Building a More Collaborative City-Municipal Union Relationship

Previously, I wrote about how a Social-Democratic administration might help private sector workers, both unionized or trying to unionize (by putting the government’s thumb on the scale) and non-unionized (through pro-worker legislation). Today, I turn to the City’s relationship with its own hundreds of thousands of workers and the public sector unions which largely represent them. This is an expanded version of a proposal I sent to the incoming Mamdani administration shortly after the election. That version focused more on how it would improve delivery of service. Here, I develop more fully the current sorry state of municipal labor relations.

One thing to keep in mind: I think that today the employer-union-worker relationship (i.e., the class struggle) looks pretty similar in the private and public sectors. But I don’t think it has to be that way. One variable on the public sector side is what class or classes the government (i.e., the Mamdani administration) represents.

A bit of history first…

The municipal unions – as we know them today, as agents of collective bargaining – largely came into being during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prodded by restive workers, themselves influenced by the civil rights and anti-war struggles, there were a number of strikes beginning in the early 1960s and through the early 1970s, despite a law firing workers if they struck, and stripping them of all seniority if they were reinstated. It turned out this law could not really be applied to mass union-wide strikes. You simply can’t fire all the teachers.

The state responded with a stick and a carrot. The Taylor Law made the penalties against workers for job actions and strikes more practicable, easier to implement, but also penalized unions as well, incentivizing them to act as “contract policemen” against their own members. The carrot granted the unions an “agency shop fee,” essentially equivalent to union dues, from all workers who were not union members – or tore up their union cards in protest if they felt the union was not adequately representing their interests. As the editor of The Chief, New York’s civil service newspaper bluntly explained,

an agency shop will help unions be more objective in dealing with employers and better able to pursue a more responsible course of action… strong enough to resist membership pressure for immediate gains… The agency shop will bring greater stability to labor-management relations and will result in more statesmanship on the part of union leaders who are free from the fear of economic blackmail by their members...

The agency shop was the reward for the unions’ “responsibility” during New York City’s fiscal crisis (1975). That responsibility has two features which have lasted to this day: abandonment of the strike, and the acceptance of “pattern bargaining” where the first contract bargained in each contract round establishes the wage increase for all the rest of the unions.

What has been the result? Obviously, the City has suppressed wages under this fifty-year-long neoliberal austerity regime. But the relationship it imposed (and the unions accepted) has had particular – largely negative – consequences. And not just on unions and union members/city employees. It has also hindered efforts at the improvement of the delivery of public services.

New York City…

under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has centered its dealings with the municipal unions through a private sector-style Labor Relations department. It crafts its policies, especially its bargaining practices, as though it was a private employer trying to maximize profits. In this case, that means trying to minimize labor costs. It has been so successful in holding down those costs that many city agencies are perpetually understaffed because they can’t hire or retain qualified employees at the wages they offer. Ironically, the lack of a profit motive forecloses one constraint on wage suppression: the need for workers who can produce a product of acceptable quality. And after all, most of the consumers of those services, the residents of New York, have no alternative product/service provider to turn to. (One of the few is charter schools.)

Besides the “pattern,” labor negotiations are also impacted by provisions of the Taylor Law that restrict the “scope” of legal bargaining to a far greater degree than private sector labor law allows. Most notably, it frees the City from negotiating about issues that have come to be known as “Bargaining for the Common Good.” The United Federation of Teachers, for example, cannot bargain about class size. The Transport Workers Union cannot bargain about subway service. The Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association cannot bargain about shift scheduling. In private sector parlance, this would be characterized as the unilateral authority to set production standards. In the public sector, what this means is that the city chooses not to negotiate about the service delivery that New Yorkers depend on.

In effect, the City has forgotten that its primary imperative should be to maximize service – measured both quantitatively and (especially) qualitatively – per unit cost. That would mean thinking about “productivity” in an entirely different way, requiring a completely different bargaining mindset – one based on cooperation and collaboration with its unions and employees. In fact, “bargaining” is too restrictive a term, for it implies that these discussions should only take place when contracts expire every four or five years, rather than continuously, and with the affected agencies rather than primarily with Labor Relations.

The Municipal Unions…

have been well-trained by years of a neoliberal economic and political agenda to lower their sights and imaginations. At first, they found themselves trapped into pattern bargaining, but gradually most unions came to privately embrace and appreciate the process. It took the pressure off them to win better contracts. When members gripe, they shrug their shoulders: the pattern is the pattern.

Sometimes, under membership pressure, unions secure a few dollars more by agreeing to productivity increases affecting small minorities of their members or especially by “sacrificing the unborn” – lowering wages or benefit packages for all future employees. Unions have the perverse incentive to show at the bargaining table how their proposals will replace skilled veteran workers with inexperienced (and cheaper) new hires.

