No party for labor
Negotiation is not a tea party, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, so why is Boston confusing labor relations with public relations?
Tsk, tsk, those rude policemen, embarrassing the nice mayor after he hung those lovely flower baskets all over town. Shame on those greedy patrolmen, threatening to disrupt the cocktail parties of delegates to the coronation of the candidate from Louisburg Square. Imagine, union officials thinking that negotiating a fair contract takes precedence over presenting a happy face to visitors to the Democratic National Convention's multimillion-dollar nonevent.
Superior Court Judge Margaret R. Hinkle set the patrolmen straight yesterday, ordering the union to accept the decision of a hastily named arbitrator, timed to be delivered just days before the purported ''party of organized labor" begins its nominating convention festivities.
So much for the myth of powerful unions, bullying meek municipalities into extortionate labor agreements with their unruly tactics. All the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association had to do was threaten some informational picketing in order to make unlikely allies of a Democratic mayor, a Republican governor, and the Democratic attorney general who hopes to unseat him in the next election.
Public safety was at stake, according to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Governor Mitt Romney, and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, who argued that a patrolman picketing after work would be too tired to perform his duties. Hinkle agreed, refusing to block the expedited arbitration because of the convention's ''unique security concern."
Curiously, exhaustion is never cited as a concern when patrolmen are working overtime or on paid details to help cover tuition bills and mortgage payments. If anything, the extra money they earn moonlighting is cited as evidence that Boston's police officers earn a pretty good living. Average base pay is $53,700 a year; with overtime, average earnings top $83,000, according to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau.
There is rarely a good time for union negotiations, but an era of government cutbacks is an especially bad time. Still, the notion that picketing is somehow a subversive tactic by ungrateful public servants demonizes union members and deprives them of what little leverage they have in negotiations with those who control the purse strings.
If patrolmen's association president Thomas J. Nee is arrogant for vigorously defending the interests of his membership, what of Menino and the national Democratic leadership, who did little to resolve this dispute in the two years Boston patrolmen have been without a contract? Last September, after a summer without a single negotiating session, Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe scoffed at the idea that the 1,400-member union might picket the convention.
''That would never occur," he said. ''The mayor has assured me they are making progress and [the contract] will be resolved clearly by the end of the year, if not in the next month or two." It didn't happen. Police are asking for 17 percent over four years; the city is offering 11.9 percent. Arbitrator Lawrence T. Holden Jr. is likely to split the difference. But the final numbers are less important than the process that produces them, and this process has been an insult to organized labor, whose membership has been on the decline for decades. Last year, 12.9 percent of wage and salary earners were union members, down from 13.3 percent in 2002 and 20.1 percent in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor.
Public unions are the last stronghold of organized labor. Four in 10 government workers were unionized in 2003, compared to fewer than 1 in 10 in private industry. Those workers had a right to expect more from the Democratic Party than a plea that police make nice during John Kerry's coming-out party.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
