Enough Blame to Go Around

Richard Steier

Description

Since 1980 Richard Steier has had a unique vantage point to observe the gains, losses, and struggles of municipal labor unions in New York City. He has covered those unions and city government as a reporter and labor columnist for the New York Post and, since 1998, as editor and featured columnist of the Chief-Leader, a century-old independent newspaper that covers city and state government in greater detail than today's mainstream news organizations. Drawing from his column with the Chief-Leader, "Razzle Dazzle," Enough Blame to Go Around describes in vivid terms how the changed economy has drastically altered the city's labor landscape, and why it has been difficult for municipal unions to adapt. There can be no doubt, he writes, that public employee unions have contributed to the problems that confront them today, including corruption and failed leadership. But at the same time and for all their flaws, he believes unions represent the best chance for ordinary people to receive fair economic treatment.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Unions on the Run

A New Sheriff’s in Town; The Town Is Nottingham
Staring Down the Barrel of Reagan’s Legacy
The ‘Evil Genius’ Loses One
‘Christmas Bonuses’ and Other Wicked Fables
Unions Finally Aroused by Mayor’s Distortions
Pensions a Beachhead for Class Warfare
Tabs to Randi: Burn, Baby
Sister Randi Explains It All
OTB Workers Unwilling to Gamble on Defiance
‘The Prince’ Incarnate in a Cuomovellian Gambit

With Leaders Like These…

Judge Speaks Loud for McLaughlin’s Victims
A School Bus Frame-Up DOE Won’t Talk About
Let’s Not Strike for Spike
Busfellas’ Past Helped Mayor to Break Strike

Police Unions in All Their Complexities

Enough Blame to Go Around
A Tough Guy Gets Undressed
Savage Steps Out Boldly
Giuliani’s Toxic Cynicism

The Demise of a Once-Great Union

Targets: Friends of Rudy
Gotbaum’s Revised History
Stern Reaction for DC 37
Delusions of Entitlement
An Absence of Leadership
Sad Tale of Two Charlies
She Didn’t Stick to Story
DC 37, after the Gold Rush
Butler’s Banana Republic
Roberts Is Queen of Denial
Roberts Wins, DC 37 Loses
Elegy for a Flawed Fighter
Same Old Song for DC 37

The Rise and Fall of a Militant Whose Vision Went Sour

Toussaint’s Quiet Revolution
The World v. Mr. Toussaint
Hard to Be Toussaint in City
For Toussaint, Power Is All That’s Left
What Killed Roger Rebel? A Self-Inflicted Wound

