A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  If he was serious about laying off thousands of workers, then he could do it and in all likelihood watch a city under his stewardship ignite in unholy chaos, with every dire prediction in the “Strike Contingency” notebook—and dozens more that had not been predicted—becoming a reality. The public would support him for a while, following along with his rallying cry that short-term pain meant long-term gain, but as garbage piled up in stinking stacks and fights flared up on picket lines and the remaining city services barely functioned, how long could the public be expected to keep following him?

  Beyond the tactic of delay, the unions’ strategy seemed to hinge almost exclusively on political history and the inevitability that Rendell, in choosing an alternative to that grisly spectacle of chaos, would fall obediently into line and would do what every politician ultimately did: place his own survival above the survival of the city, avoid the hard choices, figure out a way to fall to his knees with enough spin and polish that no one would dwell too long on that stirring inaugural speech, and by using a legacy of phantom budgets, creative bookkeeping, carefully timed tax increases, and blame placed on previous mayors, give the unions much of what they wanted in a new contract. In the long-term, such a strategy would hasten the fall of the city by perpetuating the budgetary mess that made governance so untenable, but in the short term, which was the only time most American politicians ever lived by, it would avoid Today-show footage of striking workers in the City of Brotherly Love going for the throats of those trying to cross their picket lines.

  And yet, despite what the union negotiators were expecting, Rendell’s stomach showed an iron lining. Instead of buckling in the slightest, he seemed to be doing the very opposite, acting as if he were crazy enough to do all the things he said he would do if the unions did not accept the reality of the city’s fiscal situation. And the city negotiators began to see a wonderful point of leverage in all this—the lunacy threshold, the absolute lunacy of the mayor in thinking he could take on the unions and survive to tell about it.

  “There’s no motivation like fear,” said Kenneth Jarin, a lawyer in the city and a member of the negotiating team. “People are always more scared of someone they think is crazy than someone who is rational.”

  While Rendell worked the unions from the outside, Field General Cohen and high-ranking officers from the city negotiating team led a stealth campaign from the inside, planting mines and hurling Molotov cocktails in every conceivable place they could think of, performing like expert saboteurs in their camouflage of lusterless blue suits.

  Of all the elements in the union negotiations, none was more important or more controversial than the health and welfare plan. Under a system that embodied the way cities all over the country had sold their souls to the municipal unions in return for peace and political support, the city of Philadelphia contributed an average of $475 a month per employee for health and welfare benefits. In comparison with the amount contributed in the private sector, that figure defied any rational economic explanation. Even more outrageous was the way in which the money was dispensed by the city: it went straight to the unions. The city had no rights of administration, no way of making sure that the money it doled out each month was being used solely for health and welfare benefits. And the distinct suspicion of the city negotiators was that although some portion of that $475 a month went for benefits, some portion of it also went for everything else besides benefits, such as patronage, consulting fees, and mortgages on various union-owned buildings.

  On a Saturday morning in May, several members of the city negotiating team had sat in a law-firm conference room, their elbows leaning on a table so long and so heavily lacquered that it could have been used by a bowling league. There, in the corporate splendor of the clouds on the thirtieth floor, among portraits of lawyers and sycophantic proclamations, with an unblemished view looking west toward the massive stone of the Thirtieth Street Station, they pondered ways of outflanking the union enemy. Cohen was there, of course. So was Joe Torsella. And so was Alan Davis, who held the title of chief city negotiator. Wise and wonderfully laconic, Davis had a bespectacled, gnomelike physique that belied his long years of experience in the hand-to-hand combat of union wars. But he played the games of camouflage and subterfuge so well that one had to wonder whether underneath his button-down shirt, on the cusp of his shoulder, there wasn’t a little tattoo in the shape of a smiling devil that said, “fuck collective bargaining.”

  Within the next several days, the city would formally propose to the unions a $332-per-employee cap on health and welfare benefits. Since such a proposal was nearly $145 less than the city’s current contribution, it was a safe assumption that the union leaders would be sickened by the proposal, not because it was insufficient for health and welfare benefits for the rank and file (some health care providers, eager for the business, had already offered managed-care plans right around that figure) but because it would put a significant dent in the funding of these other activities and create serious cracks in the empire. After all, if a municipal union couldn’t use health and welfare money for mortgages and patronage jobs, then how could it call itself a union?

