In 2009, the city of New Bedford was in crisis.
America was a year into the Great Recession after Wall Street securities had irresponsibly backed bad housing mortgages, leading to their collapse the prior year.
Working-class cities like New Bedford, as always, were said to be first in and last out of the economic calamity.
As he tried to stem the bleeding in city government, Mayor Scott Lang, elected as a pro-union mayor four years earlier, found himself at war with the municipal unions.
A “we’re all-in-this together” guy, Mayor Lang had asked the unions — the police, fire and AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) to take a 10 percent pay cut by way of furloughs so that he would not have to enact layoffs. His idea was that if everyone took a pay cut for a while, then no one would have to lose their jobs.
Lang’s plan was also important to the effective operation of important city services like the police and fire departments. Because of union contracts, the former mayor’s proposal would have protected the younger, often more energetic workers — some would say the folks who do the heaviest share of the work.
Lang’s plan didn’t work.
The police officers, firefighters and AFSCME workers (the latter largely laborers and clerical employees) gave Mayor Lang the back of their hands. Just four years earlier, they had overwhelmingly supported him when he ran against the late Mayor Fred Kalisz and the latter’s attempts to rein in city spending connected to municipal unions.
“Lay off our fellow workers but don’t cut our pay” was the mantra of the New Bedford organized labor leaders at the time.
Lang had to give in and laid off 76 police officers and firefighters (38 apiece) in 2009 and another 32 city workers, mostly AFSCME public facilities workers, in 2010. Public safety considerations kept him from furloughing the police and firefighters, but in 2009 the AFSCME union filed a labor complaint over the 212 of their workers that Lang did furlough that year. The AFSCME union eventually won before both the state labor board and the courts. New Bedford had to come up with $1.8 million to pay city workers who had been furloughed and thus not performed any work.
That’s the current state of Massachusetts labor law.
I remember being shocked at the time by a conversation I had with a young police officer on Pleasant Street downtown. A courteous professional guy, he was the kind of young patrolman who gives the blue line a good name.
I recall that I was surprised when he told me he was surely going to be laid off but that he still supported the police union’s position to lay off younger officers rather than letting the older ones take a temporary pay cut. Some day, he said, I’m going to be an older police officer and I’ll want my higher pay and benefits preserved.
I don’t know whether the young officer really believed in that logic or whether he was just shrewd enough to never tell a journalist that he opposed police union leadership, but for better or worse, that’s what he said.
Here’s the thing: Anyone who has the idea that the senior leaders of New Bedford’s municipal unions are all about solidarity with their own members — never mind solidarity with the citizens of New Bedford who depend on their services or some of the city’s blue-collar property taxpayers who pay their salaries — should take a course in human psychology.
The long-term union members, who control the New Bedford municipal unions, are about themselves, first, last and always. It’s about salaries, top-shelf health-care plans, and generous pension plans. For themselves. First, last and always.
It is never about whether New Bedford city services or employees will have to be cut back in order to pay for those union benefits. It is never about whether property taxes paid by the city’s low-income private sector workers will have to rise exponentially.
To a certain extent, you can’t blame the union. It’s their job to advocate for their own interests as no one else will do it as well. But the mayor and City Council have a different set of responsibilities. They are supposed to look after all the other interested parties in the city.
This writer, raised in a union-supporting household, certainly doesn’t begrudge New Bedford city workers good salaries, good health care or good pensions. But like everything else in life and government, it’s complicated. Union workers are not some entity devoid of connection to their fellow citizens, be that of a city like New Bedford, the state of Massachusetts or the United States of America. And they are certainly not devoid of duty to their younger union members, many of whom will never obtain the kind of benefits that they did in America’s economic heyday after World War II.
The truth about the American labor movement is that over the past 75 years, it is government unions that have grown exponentially in numbers and power even as the country’s private-sector unions have collapsed, almost across the board.
Gone are the days when government workers — particularly working-class ones — earned less money, and received poorer health care or pension plans than their private-sector counterparts. Particularly in a city like New Bedford where the private sector is weak. It’s the government jobs that are highly sought after here — for their pay, their benefits and their security.
You don’t have to take my world for any of this or write me off as just another conservative ideologue. I’m not.
You just have to look at a moderate-progressive mayor like Lang who couldn’t get the New Bedford unions to work as a team for their fellow workers and for the preservation of city services, even police and fire public-safety services. And you just have to look at a moderate-conservative mayor like incumbent Jon Mitchell, who in 12 years in office has never been able to get the unions to work as a team for modest-income New Bedford residents whose services are being cut back, and whose taxes are rising exponentially.
So this year, Mitchell was back in front of the City Council, asking them for the third time to adopt a section of state law that would allow a neutral arbiter to decide — when the mayoral administration and unions can’t come to an agreement on the employees’ share of medical costs — who should pay what share of the cost.
He warned them that at the rate that health care and pensions are increasing, city services will have to shrink to pay for them.
Long after most of the city’s suburbs, as well as Fall River, have increased the cost of health care for municipal employees, the city of New Bedford has held out against opting in to the independent arbiter system. The unions are strong here and they use their muscle to influence a City Council that has somehow elevated city employees above city residents.
Cities and towns that have allow a neutral arbiter in local government health care negotiations
So the union leaders on the Public Employee Committee recently wrote to the councilors, outlining how they have given back what amounts to $3.1 million in health care plan concessions over the past five years.
The problem, however, is that the city’s costs are escalating even faster.
Mitchell told the council at his annual budget address that costs have increased by about $1 million a year each of the last 10 years. But interim Chief Financial Officer Mike Gagne told the council that in the wake of the pandemic, costs increased by $7.4 million just in the first 11 months of Fiscal Year 2021.
“I don’t care what anyone says, we’ve got to come together and address this,” Gagne told me.
The mayor has tried to frame this as a debate between city employee benefits and city services, but it’s more complicated than that. And Mitchell has been a little less than straightforward. It’s really the rate that public school spending is increasing that is eating up the money for police, fire, and public infrastructure services even more than employee health care and pensions.
But Mitchell, the council and the state have all committed, after many years of dragging their feet, to spending much more money on urban public education, and that’s a good thing.
There are, of course, equity issues in how the city’s education money is spent every bit as much as there are equity issues between the financial burden put on city employees vs. city residents.
There are even cracks beginning to show on the council as far as the increases to education spending go. That old conservative canard about too much money being spent on administrators is beginning to surface. And the council has not yet faced up to how much money is being diverted to a select group of city kids who are given the advantages of the regional vocational school.
In New Bedford, there certainly could be money to be saved by closing some schools and redistricting, as the amount of money used for public charter schools and vocational education increases. That’s a politically fraught process with parents, however.
So the easiest and quickest way for the city to control costs would be to allow the neutral arbiter to increase employee contributions to health care. Yes, it may result in a decrease in the quality of care for some employees. Those are the hard decisions that need to be made.
But by the council not even agreeing to hear what is available in terms of changing the health care plans, we won’t know if both quality care and savings can be obtained. There may indeed be decreases in costs to be had by the city joining the state’s Group Insurance Commission, by which insurers sell their plans cheaper to a state group that brings them more subscribers.
Fairness to all the citizens means compromise, where no one is happy. That is what a neutral arbiter will bring.
The City Council can face the facts about the cost of government and who is favored and who is not. Or it can continue to make phony cuts like it did Monday — in which it cut $7 million from a fund that covers fixed costs and will just have to be replenished later in the year.
The council and the mayor need to have the politically hard conversation about taking a “We’re all in this together” approach. They need to compromise instead of continuing to talk past each other.
Unfortunately, we see little sign they are ready for the latter.
Email Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
