we had to be.” Had the contract
gone to binding arbitration, the transit settlement would
have played an important role, a fact which strengthened the
union’s position.
On merit
pay, the city gradually softened its stance during the last year
of negotiations, with proposals for tiny across-the-board hikes of
one or two percent. The proposed contract does include language on
merit pay, but it is limited to the general statement that the
city has “the right to pay additional compensation for
outstanding performance.” This came after DC 37 rejected an
earlier city proposal, which would have specified a structure for
merit raises of as much as 7%.
Giuliani
hailed the merit pay clause as a major victory, while DC 37
described it as a “tradeoff” in which it had given up very
little. Union officials pointed out that most job titles in
mayoral agencies already have a range of salary levels.
Who is
right? According to the pro-business, anti-union Citizens’
Budget Commission, it’s not Giuliani: “The merit pay language
is a toothless, face-saving device,” the CBC concluded in an
April 25 op-ed in the Daily News. The CBC, a big booster of merit
pay, called the proposed contract “profoundly disappointing,”
and complained that “the mayor hasn’t delivered.”
So why did
Giuliani cut a deal? One factor, said library union leader Ray
Markey, is that “it was possible for Giuliani to give DC 37 a
pact that they could accept, but which the teachers and police
could not.” Both public school teachers and police have
emphasized that their salaries are far below those of their
suburban counterparts, and argued that the city must provide large
wage increases to remain competitive. Certainly the city will cite
the DC 37 deal in an effort to blunt this argument, but the UFT
and PBA have already rejected the comparison.
It is
unclear whether Giuliani and the UFT can come to an agreement. In
March the UFT declared that its talks were at an impasse and on
April 6 the state Public Employee Relations Board (PERB)
agreed—over the city’s protests. A few sessions have now been
held under the auspices of a mediator, a process which could lead
to fact-finding and arbitration by a PERB-appointed panel if no
agreement is reached.
“The
whole process could take about five or six months,” UFT Special
Representative Jeff Goldstein told Clarion, “though one side
could potentially drag it out.” To the union’s advantage, a
PERB panel would look at suburban teacher wages as well as those
of other city workers. But unlike the arbitration that DC 37 might
have faced, which would have been governed by the city’s
collective bargaining law, a PERB panel’s arbitration report is
not binding.
Giuliani
has also declared his intent to get merit pay language in the
teachers’ contract, and UFT President Randi Weingarten has said
that this “would be counterproductive.” But the April 25 issue
of the UFT’s newspaper indicated that the union would be open to
discussion of some new forms of incentive pay. In line with a
newly-adopted policy statement of the AFT, a four-page supplement
on the topic drew a sharp line between “traditional merit
pay,” awarded to individual teachers, and “group incentive
pay” that gives more money to workers at an entire school or
unit. The latter could be acceptable or even desirable, the paper
said, depending on such factors as whether schools are analyzed on
a single test or a variety of measures, or whether they are
measured against a fixed standard or against their own past
performance. A UFT-supported experiment with group incentive pay
is now under way in two school districts in Brooklyn.
Though it
applies only to a small group of workers, the New York Public
Library’s settlement with its librarians made front-page
headlines. On top of the 9% increase in the DC 37 pact, librarians
in AFSCME Local 1930 won an additional raise of 8% (see p.12).
Current pay scales for city librarians are so far below those in
the suburbs—or even in the public schools—that the system
suffers from huge shortages of trained personnel. The NYPL
agreement thus drew sharp interest from other workers whose pay is
less than that of their counterparts.
“The
bottom line for all of us,” said Local 1930 President Ray Markey,
“is [that] to give quality service you have to pay quality
wages. If you don’t do that, everybody gets hurt.”