  Now Davis fretted over what the media coverage would be like when the city made its health-plan presentation to the unions. It would be made in private, but in the endless war being waged by both sides to win the hearts and minds of the public, leaks to the media were so fast and furious that keeping up with them was hard. In Davis’s view, as in the view of the others at the long and lacquered table, the unions clearly had a pipeline to the city’s newspapers, in particular to Kathy Sheehan of the Daily News. Unsmiling and sullen in a way that was impressive even for a reporter, Sheehan greeted every city pronouncement about the negotiations with deadened nonreaction. While most reporters seemed both dazed and dazzled in Cohen’s presence when he went into one of his numbers riffs, Sheehan seemed quite uninterested in him, as if he were just some policy wonk with better than average stamina. She also did have good contacts within the unions. Earlier in the week the city had given the unions the wrong location for a negotiating session. It was a pure and simple accident, but a story about it had found its way into the Daily News under Sheehan’s byline, told from the point of view of union outrage and insult.

  “That’s what you’re dealing with,” said Davis, and Cohen readily agreed.

  “Anything we put in front of the unions will be in the newspapers the next day,” he said, and the fear was obvious: the unions would be able to spin a story to the media about how the city’s health-plan proposal was draconian, indecent, and an outrage to working men and women everywhere.

  No one at the table thought there was a way to rub out Sheehan’s machine-gun nest, but by using their own campaign of sabotage, they were confident they could render the bullets harmless. To counterbalance the unions’ spin on the health plan, Davis felt it was important for the city’s “propaganda machines” to get up and running as quickly as possible, weaving as many stories as possible about how a sizable portion of what the city contributed to the unions for health care did not even go to health care. It was one thing to pay for illnesses, but should the city also be paying for patronage?

  “We will be prepared with whatever propaganda machines we have going—editorial boards—so that we win this thing publicly,” said Davis. “We’ll have to engage in media education here.”

  “I’m not sure I agree that the proper place is editorial boards,” Cohen countered. Instead, he wondered whether the best way to neutralize a reporter such as Kathy Sheehan was by fanning the flames of various antagonisms that he felt existed, in effect pitting reporter against reporter by playing on their jealousies and egos. “There are reporters other than Kathy Sheehan we can go to. She is not particularly respected by her colleagues. Three Daily News reporters have independently come to me and have criticized her—and two from the Inquirer. If we want to play this game, one thing to do is sit down with these other reporters.”

  Someone the
n came up with a strategy that would be used throughout the war of the unions: when in doubt, douse a leak with another leak. As a result, it was suggested that Rendell write a heartfelt letter to city employees, giving his explanation of why health care benefits had to be cut. That letter could then be leaked to certain reporters in perfect sync with the unions’ leak of the city’s health-plan proposals and their claims of how outrageous they were, thus creating a veritable rainstorm of leaks and leaving reporters confused and conflicted about whose leak was the better leak.

  “Sutton and Cronin will walk out and immediately call the papers, and there will be a story the next day,” said Cohen of the two union leaders. “Can we send the letter the same day we meet with the unions and give it to the reporters that we want to?”

  In the midst of discussion of the Rendell heartfelt-letter leak, another discussion quietly developed between Davis and Torsella, about the crazy-work-rules leak. City administration propagandists had assembled much of the material for this leak already, packaging it in the camouflage of a memorandum to the city negotiating team explaining why the city needed better management-initiative proposals. Written in exaggerated bureaucratese by midlevel officers Feeley and Michael Nadol, the cautious and stultifying three-page introduction served as the perfect smoke screen for what followed: a litany of outrageous work rules compiled not for the benefit of the city’s negotiators, since they obviously knew all about these rules already, but as a document to be leaked to the media. It was marked CONFIDENTIAL at the top in underlined boldface type, not because it was meant to be confidential but because city propagandists knew that the very word creates an almost orgasmic effect among reporters.

  Almost all the examples cited in the memo were powerful, but a few entered the realm of the twilight zone, including the one about the programmer for the Revenue Department who was dismissed by the city after his six-month probationary period because he repeatedly left work to play pinball and video games at local arcades. His union filed a grievance based on the theory that the employee’s preference for arcade games was a gambling addiction and therefore should be treated as a handicap. After the time and expense of nearly three years of hearings, it was held that the city did in fact have the right to dismiss the employee on the grounds that playing pinball was not a handicap or a gambling addiction but something that shouldn’t be done during work hours. Of course, after his separation from the Revenue Department, the employee went to work for the city’s Board of Pensions and Retirement.

  This example was sublime, but no more sublime than the difficulties faced by the city’s Commerce Department, where the old joke of how many people it takes to change a lightbulb was apparently no joke at all. Because of union job classifications, the answer at Philadelphia International Airport was three: a building mechanic to remove the cover of the light panel, an electrician to actually replace the fluorescent-light fixture, and a custodian to clean up any dust or debris that might fall to the floor during the light-changing ritual. And the city’s difficulties with lightbulbs may not have been any worse than the intricacies of cleaning various city walls. Custodians had no problems doing it, but only to shoulder level. Above the shoulder threshold, the job had to be done at increased pay by a category of workers called wall washers. If no wall washers were available, then custodians of course would do it, but at the extra pay accorded those with enough pride and skill to call themselves wall washers.