Epilogue
Index

Sujets

• Labor Relations
• Trade Unions
• USA
• United States of America
• Movimiento sindical
• Local history
• Industrial relations
• Region
• Trade union
• History of the Americas
• Regional
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438449562
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Enough Blame to Go Around
“New York City's labor unions have been luckier than they deserved to have had reporter and editor Richard Steier around to spotlight their occasional triumphs and their much more frequent failures. Like Murray Kempton, another great New York columnist who loved the men and women of labor but who never suffered the fools who sometimes ran their unions, Steier's columns are filled with news, insight, and always compassion for those who ride (and drive) the early trains and buses to work.”
— Tom Robbins, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
“Steier presents an impassioned case for public sector unions and the benefits they have won, along with fascinating tales of the machinations inside several of the largest unions in New York City—District Council 37, Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the 2005 strike that paralyzed the city, and the United Federation of Teachers.”
— Alair Townsend, former New York City Budget Director and Deputy Mayor
Enough Blame to Go Around
The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions
RICHARD STEIER
Cover art by AP Photo/Shahrzad Elghanayan.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Cathleen Collins
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steier, Richard
Enough blame to go around : the labor pains of New York City's public employee unions / Richard Steier
pages cm. — (Excelsior editions)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4954-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Labor unions—New York (State)—History. 2. Labor unions—Officials and employees. 3. Collective bargaining—Government employees—New York (State) I. Title.
HD6519.N5S74 2013
331.88'113517471—dc23
2013005363
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents, who instilled in me an appreciation for the written word and offered a look at the fun side of the journalism business; and to Gilda, with love.
Acknowledgments
This book came about thanks to a suggestion by Rob Polner, who then provided a friend's guidance while helping me navigate my way to SUNY Press. My appreciation to Dan Janison, who when Rob floated the idea didn't dismiss it as silly.
My gratitude also to Jimmy Breslin, Robert Lipsyte, and Murray Kempton, whose work helped shape my sensibility; and to Tom Robbins, whose pieces for the Daily News and the Village Voice spurred more than one follow-up look at union funny business.
My informal education as a labor reporter was provided by officials from both sides of the bargaining table and a few neutral parties as well. They include Basil Paterson, Bruce McIver, Harry Karetzky, Bob Linn, Jim Hanley, Gary Dellaverson, Donna Lynne, Arvid Anderson, Marlene Gold, Steve DeCosta, George Nicolau, Jane Morgenstern, Estelle Karpf, Nat Leventhal, Stanley Brezenoff, Alair Townsend, Harvey Robins, Michael Jacobson, Bernie Rosen, Barry Feinstein, Bert Rose, Victor Gotbaum, Charles Ensley, Al Viani, Stu Leibowitz, Mark Rosenthal, Beverly Gross, Dennis Sullivan, Vinnie Montalbano, Norman Adler, John Toto, Jack Bigel, Jonathan Schwartz, Randi Weingarten, Jimmy Boyle, Nick Mancuso, Vinnie Bollon, Tom von Essen, Pete Gorman, Brenda Berkman, Sidney Schwartzbaum, Norman Seabrook, Arthur Cheliotes, Bill Henning, Larry Hanley, Eddie Kay, Jim Gebhardt, Tony Garvey, Bill Kelly, Floyd Holloway, Richard Wagner, Bob Croghan, Ray Diana, Phil Tacktill, and at least a dozen others who will be happy that I didn't mention them by name.
I owe thanks to my bosses at The Chief , Ed Prial and his brother Joe, who gave me the editorial independence needed to do the job right; and to other members of the Prial family—Frank II, Frank Jr., Jim, and Mike, who gave me the chance earlier to develop my skills and then write the column. Thanks also to Steve Jackel, a former colleague who is now the newspaper's lawyer, and to Harry Park, its head of production.
I am also grateful to those at SUNY Press—Michael Rinella, Cathleen Collins, and Anne Valentine—who believed in the book and helped shepherd it into print.
Introduction
Over the past 40 years, the wages of ordinary workers in the United States, adjusting for inflation, have risen by just 1 percent, even as compensation for top executives has grown exponentially. There are several significant factors that account for that widening income gap, including computerization, globalization, and the tilt away from a level playing field that began with the presidency of Richard Nixon and was solidified by Ronald Reagan's transformation of the political dialogue in America.
But there is also an inescapable correlation to the decline of organized labor as a force in American life over that period. Four decades ago, roughly 35 percent of the nation's workers belonged to unions; today just about 12 percent do. In the process, as private-sector unions have declined in size and influence, the one area where labor has gained strength has been in the public sector, where collective-bargaining rights were not even granted until the late 1950s. In what seems particularly ironic today, the first state to enact those rights was Wisconsin in 1959, a year after they were adopted for New York City.
New York was a ripe area for labor ferment during the 1960s, beginning with a strike by welfare workers in the middle of the decade that was as much about the treatment of their clients as it was their own salaries and working conditions. The march to the barricades continued with a 1966 strike by transit workers that paralyzed the city for 12 days and a couple of years later by a sanitation strike and a months-long teachers strike that was fought not over wages but rather a bid by black militants to exert “community control” over public schools by, among other things, firing white instructors they claimed were inadequately educating minority pupils.
Eventually the spotlight dimmed as labor unrest quieted; New York's unions were credited with helping to rescue the city from the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, although critics claimed that too-generous contracts awarded to them by previous mayoral administrations were a major factor in the financial crisis. The bullet was dodged, and the unions in New York (where I live) gradually consolidated their gains, even as public worker unions in other parts of the country also prospered.
For much of the three decades after New York's fiscal crisis, public employee unions operated largely below the radar of the national and New York City media, unless a major scandal bubbled to the surface or, as with the city transit workers union in late 2005, a potentially crippling strike briefly focused attention on labor/management conflict before evaporating once the crisis passed.
The New York Times , which used to have a reporter assigned solely to covering municipal labor, discontinued the practice in the early 1980s, relying on its City Hall reporters or its national labor correspondent to step in once an alarm had sounded. The Post hired a labor reporter (me) in 1989 and discontinued the beat after a strike at the paper ended with management busting out the Newspaper Guild four years later, entrusting most of its labor coverage since then to young reporters impressionable enough to slant their coverage to suit the prevailing editorial sentiments. The Daily News has a civil service column buried in the regional sections of the paper but usually reserves most of its news-section column inches for scandals involving greedy labor leaders caught with their hands in the till. And television, which generally finds its version of news in the morning papers, has responded accordingly to the drop-off in serious labor coverage.
But the crisis on Wall Street has brought a sudden surge of interest in public employee unions, although not for any reasons they would encourage. Some labor leaders contend that there has been a concerted effort, by the titans of the financial community, the media properties of Rupert Murdoch, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to deflect attention from the cause of the city's financial problems by focusing it on the benefits that public employees receive and how good they seem in comparison to what's available these days in the private sector.
One of Murdoch's business publications, Barron's, early in 2010 had a cover story complete with a drawing of a cop and firefighter sunning themselves on a tropical island to dramatize its case that their pension benefits represented a greater threat to the long-term future of the national economy than the chicanery on Wall Street. The governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, elected in part through the financial largesse of two billionaire brothers with a distinctly anti-labor bent, has succeeded in largely disenfranchising the public employee unions in his state, although he exempted from his crackdown the police and fire unions that endorsed him (and which in many cities are the labor groups most likely to back Republican