A Prayer for the City

by Buzz Bissinger

  Sanitation?

  To District Council 33, that was the same as challenging the existence of God. Of all union functions, none was more inviolable than sanitation, and the idea of a mayor even remotely challenging it, going after it, was just another example of the lunacy threshold. Was he willing to suffer the waves of physical confrontation that would inevitably sweep the city if the sanitation workers, virtually all of them black, found themselves put out of their jobs by a white mayor? On the other hand, if the mayor was serious about achieving fundamental change in the government regardless of the consequences, how could he give up a potential annual savings of as much as $30 million a year?

  “I definitely think we should send it out,” said Davis.

  “There’s no way we’re going to do it,” the mayor acknowledged, realizing full well that his nickname was Fast Eddie, not Crazy Eddie.

  “But they don’t know that,” said Davis.

  The mayor pondered Davis’s comment for a moment. As he sat in his family room in his aqua Lacoste shirt and gray running pants, he found himself surrounded by some of the things in life he liked the very best—the razor-sharp minds of men completely loyal to him; exhausted cartons of food; his loyal dog, Woofie, at his feet after another fine meal. Without articulating it, he saw the beauty of what Davis was saying.

  How could the unions predict his behavior? How could anyone predict his behavior even at this very moment, when in the midst of one of the most important meetings of his political career, with the future of the city balancing on the pinpoint of a pyramid, he mused aloud on the topic of death and concluded that “given his proclivities,” his role model for such an exit was Nelson Rockefeller.

  He told Davis to go ahead and send out the notice informing the union that its most precious commodity—garbage—was eventually going to be picked up by private hands.

  IV

  The following day the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board approved the sixty-day period for fact-finding for the nonuniformed unions. Negotiations could continue, but there could not be a strike until the end of August at the earliest. True to the strategy that had been embraced at the meeting at the mayor’s house, Cohen then spent the weekend hammering out a series of agreements for a new contract with FOP head Shaw. The agreements were minor, the kinds of concessions the city knew it would have to give up in arbitration anyway, but that wasn’t the way they were cast to the media at a press conference the following Monday. The agreements were presented as major, and Shaw himself was depicted as a union man of reason and integrity and honor. The appearance of a white mayor and a white union leader standing together and congratulating each other on their ability to work with each other toward the common goal of a new contract was hardly subtle, and it was aimed directly at the black membership of District Council 33.

  “I think they’ll be scared to death,” said Cohen.

  But if they were scared, they had a funny way of displaying it. Several hours later as many as five thousand union members gathered at a massive rally on Dilworth Plaza in front of City Hall. The day was hot and sunny, lugubrious and slow, the way most summer days in the city were, but there was an edgy and excited mood to the crowd that transcended the heat. Union leaders spoke one after the other, none of them more powerfully than Jim Sutton.

  Ed Rendell has shown that he has no respect for the labor movement! We intend to make him have respect! If he can’t do anything else, he will hear this crowd, he will see around.

  We intend to fight with every ounce of strength that we have in our bodies. And I say to you, Ed Rendell, if you think that L.A. had a bad time, mess with District Council Thirty-three.

  If you don’t play by the rules, we will take whatever action we have to take!

  Sutton was posturing, as all union leaders posture in the heat of battle when playing to the rank and file, but there was something in his voice that had never been there before. Rendell had always considered Sutton something of a soft heart when it came to union leaders, at one point half-jokingly suggesting in private that he was going to have to teach Sutton to “beat up on [Rendell] a little bit more” to make him seem more credible to his own union. But as Sutton spoke now, his voice rising sharply over the soup of the afternoon heat, it was clear he didn’t need any training.

  The crowd erupted, and in that moment the strength and the solidarity of the unions seemed greater than they ever had before, coming together as a potent force that would neither bend nor break under the city’s artillery shells and campaign of propaganda and injections of race, even if it meant riots in the streets. Somehow, some way, Fast Eddie would be brought to his knees, cowed and bloodied.

  “No contract! No peace!” someone in the crowd yelled. Another voice picked it up, and suddenly it became a rousing chorus:

  No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace!

  The chant continued as union workers blocked traffic and walked around the nape of City Hall with their arms interlocked and their fists held high.

  No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace! No contract! No peace!

  As the workers marched, another chant started up:

  Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

  As Rendell waited for an elevator on the second floor of City Hall, he watched the rally making its slow circle. He just stared silently, without giving his usual broadcaster-like commentary—one of those rare moments when he seemed to have a need for privacy and introspection and the sorting out of conflicting emotions. He wore a kind of weakly bemused smile, as if it were hard to imagine that he, a man who had spent so much of his life getting people to like him by coddling them and sucking up to them and suffering all fools gladly, had somehow managed to whip up such a frenzy of hate. He later claimed that the remarks and the chants didn’t bother him at all, that they were all part of the war of the unions. But it wasn’t true, and the look of Ed Rendell as he peered out that grimy window by the elevator was the look of a man trying bravely to remain calm, trying to be a politician and not a person and not take personally the attacks being heaped on him.

  Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

  As he lumbered onto the elevator, the chants of those below him reverberated and echoed.

  Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

  7

  Crisis of Faith

  I

  Alan Davis had privately worried that it would happen, perhaps because he was a seasoned fatalist with the wisdom of Merlin and the doe-eyed sadness of Marcel Marceau, but also perhaps because he knew better than anyone else in the city the delectable temptation to dance and deal. Fifty-five years old, Davis had long been a keen observer of city labor negotiations, and it was his unvarnished perception that mayor after mayor had consistently traded long-term gains for short-term ones, economic issues always taking precedence over the non-economic ones, the ones that over time could truly change a city’s destiny. He had no illusions about politics, and he understood the impulse that had guided other mayors. So why should Ed Rendell be any different, particularly when it seemed as if the war of the unions might drag on forever, past June now and into July, when most citizens had the wise sense to flee for the Jersey shore and the city had all the energy of a drooping eyelid, barely able to keep itself awake.

  Davis’s perception was based not just on observation but on active participation. As the city solicitor in the early 1980s under Mayor William J. Green, Davis had negotiated for the city in nasty labor disputes with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. It was also during the Green administration that nearly a thousand police officers and firefighters were laid off to close a budget deficit. “We traded work rules for economics in the early eighties, and I was ashamed of it,” said Davis. It was an incomplete part of his agenda, and when Rendell asked him to serve as the city’s chief labor negotiator, Davis, despite the comfort of his practice at Ballard Spahr that made him one of the most respected lawyers in the city, acc
epted the challenge. Although almost diminutive in appearance, he was hardly a lightweight. Labor negotiations with the schoolteachers had resulted in two strikes, and regional commuter-train lines went dark for four months when he represented the transit system. “I would like to make love, not war,” he told an interviewer, but union leaders who dealt with him in the past could only figure that he had his fingers crossed when he said that.

  Davis liked Rendell. He saw him as mayor the way many people saw Rendell as mayor regardless of whether they could articulate it or not—as a big kid having the time of his life. Absent the yellow feathers and beak, the mayor had become the political equivalent of Big Bird (they even had the same endearing waddle that comes with ample padding), and his comfort in who he was made him a willing participant in just about everything, except hammering a nail into a roof with one of those nail guns to put the finishing touches on a refurbished city recreation center. He’d climb a ladder to the roof, but they could forget about those noisy, nail-spitting guns, given his aversion to anything remotely mechanical, even a pen. “If I used a nail gun,” said the mayor, “I would nail my ankles.”

  There were certain moments in the war with the unions that Rendell seemed to relish, like the time he walked from City Hall to his car and union members angrily showered him with copies of the city’s proposed health plan. Sergeant Buchanico had urged the mayor to slip out by another exit, but Rendell was determined to forge ahead through the same exit he always used, and he was more than just determined—he welcomed the confrontation, particularly since it broke up the monotony of all those meetings. “It was kind of fun,” he said in the car afterward, and he seemed so giddy at the thought of all those health-plan proposals being showered on his head like stale banana peels that he didn’t get angry at the slow response of the car phone and passed up the usual ritual of banging it against the dashboard in frustration. But there were other moments that he did not relish, particularly the thought of a long and nasty strike in which he would be held up as a union buster and an absolute enemy of the common working man. Although Rendell himself had never been a common working man, he knew about the garment factories in New York because of his father. He knew what it was like to sew and stitch and do piece work while racing against production schedules. He respected and admired the skill of those who did it, and of all the things that later struck him about his father’s funeral, it was the way some of those who had worked for Jesse Rendell came up to him and related what a fine and decent man his dad had been.

  But the city was in crisis, and more than just in crisis, for Rendell had staked much of his campaign on a willingness to create a new type of government. Although the word was dangerous to use in any labor negotiations, there actually were some principles, and they centered on such issues as the city’s right to lay off workers, a management-rights clause that would actually give the city greater latitude to set work schedules that might enhance productivity instead of hamper it, the right to contract out certain union work on the grounds that it could be done more cheaply and more efficiently privately, the enactment of a so-called zipper clause that would allow the city to “unzip” some of the more ridiculous and corrosive union practices of the past, and the right of the city to transfer workers from one job classification to another without endless hearings and grievance procedures. In most previous bargaining sessions, these issues, the so-called non-economic ones, had inevitably been discarded or watered down to the extent that they had no bite. They were difficult to quantify and had little sex appeal with a media far more interested in such classic economic issues as wage increases. But the Rendell administration, embracing a spirit of reform so sweeping it had been dubbed perestroika, had finally recognized the importance of these non-economic issues and how they could not be traded away if the city was ever to change, if services were ever to improve and government was ever to play more than a role of nominal caretaker and employer of last resort.