  As a leak, the twenty-page memo was the equivalent of several direct torpedo hits on a submarine. The Daily News wrote about it. So did the Inquirer. Then, in the ultimate case of sabotage, The Wall Street Journal reprinted excerpts on its editorial page, and one could almost hear the unions, in their halfhearted defenses and denials, gurgle and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

  III

  Toward the end of June, members of the city negotiating team met privately with Rendell at his house in East Falls for a pivotal strategy meeting. At this point, the contract was only five days away from its June 30 expiration date, and everyone knew that there would be neither a settlement by that date nor a strike. The city may have been achieving a rout in the media war, but the unions, in their efforts to use delay as a weapon against the city, had also been successful. Despite Rendell’s best private political wangling, it seemed clear that the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board would in fact impose the sixty-day fact-finding period, thereby extending the terms of the current contract. Negotiations could continue during that period, but there could not be a strike, and the bleeding of the city’s budget would continue. The imposition of fact-finding was a blow to the city, and the men who gathered at Rendell’s house were hell-bent on besieging the unions from every conceivable angle.

  The meeting took place in Rendell’s family room. The mayor wore an aqua Lacoste shirt and gray running pants, and was eating Chinese food out of four different containers with such frantic and rapacious desire that it was difficult to know, from a purely medical standpoint, how food could travel that fast into the human body without doing severe harm. He was the only one eating, except for his dog, Woofie, who, lying on the floor next to him, took whatever morsels his master was willing to part with. The mayor graciously asked the others whether they were hungry, but given the appearance of things, they responded in a way that suggested they would rather go to their cars and drain the motor oil.

  On a one-to-one basis with the unions, Rendell was as affable as ever, just a day earlier OK’ing the use of a platform at a union rally whose very purpose, as he himself put it, was to “beat up on Ed.” “Why create ill will?” said Rendell when the request was made. “It doesn’t do shit.” But privately he had vowed to “crush” the unions if he thought they were stalling on a settlement, and now it was clear that he meant it.

  “The fact-finding was the Rubicon for me,” he said. And this wasn’t just a war of leaks now. In the war of the unions, no weaponry would be banned. The injection and heightening of racial divisiveness among the different unions, the purposeful pitting of union against union so that members of one would begin to hate members of another, the ceaseless ratcheting up of layoff notices, notices of the city’s intent to privatize certain time-honored union functions—every conceivable piece of ammunition was being fed into the cannons now.

  Technically there were four unions negotiating with the city. But in terms of negotiations, only two counted, the Fraternal Order of Police and District Council 33, which represented the city’s blue-collar workforce. There was an obvious difference between the two unions in terms of the jobs their members performed. There was also a significant difference in the city’s bargaining strategy toward each of them: District Council 33 had a right to strike, but under state law the police department did not. Instead, unresolved issues on a new contract for the police would be decided by arbitration. There was yet another distinct difference, not articulated but obvious, and as far as some city negotiators were concerned, it could prove a wonderful source of leverage—race.

  The head of the FOP, the silver-maned and barrel-chested John Shaw, was whiter than white. So were most of his union’s members. The mayor, of course, was white, and so were all the members of his negotiating team. Conversely, Sutton, the head of District Council 33, was black, and so was the vast majority of his union’s members.

  City negotiators assumed that such racial dynamics terrified District Council 33. And one of the keys, as they told the mayor that night, was to stoke those fears to the hilt—give District Council 33 the distinct impression that the mayor, a white mayor, was about to cut a favorable deal with a union head, a white union head, and with the police force, a predominantly white police force, and then take from District Council 33’s hide, a predominantly black hide, whatever it didn’t get in terms of givebacks from the police.

  “They are afraid that you are going to cut a deal,” Davis asserted. “You’re white, and John Shaw is white. And [District Council] Thirty-three is black. They fear that they are going to lose their jo
bs to a cabal between you and John Shaw. It’s a wonderful mind-set.”

  In the meantime, there was universal agreement that the machinery of layoff notices should start in earnest on all fronts, with all the notices leaked in various stages through the media to whip up as much hysteria and frenzy among the unions as possible. The strategy called not for just one layoff bomb, but a series of smaller ones, with different numbers of workers laid off each time, leaving virtually every worker in the city in dread and fear as to whether his name or her name would be included in the next round. “Think of all the leaks that come with this,” said Davis. “You have all kinds of stages of pressure.”

  The machinery for contracting out union work had to start up as well—not just the little ticket items that the unions might not even care about very much but the big ticket items, the items that the unions had always considered sacrosanct. As a result, Davis urged the mayor to approve sending District Council 33 notification of the city’s intent to contract out sanitation to private companies.