Pat Lynch isn’t a cartoon character, although he does his best to come off that way. As police unions, separate from all other public sector unions, have come under attack as being singularly problematic when it comes to excising the cancer of bad individual cops from the force, Lynch does his best Wile E. Coyote routine by throwing teachers unions, inter alia, under the bus.
For example, a common anti-union talking point is that “police unions have traditionally used their bargaining agreements to create obstacles to disciplining officers.” In New York State, at least, that’s false. Police unions are prohibited from negotiating disciplinary issues. The police commissioner — and, by extension, the mayor who appointed him — have full authority over discipline.
But then there’s mandatory arbitration, Pat. They discipline. You arbitrate. Did that slip your mind?
It’s also a myth that police unions blindly defend every police officer accused of a crime. Our union has said — repeatedly, unequivocally and with the unanimous support of the police officers we represent — that George Floyd was murdered and the police officer who murdered him should be behind bars.
Chauvin wasn’t one of yours, Pat. Pantaleo, on the other hand? But Pat’s got more myths to bust.
The state lobbying watchdogs’ most recent annual report, for example, shows the city’s United Federation of Teachers, the New York State Nurses Association and New York State United Teachers unions among the state’s top lobbying spenders, with payouts ranging from $1.3 million to $1.6 million. That same year, the PBA spent just over $200,000 on lobbying — the vast majority of it in our fight to obtain the same pension benefits as every other police officer and firefighter in New York State.
That’s a lot of money not going into teachers’ pockets, What was Randi thinking?
But when members are accused of misconduct or a crime in the performance of their duties, we must work within laws that require all unions to provide fair representation to all members, even and especially in difficult, tragic cases. Once again, police unions are not the outlier here: The teachers union provides representation for members “facing criminal charges as a result of disciplinary actions taken against a pupil while the member was doing his or her job.” The transit workers union defends members who are charged in fatal on-duty accidents, and even waged a PR campaign against a proposed change to the right-of-way laws that would have unfairly criminalized bus drivers who were attempting to do their job.
And in the most cop of cop ways, Pat Lynch burns solidarity to the ground for his cops.
Private sector unionism exists under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, better known as the Wagner Act, named after its author, New York Senator Robert F. Wagner, which was designed to address the bargaining asymmetry between employers and employees. It made sense, as it balanced the right to strike against lockouts, the former costing the employer profits and the latter costing the employees wages.
But the New York law permitting public sector unionism, the Public Employees Fair Employment Act, is amusingly called the Taylor Law. named after a professor at Wharton, George Taylor, because no New York politician wanted his name associated with the law. While the concept made some sense if one squinted really hard and only saw the piece relating to the rights of workers, it made no sense otherwise.
Pubic employees can’t strike (although they do, only to be forgiven their trespasses as part of the resolution of their unlawful strike). Public employers can’t lock them out without eliminating the services they exist to perform. There’s no profit to be lost, and the gain from savings in salaries inured to the benefit of the public as public employees are paid by taxes.
As far as their wielding influence as to their wages and terms and condition of employment, they do. They get to speak out and persuade the public as to the merit of their needs. They get to vote, like every other citizen. They get to form associations, put in their dimes and buy off politicians like anyone else, even if their associations had no lawful ability to bargain collectively.
And Pat drives the point home by pointing at his fellow public sector unionists who are even worse than he is. Way to go, Pat. But cops are different, as even Pat can’t (and wouldn’t) deny.
Many in the police reform movement would say, with reason, that the difference comes from police officers’ unique role in our society. That difference is an undeniable fact: as police officers, we have a different job than bus drivers or nurses or teachers, with different responsibilities and powers.
But those differences are confined to the job we do, not the rights we are guaranteed as employees or citizens.
And cops do, “undeniably,” have a unique role in our society, which is why their “rights” as employees give rise to the problem. Their “right” to a job even after they’ve wrongfully killed somebody is unique. Their “right” to a pension despite using the job to commit crimes like stealing money off dead bodies or crime scenes, or just ordinary folks driving along, is unique. Perhaps realizing this, Pat again throws his fellow unionists under the bus.
