Labor protests are expected as convention nears

Two weeks before the Democratic National Convention begins, hope has all but disappeared that labor protests can be avoided during the huge party gathering, despite last-minute pressure to hurry the dispute into arbitration.

Boston's main police union is vowing that its pickets will proceed even in the unlikely event that an arbitrator could deliver a contract. Thomas J. Nee, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, said any arbitrator's judgment before the convention begins July 26 would be a ''rush job." And even though an arbitration award would be binding on the union, he said, the City Council could reject it, and aspects of it could be challenged in court.

''This doesn't make us go away," Nee said.

And so union leaders are preparing for the night before the convention opens, when they will set up picket lines at the 30 delegate welcoming parties Mayor Thomas M. Menino has planned for every corner of the city. The union is sending out letters to all of the convention's nearly 5,000 delegates and alternates this week, and will deploy police officers from other departments around the nation to march in front of the parties attended by their local delegations.

For more than a year, the Democratic convention has been the focal point of Boston's negotiations with its unions. To Menino, it has been a looming deadline, the time by which he wanted to put labor strife to rest. To Nee and other union heads, the convention has been a powerful bargaining chip, because they have known the mayor wants the event to be a success.

Now, the stakes are higher, and so is the gamesmanship. Menino launched a final effort Friday to gain a settlement through arbitration, arguing before a state board that public safety could suffer if police officers use their off-hours to picket instead of rest. Nee, aside from organizing the picket lines, is joining forces with the firefighters' union to throw their own welcoming party for delegates who want to show their support for labor.

An 11th-hour solution is unlikely. For the principal players -- Menino and Nee -- the dispute has become personal. Their war of words has kept its rancorous tone, and both men appear unlikely to budge on their core demands. The mistrust is running so high that both sides brought their own stenographers to Friday's meeting before the Joint Labor-Management Committee, so they would have independent records.

Lately, the equation has been complicated by the intrusion of presidential politics into a local labor dispute. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, shoring up his labor support, supported the police union last month by honoring its picket line at the US Conference of Mayors meeting in Boston. Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican with national political ambitions of his own, replaced Kerry on the schedule. He is actively supporting President Bush's reelection campaign, and has little incentive to push for a swift settlement.

''It's a little bit like the OK Corral here," said Michael McCormack, a former Boston city councilor. ''It certainly isn't the city putting its best foot forward. It's a little disappointing to see this collateral issue still floating around."

The Joint Labor-Management Committee is expected to decide on whether to order arbitration Thursday, leaving just six business days for a potential arbitrator to find a solution. The committee's 13 members could respond to an appeal for fast action from Romney, since their posts are gubernatorially appointed, but the governor has shown no signs of getting involved to make the Democrats' convention smoother. Regardless, Nee said, the protests at convention events are on.

Menino and Nee each contend that the other is not serious about getting a deal done. Menino said Nee is set on embarrassing him at the convention, and Nee said Menino has long been hoping to foist the problem on an arbitrator and, therefore, will not negotiate in good faith.

The biggest sticking point is salary. The city has offered a pay raise of 11.9 percent over four years, while the patrolmen's association is seeking closer to 17 percent. It works out to a difference of about $15 million in city tax dollars, according to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau.

Fiscal watchdog groups say Menino is right to try to hold the line, given the city's fiscal outlook. The research bureau issued a report last week showing that spending by city agencies is decreasing by about $6 million in the fiscal year that began July 1, after setting aside increased health insurance and pension costs and money for city employees' raises.

''The city is not in a position to be offering high, generous wage increases," said Samuel R. Tyler, president of the research bureau, a nonpartisan, business-backed group.

The seeds of the current standoff were planted long ago. The patrolmen's association's contract expired at the end of June 2002 -- several months before Boston was awarded the Democratic National Convention -- and Menino let union talks stall to the point that all 32 city unions were working without contracts when 2004 began.

The patrolmen's association asked to start contract talks in April 2002, but the city did not schedule the first meeting until that October -- after the latest contract expired. Then, union leaders contend, months went by without a wage proposal they deemed to be serious. By the time the state board took over negotiations this April, the city's latest proposal was nearly identical to the one the detectives' union voted overwhelmingly to reject.

Tyler said Menino has himself to blame for unions' inflated expectations -- and the perception that a combative negotiating style would be productive. In 2001, after protracted and contentious talks, Menino gave the firefighters a lucrative pact, with raises of 22 percent over four years and a sick-leave bank they can cash out upon retirement. In the patrolmen's association's last round of talks, the union won Quinn Bill education incentive salary boosts, something it had been seeking from various mayors for three decades.

For their part, Menino and city negotiators say many unions have not accepted the fact that fiscal times have changed, and they grew frustrated by what they saw as Nee's grandstanding through the media. Threats of convention protests started to fly last fall, and the mayor was embarrassed by the protests at his State of the City address in January.

Last month, the patrolmen's association twice flexed its muscle at Menino's expense on a national stage. It delayed the start of FleetCenter convention preparations for three days by persuading delivery truck drivers and construction workers to honor its picket line. Then, the police and fire unions persuaded Kerry to snub Menino by staying away from the US Conference of Mayors meeting he was hosting in Boston, infuriating the mayor.

Menino said the police union has clung to salary demands that are unrealistic in a time when the city is seeing its state aid slashed and its property tax revenue relatively stagnant. City officials have said that the union's refusal to accept arbitration shows that its leaders are afraid that their arguments cannot withstand scrutiny.

''They continue to stonewall us," Menino said. ''What are they afraid of? Why can't a third party make a decision? I'm willing to take a chance and go to arbitration. Why aren't they?"

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.