Because of bargaining scope restrictions and Labor Relations stonewalling, the municipal unions find it very difficult to negotiate about relief from onerous or unpleasant work conditions. Largely restricted to negotiating about money items, and even hemmed in over those, union leaders have little incentive to engage with their members about their workplace needs; that would only lead to heightened expectations and later frustrations. Bargaining is an entirely top-down affair, with little or no member participation or agency. For the same reason, they rarely engage with the communities their members serve. It is hard to even imagine that in 1965 NYC social workers went on strike… to win an easing of bureaucratic requirements for their clients.

Union members/NYC employees…

largely find themselves ignored in any discussion of provision of services. The large majority of workers want to have pride in their work; they want to do it better; they want to deliver better service, a better product. Moreover, the best experts on how to do the work better and more efficiently, and how to make the workplace more enjoyable, are the workers themselves. And, obviously, they would also like to address the nagging workplace concerns that also produce a demoralized workforce. Yet their experience is that their unions cannot deliver any of these outcomes, and that changes that come down from agency management – some of them good and useful; others not so – are implemented unilaterally without consultation. They are trained to be passive - and, for good reason, fearful of change.

Of course, in virtually all private and public sector workplaces, workers and their front-line managers use their on-the-ground knowledge to develop informal arrangements that ease workflow and working conditions. But presently, it is almost impossible for groups of workers in specific workplaces to legally reach agreements with their managers and formalize them; the mechanisms that would allow this to happen remain unused through disinterest and fear from both agency and union leaders of loss of control and authority.

Consumers of New York’s public services…

students/parents, building managers, parks and recreation users, senior citizens, public housing residents, Access-a Riders – also have ideas about how those services could be improved. And they often tell them to the front-line workers with whom they interact. Who, in turn, shrug: Yes, that’s a good idea; I have ideas too; but, sorry, this is the rule, this is the procedure. The sorry truth is that both the providers and consumers of public services lack the ability to make change, or even meaningful processes to advocate for change.

Working toward a solution…

How to break this vicious circle? On the one hand, unions could “change their spots” – rejecting fifty years of submissive behavior. This is what I and other activists have spent our lives trying to achieve, with only sporadic and temporary effect. The point is not that it is unachievable, or that these efforts should stop, but that it would take years of sustained effort to change union culture and behavior.

Or the City (which, after all, is the dominant player in this relationship) could initiate changes. Our new Mayor could indicate a willingness to adopt – and then enjoin agency heads to embrace – a different form of labor relations, a collaborative exploration of how services can be delivered better, and worker treatment and morale improved, across whole agencies but also in individual workplaces.

If there will ever be a chance to end decades of ossified and bureaucratically creaky service delivery, to explore new methods of planning and engagement, this is the time: if Mamdani and his inner circle have the imagination and confidence to advance efforts at city-union collaboration that simultaneously improves service delivery and worker agency in the delivery of those services.

The City can act unilaterally, but it will then need to identify unions ready to partner with it in this new form of bargaining. From my experience in NYC’s labor movement, at the start, many of the municipal unions will be too timid and afraid of changes that might be disruptive of their largely top-down internal equilibriums to truly take up an invitation.

In a proposal to the Mamdani administration, I suggested two possible directions for a pilot program. On the one hand, there are individual Locals within the mega-union AFSCME DC-37 capable of bargaining with specific agencies where their members work across a range of service and workplace issues. And, of all the municipal contracts, DC-37’s contract with the City expires first, next fall. The question is whether DC-37’s Executive Director would be willing to relax his virtually unilateral control over negotiations, giving Locals independence to bargain – and then continue to meet with those agencies and revise and revise.

Alternatively, the City could initiate a pilot with some of the unions that work in Health and Hospitals – Doctor’s Council, Committee of Interns and Residents, NYS Nurses Association. These are unions which already think about working conditions and service delivery a lot. And the virtue of starting in H&H is that it is almost its own separate universe, divorced from “the City.” Or maybe that’s a downside?

What should these negotiations look like? The types of changes the city desperately needs in its delivery of services require a big shift in the culture of bargaining for both city and unions: listening to, and having serious conversations with workers, alongside union representatives far closer to the workplace. Forms would need to be institutionalized for ongoing discussions at workplaces between mid-level managers and workers, and the codification of changes.

An added bonus of these kinds of discussions and negotiations is that to be truly fruitful (on the union side) more participation from their members, actual city employees - creating real engagement and agency – will be vital. This alone would be a great step forward, developing more participatory democracy in unions which are today largely top-down.

As trust is built, adding community stakeholders to at least some of these discussions would add another element of potential value.

Is this all utopian?

Yes. Could it be tweaked, revised? Yes. Do I have all the answers? No. But it is a crime that we – the City as a whole; all of us as a collective entity – have failed to use all the detailed worker knowledge and experience that exists about how to more efficiently and more humanely run this town. It is a crime that hundreds of thousands of workers have no say in the city they administer. It’s time to begin to build the basis for a different and more fruitful government-union-worker-community relationship. And could something along these lines begin to happen now? Yes; what is needed is the will.