City could face more contract difficulties
Hours after inking a five-year, 17.5 percent pay raise for the city’s firefighters, Boston officials are now bracing for difficult negotiations with 41 unions whose contracts expire over the next several months.
Thousands of unionized employees — including police officers, teachers, and clerical and cafeteria workers — are expected to insist that they, too, deserve lucrative pay increases, even as the city closes libraries and lays off workers to balance its budget. Twenty-three city unions agreed last year to the mayor’s demand that they freeze their wage increases, only to see the firefighters receive a significant bump in pay after the firefighters union battled Mayor Thomas M. Menino for four years and took its case to an arbitrator. “Our folks have given our fair share, and we’ve sacrificed, and we’re certainly not looking for 19 percent, but we think our members, especially in the city of Boston, are underpaid and undercompensated for what they do,’’ said Bruce T. Boccardy, president of SEIU Local 888, which represents 2,000 workers in the city’s Elderly Commission, Department of Neighborhood Development, and other agencies. “We don’t have the leverage and we’re not public safety folks, but we think what that we do is very important to the city and we should be compensated fairly.’’ Richard M. Rogers, executive secretary-treasurer of the Greater Boston Labor Council, said he hopes other unions will be able to bargain with the city more amicably than the firefighters. “I’m sure the unions are going to be looking for raises, but there’s always a back and forth between raises and other issues at the bargaining table,’’ Rogers said. “The city of Boston is in much better economic shape than the state and most municipalities in Massachusetts, so there should be a way to negotiate these contracts with fair wage increments . . . without the kind of hostility that existed during the firefighters’ contract.’’ Menino will face a particularly difficult challenge with the city’s four police unions, which have long sought parity in pay and benefits with the firefighters. The police contracts expire June 30. And the Boston Teachers Union, whose contract agreements have also influenced the pay rates sought by other city unions, has a contract that expires Aug. 30. Detective Miller Thomas, president of the Boston Police Detectives Benevolent Society, said he would be studying the firefighters’ contract over the next several days. He said the city’s police unions received a 14 percent raise over the same five-year period that the firefighters’ new contract gives them a 17.5 percent raise. “There’s always that issue, parity; that’s always going to be an issue, period,’’ he said. “But there are other things we have to look at it,’’ such as the contract’s language, he said.
Thomas said the firefighters’ increases are “a little higher than ours, and that’s what we’re looking at,’’ but he added: “There’s not this eye of envy. That’s not the attitude.’’ Former Senate president Thomas F. Birmingham, a labor lawyer, said police and fire unions study each other’s contracts “as if they are Talmudic scholars.’’ “They both know each other’s contracts inside and out, and they both seek parity,’’ he said. “They very closely gauge themselves to each other, and, secondarily, for the teachers, the other unions might look at the trends that they get.’’ Birmingham said the firefighters’ decision to take their case to arbitration might encourage the police unions to do the same. “That might lead the police to say, ‘Hey, they rolled the dice and they hit the jackpot, so why don’t we?’ ’’ he said. “There are rippling implications.’’ The firefighters’ new contract gives them raises worth more than 17 percent over five fiscal years, from 2006 through 2011. Calculated through the next fiscal year, 2012, the raises amount to 20.5 percent. The original arbitrator’s decision would have awarded 19.2 percent in raises over five years, the city said. “I can see other unions using the settlement that the firefighters got as a basis for saying, ‘Well, we should get more money,’ and then trying to liken their situation to the firefighters,’’ said Thomas C. Kohler, a professor of labor law at Boston College. “It becomes sort of a model settlement.’’ Menino’s aides declined to discuss the upcoming contract talks, but said the deal with the firefighters was a reasonable compromise, in a contract that still squeezes the city’s budget. “The city recognizes these are very challenging times, and we will continue to do our best to balance the needs’’ of union workers and residents, said Lisa C. Signori, Boston’s chief financial officer. Even so, for Menino, “it’s a lot harder to say to a union, ‘We just gave X percent to another union, but you’re not worth that increase,’ especially if the group you gave it to is among your better-paid employees,’’ said Kevin Lang, a Boston University labor economist. “It doesn’t mean the city has to give it, but there will be a lot of pressure on them from the [union] members.’’