In the disciplinary realm, too, our only demand has been for the due process rights afforded to other civil servants. Another example: During the fight over repeal of Civil Rights Law Section 50-a, the law that protected police officers’ personnel records, none of the repeal proponents made mention of Education Law 3020-a, which expunges unsubstantiated accusations of misconduct from teachers’ records. Now 50-a is gone and 3020-a and analogous provisions remain, and police officers are left with fewer rights than other city employees.
He’s got a point, as teachers get to spend the waning years of their career in the Rubber Room after touching kids, but being reinstated by arbitrators. Why isn’t anybody demanding an end to that as well?
At this moment, public sector union solidarity is critical. Distrust in government and its agents is at an all-time high. A three-month public health lockdown has only made it worse. Police officers, as one of the most visible faces of government, are now bearing the brunt of a popular backlash that has been brewing for some time.
Pat nails it. We’re focused on cops at the moment because they are visible, the killing of George Floyd lit the cabin-fever match and police unions have been raised as one of the primary stumbling blocks to getting killers off the job. And they are, but the problem isn’t just police unions, as Pat Lynch persuasively argues.
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So eliminate all public-sector unions? Sounds good to me. Or was that supposed to be the Modest Proposal to show the absurdity of the argument to eliminate police unions?
Lynch might not have appreciated where his argument took him, but who are we to argue with his brilliant ideas?
It’s easy to point out that there are problems addressed by private sector unions that don’t exist for public sector unions. But that is not a convincing argument that there aren’t unique problems involved with public service that are addressed by public sector unions, or that they don’t serve a public good beyond benefits for their membership. They are also problematic in some ways, and sometimes produce outcomes to the detriment of the public good, as do private sector unions. But perhaps that argues for change and refinement, rather than abolition.
Do you have any actual argument to offer, or just words that don’t say anything?
My long experience with public sector unions had nothing to do with law or law enforcement, so I spared you my anecdotes. But to restate, my argument is that public sector unions were and are still necessary and provide benefits to the public, and that your implication that they should be abolished is wrong.
Anecdotes aren’t arguments. So you’ve got nothing. Okay then.
As a steward in a public sector union, I feel the treadmarks from the last bus we were thrown under by the police union are still fresh. It is a familiar feeling.
Only anecdotes, no arguments here as well but I feel that sometimes us public union people get it right and manage to protect employees from some of the government’s excesses of enthusiasm. However, I certainly respect the many issues that the pubic must bear due to the excesses of public union enthusiasm. I hope there is a humane path to tread between these.
Thanks for challenging me as always.
I could write a book on public sector labor law, in general, and police unions in particular. I was an associate member of the FOP for a while so I could put a badge on my licence plate and drive as fast as I wanted. Not that I would ever speed, of course.
So that’s the party line, eh?
While I’m being told I might get a commemorative plaque, honoring my contributions to roadway maintenance, you were telling me…*
Don’t be surprised if Brother Lynch sends over Officer Torquemada to give the Healey a custom “tune up”.
*SJ: Short Take: Nothing To Hide
Dec. 19, 2018
Rhetorical hyperbole or artistic license. Pick one. And I rarely drive the Healey in the city.
Is there a reason why public employees shouldn’t be able to negotiate over wages and hours, even if not discipline?
Excellent question. Yes, there’s are reasons. The motivation/limiting factor for a for-profit business is that whatever it pays employees, it still has to make a profit or it can’t survive. So it needs to pay enough to attract and retain competent employees, but not so much that it loses money and goes under.
For public employees, there’s no inherent limitation other than what the public will suffer in taxes. For the employees, salary demands aren’t limited by the business’ profitability. Private sector unions can’t destroy the company by excess salary demands; public employees have no such limit. It’s always more, usually kicked down the road a few years so that when the tax bill comes due, it’s not the current admins fault, but negotiations from years before that are now obligations that must be paid. And the taxpayers have no choice but to pay the tab.
This too is an oversimplification, leaving out a significant mitigating mechanism. Budgeting accountants in both NYC’s DCAS (Dept. of Citywide Administrative Services), Etc., and Scott Stringer’s office (NYC’s Comptroller), carefully calculate and compare notes on how long to make the unions wait before settling.
While the political benefit of having any consequences fall upon a subsequent administration is part of the calculation, the real financial impact to the taxpayer is usually more than offset by TVOM (Time Value Of Money) factors.
