THE BOSTON CITY Council should steel itself against the city’s alarming firefighter’s union. All it would take is for seven of the 13 members to stand up and say they will not give firefighters a pay raise in exchange for drug and alcohol testing — period.
Negotiations are underway between the Menino administration and firefighters Local 718. Neither side is confident about where the council stands on an arbitrator’s decision to give an inflated 19 percent, retroactive pay raise to firefighters over four years. Firefighters, therefore, have offered a one-year delay of the 2.5 percent increase foolishly handed them by the arbitrator for coming to work clean and sober. The Menino administration, meanwhile, is toying with accepting the one-year delay, as long as the 2.5 percent raise applies only to current firefighters, not future hires.
There’s too much intrigue going on here. Councilors who lean toward the city’s position make a show of tearing into administration officials to curry favor with the union. One day a councilor appears locked into a position. The next day, not so much. The majority swings with each new proposal. Meanwhile, a council vote may be imminent.
Relations between the firefighters and the Menino administration are abysmal. But the council doesn’t need to play marriage counselor. It needs to protect public funds. That means rejecting any contract that includes money in exchange for drug testing, no matter how it’s dressed up or dressed down. The notion that firefighters, whose lives are in each other’s hands, would receive on-the-job-sobriety pay is unacceptable.
The firefighters can argue that police and emergency medical technicians have been paid for drug testing in Boston. Not so, say those unions. It’s not even worth trying to unravel those claims. Going forward, no public employee should receive extra pay for submitting to random drug and alcohol testing as a condition of employment or to remain on the job.