  “The notion of taking control of the government and restructuring it for effectiveness was at the heart of our campaign platform,” policy and planning head Torsella had written in a confidential memo to Rendell and Cohen several months earlier, arguing that these issues carry the same weight as economic ones.

  Voters have the expectation that the Rendell administration will be a sustained exercise in remaking government; editorial boards, the national press, and many of our appointees share this expectation. The fate of the “non-economic issues” in the contract talks will be the first big test of our determination to stick with this agenda.

  For well over a year, we have been lambasting the current contracts to anyone who would listen as representing the bargain with the devil made by past administrations: the giving-up of long-term rights for short-term financial relief. Now that we have convinced everyone, it is imperative that we not give anyone the opportunity to say that about the contracts we negotiate.

  It was a fine memo, written with precision and thoughtfulness and a strong trace of the good-government piousness that Torsella—a true and earnest believer in the midst of crotchety wolves and coyotes—was known for. But it represented the ideals of government, a government that was proactive instead of reactive and one that determined its own fate instead of waiting for the latest kick in the teeth, so it really didn’t represent government at all. Nor did it represent the reality—the reality of a mayor engaged in a showdown with the unions the likes of which had not been seen in any major city in decades, the reality of a mayor being increasingly enveloped in tourniquets of pressure that only intensified and increased with every hour and every day and every week.

  Fast Eddie! We are ready! Fast Eddie! We are ready!

  II

  The first signs of what Alan Davis feared took place at the end of July at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Bill Clinton was about to accept the nomination for president, and since Rendell had been an early supporter of the Arkansas governor, it was presumably a heady time. But Rendell was already exhausted to begin with, from the long days he worked throughout each week, and then he developed an infection in his elbow. When it came to doctors, the mayor had all the dignity of a child, convinced that the minute you saw one, you were guaranteed an amputation or inadvertent organ removal. He took great pride in the fact that he had virtually never missed a day of work due to illness in more than thirty years. Getting him to go to a doctor for a checkup or even for a life insurance exam was virtually hopeless. But when the lump on his elbow steadily grew to the size of a baseball and his arm swelled to the point where his wife, Midge, noted that he was rather ominously beginning to look like the Pillsbury dough boy, even he became scared and knew he had to do something. On a Thursday morning in July, he gave a press conference on South Broad Street, excitedly announcing the groundbreaking for a new theater that in fact wouldn’t occur for at least another year. Then he was quietly driven a few blocks away, to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, for an examination. Afterward it was agreed that he needed to be hospitalized so the infection could be properly drained and cared for. He got out just in time for the convention, but the only way the doctors would let him attend was accompanied by a nurse, which was not only unsettling to Rendell but also somewhat humiliating, perhaps even worse than that moment at the 1980 convention when he addressed the floor to the interest of absolutely no one. After all, what other politician would be showing up at the convention with a woman who really was his nurse?

  On a spiritual level, it was clear that the negotiations were taking their toll on the mayor. Once the smoke had lifted, he could see that the all-out offensive by the city had gained barely an inch of ground. Threatened layoffs, secret communiqués sent across enemy lines, legal appeals—none of it was working. During the sixty-day fact-finding period, the union was continuing to work under the existing contract, and a city that was on the edge of bankruptcy was losing roughly $2 million a week. In a sweet stealth strike all their own, the unions also had a little surprise in store for Rendell when
he arrived at the convention in New York: a protest in his honor on Seventh Avenue that tied up rush-hour traffic. City workers carried signs labeling Rendell a REPUBLICRAT MAYOR and a member of the antiworker hall of fame, along with Frank Lorenzo, the former head of Continental Airlines. After the protest, they carried the signs into the convention itself in an attempt to embarrass the mayor in front of a national audience. Subsequently various national union leaders privately cornered Rendell at the convention. He later denied feeling any heat in the slightest and instead said he found all the protests amusing. But it was at the convention, according to Davis, that Rendell gave the union leaders an indication that in return for full concessions on health and welfare benefits, he would be amenable to wage increases of 10 percent over the life of the contract.

  Ten percent?

  It was a catastrophic statement, one that ran counter to every tenet of the negotiations. If the city was on the verge of bankruptcy, then why was the mayor committing it to such healthy wage increases? And if that was the mayor’s private stance, then what about the stance of Alan Davis and the other members of the city negotiating team, who all along had been arguing that any wage increases in the life of the contract would be negligible at best? To the union leaders, the answer was clear: all the city’s posturing over bankruptcy and no more money had been a bluff, the kind of transparent negotiating that always went on before a new contract was sniffed out. And every mayor in America had an epiphany in which he or she realized that choosing public considerations over political ones was just plain stupid if there was any interest in surviving beyond one lousy and meager term.

  Davis forgave Rendell for what happened. He had known Rendell for thirty years, and he understood that the mayor had an almost compulsive need to be nice and generous. The mayor knew it too, lamenting once that his weakness for people was such that, “if I was a woman, I’d be pregnant all the time.”