Even when back-benefits are paid with interest, and considering that interest rates remain at historically low levels (*cough* Quantitative Easing *cough*), the real rate of inflation has already been incorporated into the tax-base.* The union membership will ultimately be paid in present-day dollars, and most will be glad to have finally gotten something – anything, regardless of its diminished value – after a very long wait.
The real, unexploded, time-bomb, is the ever-increasing pension obligations. The fallout of how that’s dealt with is anybody’s guess.
*Among other, less obvious, confiscatory revenue sources.
Sit down. I have something to tell you and it’s going to make you sad. This was a generic explanation. NYC isn’t the whole world. Cities aren’t the whole world. Even small towns can have PDs. If I was writing a book about it, I could go into more specifics for different areas, but this isn’t a book and you just made people stupider by introducing pointless confusion into a fairly straightforward concept. Don’t do that, no matter how strong your worst impulses.
Regarding your choice of video, those of sufficient years, who may remember a mock variant from a period in the not-too-distant past, when the phrase “off the fascist pig” (with regard to police) was a rallying cry of the Black Panther Party and the early Black Power movement, might be inclined to read an intended pejorative slight into it.
Others, who may recognize the background music as “when the merry-go-round broke down”, may read something entirely different into it. (As you may remember, from your “No Happy Day” post, where I posted the no-longer-available extended version, it’s our theme song, here at the ‘rest spa’).
It is fascinating to see an argument that the NLRA of 1935 and 1947 leads to bargaining symmetry between private sector labor components and management, when the playing field was tilted towards employers by Taft/Hartley in ’47 and it became a sheer cliff after 1981. Nor did the NLRA create private sector unionism, as the Railway Labor Act of 1926 has and continues to have far greater impact.
The RLA governs railroads and airlines, and the record of labor relations within cargo and passenger carriers led to the ubiquitous use of mandatory arbitration to “settle” all disputes…which is a misnomer because arbitrators have such an interest in securing future business from private corporations that they invariably side against labor when the grievance process leads directly to their door. This spilled into the sector covered by the NRLA, and now almost all private labor groups must assume the contract they sign with managers will be whittled down piecemeal through the tilted arbitration process. Airlines have become so adept at it the Purchase, NY-based airline Atlas Air has repeatedly sued to force their laborers to have contract negotiations settled by arbitration. Which raises the question–why cannot the public sector use arbitration as such a hammer?
It is probably only a matter of time. Teacher unions are on the way out, as the massive de-unionization wave that began with Taft-Hartley 73 years ago is washing over the largest component of public sector labor Schools in aggregate are increasingly devolving into private control from the pressure for charter schools and the swings of the economic pendulum. NYC’s charters already serve over 100,000 students with another 50,000+ on the waitlist. Few have unionized teachers, and at least one school (KIPP) is trying to remove its union representation. This pressure will only increase as 500,000 public sector jobs have already been eliminated by the pandemic recession, and the fiscal cliff the states are facing in July-August will likely eliminate over 5,000,000 more. The pressure is mounting, and the New Orleans experiment to switch to an all-charter public school model probably is about to be taken nationally.
Teacher collective bargaining is going the way of the dinosaur, but the same factors are not present in police forces. At all. The liability is simply too high for there to be a mass movement to privatizing police forces, without considering whether such an action is even sane, let alone warranted. The crunch that has begun a de-unionization wave in the school industry, ushered in by three economic recessions in this century, have not curtailed police funding–if anything, it has increased. Cutting education funding has more generally become an accepted method to close state budget deficits, but cutting law enforcement is a nonstarter as it risks a crime wave (real or imagined, the effect is the same).
Moreover, in the highly unlikely event that the de-unionization wave were to hit police forces, one must question whether that would solve anything. Mandatory arbitration outside of the public sector is defined by power dynamics–customers and employees have little or no power when facing the arbitrator, and thus corporations flourish. The fact that police officers that are fired for misconduct often resume their employment could indicate that the same isn’t true in the public sphere, but in more likelihood the explanation is the power dynamics work in favor of police over outmatched city managers. Police are trained and given the authority to project power–why should it be surprising if the same isn’t the case in front of an arbitrator?
Since few are likely to read this comment, I saw no harm in posting it, despite it completely missing the point, particularly about the RLA, and being the sort of tendentious crap that reflects too much information and too little understanding. Nonetheless, if you believe you have so much to say in long, prolix comments, start your own blog and gain the adoration of your fans. But not here.