Fire union’s big hit is only a half-step

As a concession to get its arbitration award funded, Ed Kelly, president of Boston Firefighters Local 718, offered to delay for a year a 2.5 percent wage hike scheduled to take effect June 30.

Now, listening to the firefighters blame the mayor and the media for their tarnished image, one couldn’t help think the union would benefit from a little less self-pity and a little greater recognition of the way the various controversies that have rocked the department have eroded their public standing.

But make no mistake, Kelly’s dramatic move was a huge hit inside the council chamber. Relieved councilors lavished him with praise and repeatedly declared him a hero. (Suggested headline: Fire union chief saves councilors from smoldering seats.) Judging from those accolades, Kelly appears to have given them the cover they need to fund the award. And let’s be fair. Although the concession is a decided half-step, it does qualify as a meaningful gesture.

For unions, after all, upholding the collective bargaining process means treating an arbiter’s award as though it had been handed down on Mount Sinai. Indeed, that was the kind of rhetoric heard inside and outside City Hall during the council’s marathon hearing about the package, which gave firefighters what was effectively a 19 percent raise by the end of the four contract years, and which explicitly paid them for drug and alcohol testing.

In one particularly high-handed speech Wednesday, Lou Mandarini, secretary treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, basically told councilors that, the award having been arrived at, their job was simply to fund it. Then, declaring that he wasn’t making a threat, he warned that though everyday people might well move on, labor would never forget if they voted no.

That was an admonition Rich Paris, Local 718’s vice president, repeated yesterday. Years from now, he said, a councilor might be on the golf course or at the beach, and encounter a firefighter who hadn’t forgotten that he or she had voted against this award.

That reflects what we’ll call the old world view: What you’ve won at arbitration, you’ve won fair and square, no ifs, ands, or buts. The problem, of course, is that when you are dealing with public-sector unions, that doesn’t take the taxpayer — or the effects on the rest of city government — into proper account.

And that’s where the new reality comes in. With experts like Cathy Minehan, former president of the Boston Fed, Mike Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, and Sam Tyler, president of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, warning about a still-uncertain economy and serious ongoing state and local fiscal problems, most councilors clearly recognized they had to take a broader view.

Which is why, until Kelly’s dramatic concession, the council seemed prepared to vote no. Councilor Chuck Turner and City Council president Michael Ross had already made their opposition clear. Over the course of the lengthy proceedings, others did as well. Two councilors with their fingers on the body’s political pulse told me that, without a concession, the award would clearly lose. Councilors John Tobin, Felix Arroyo, and Bill Linehan deserve particular credit for their efforts to make Local 718 understand that reality.

Now to why this gesture, though important, is only half a step. Because it merely defers the raise from the end of this fiscal year to the end of the next, rather than making the 2.5 percent bump Local 718’s increase for fiscal 2011, it leaves the door open for the union to come back later looking for another hike for next year.

For the council, that might well be good enough. But let’s be clear: This concession hasn’t put the issue to rest so much as it has kicked the affordability can down the road.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.