The Sounds of Silence

Nutter and the unions aren't saying anything about their negotiations. Is that wrong?

by Tom Namako

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There's just a few feet between the offices that house most local government reporters and the Mayor's Office of Communications on the second floor of City Hall. It's a well-trodden path that sees an extra amount of traffic around this time every four years, during the contract negotiations between the city and its four major labor unions.

The press has, for decades, been a third party to these heated talks, as union and city officials have used staged events and "confidential" documents to plead their case to the taxpayer. Take the summer of 1992, when, as journalist Buzz Bissinger tells it in A Prayer for the City, the mayor's negotiators "came up with a strategy that would be used throughout the war of the unions: When in doubt, douse a leak with another leak." Similar tactics have come to be expected.

Not this year. Already several weeks into the negotiations, Inquirer City Hall Bureau Chief Marcia Gelbart has made several trips from her first-floor office to visit the Mayor's press team. "We go to them every day," she said recently. "'You know we don't discuss this in the media, Marcia,' they say. It's not a personal thing. But it does have an effect. For one thing, it makes the story really, really boring."

By most accounts, the Nutter administration's attempt to quiet down the negotiations has worked. In February, he budgeted $403 million for the contracts, while previous mayors tried to hide money from the unions. So far, Cathy Scott, president of white-collar union District Council 47, has issued tame statements and led her union to take a strike vote, which is mostly seen as a formality. Herman Matthews, president of blue-collar union District Council 33, has said even less than Scott. And as a result, this year's round of talks have an almost civilized feel. "It's probably the quietest I've ever seen," said Dave Davies, senior writer for the Daily News who has covered City Hall for more than 20 years.

The question is if this is a good thing. Leaks and press conferences were often the only way for the public to measure the progress of the talks. If those spectacles remain sedated, will people be less informed about a process whose actual negotiations already happen behind closed doors? Or will taxpayers — and union workers — ultimately benefit from a process devoid of grandstanding politics that some feel just complicate matters?

The answer, it seems, favors civility. One reason, Davies says, is that the political theater of past years was mostly for an audience of politicians. "Most people only want to know if there's going to be a strike or if the city is going to be ripped off," he says.

Of course, the city and unions don't have to say anything. Pennsylvania's new open records law says that labor negotiations are among the six reasons a public agency can meet in private, according to Kim de Bourbon, executive director of the Pennsylvania Freedom of Information Coalition.

"Agencies should be able to undergo [some] negotiations outside of the public eye, in order to negotiate successfully for the public good," she says. But even then, she adds, the public should be informed of general progress, to prevent against side deals that could be struck between politicians and union bosses. "That's happened in the past," says Brett Mandel, executive director of Philadelphia Forward, a government integrity watchdog.

The talks may have been tempered, according to Tom Cronin, former District Council 47 president, because there are several new styles of bargaining at the table this year. Scott, who's new to the job, isn't in a position to be overly aggressive because her workers may lose faith if she doesn't deliver. Matthews recently emerged from a controversial re-election. And Nutter, perhaps most importantly, didn't receive organized labor support during the mayoral primary, which makes him less beholden to its leaders.

But then again, bargaining style and press leaks won't mean a thing unless the final deal is fair to both the city and its workers. "We'll only really know if this is good," Mandel says, "when it's all over."

(tom.namako@citypaper.net)