Union Families Are Nervous as de Blasio Faces Another Round of Labor Contract Negotiations

When Bill de Blasio took the reins at City Hall, he inherited a municipal workforce of more than 300,000 people all working with expired labor contracts. In four years, his administration reached agreements with more than 99 percent of them.

But now, as the mayor prepares to release his latest budget plan on Thursday, those contracts are all beginning to expire again — in a more restrictive economic environment.

According to the Independent Budget Office, nearly 90 percent of the city’s unionized workers will have expired contracts once again by the end of this calendar year.

The situation is not completely dire. The city has experienced successive years of an economic recovery with record amounts set aside in its reserve funds. Officials have also done the hard work of repairing the city’s relationship with much of the workforce that felt jilted by the Bloomberg administration. At the same time, the city faces eroding financial support from the state and federal government.

So far, the city has budgeted for one-percent annual raises. Anything more will likely come from negotiated savings, like the $3.4 billion in healthcare savings the city negotiated with the Municipal Labor Committee during the previous term.

“I think the problem's going to be, what is new that we can generate. You know, where does it say that we have to pay for our own raises?” said Harry Nespoli, head of the Sanitation Workers Union and chair of the MLC, an umbrella organization that negotiates healthcare benefits for city unions. He added, “Sometimes a city can get very greedy, too.”

Budget watchers say the unions are actually better off now than last time around, when the Bloomberg administration budgeted nothing for wage increases.

“The one percent reserve for collective bargaining is often seen — or it's definitely seen — by labor as a floor rather than a ceiling,” said Maria Doulis, vice president at the Citizens Budget Commission.  “In a sense, they're already starting ahead.”

Since contracts are just beginning to expire, she said city negotiators have an opportunity to work with the unions to improve productivity in a way that some of the gains and savings could be shared with the employees.

One of the largest city unions, District Council 37, returned to the bargaining table with the city last November. In July 2014, the city reached a seven-year deal with the union that included 10 percent wage increases, covering four back-years and three going forward. That contract expired last year. 

A spokesman for the union declined to comment beyond noting that the negotiations are ongoing. According to a post on the union’s website, DC 37 is seeking a new three-year contract.  Among their demands, the union is seeking a floating holiday, an increase in their meal and mileage allowances, an increase in the city’s welfare fund contribution for each member and retiree, and notably — paid family leave.

The city already offers six weeks of paid parental leave to some non-union city employees, and the state enacted a law that covers private sector workers. But unionized public sector workers are not covered unless they negotiate for it.

Gareth King, 35, an assistant environmental engineer with the city’s Department of Environmental Protection and a DC 37 member, wants paid family leave to be a priority at the negotiating table. He and his wife Lisa Bissell are raising two young children, ages 2 and 4. King worries that when his youngest was born, he went back to work too soon and that could have contributed to his son’s emotional and speech delays.

“He’s a little bit behind on some of his stuff and the greatest fear you have as a parent, is did your neglect or something cause your kid to have problems?” King said on a recent evening as he and his wife juggled dinner preparation and diaper duty.

He said he took nearly two months off when his son was born, but one was entirely unpaid and he just couldn’t manage more. “At the time it was, how do we get the mortgage paid for? How do we get the bills paid for?  How do we get all this other stuff paid for? At some point we were running out of money.”

Balancing these kinds of benefits and worker wages is the dilemma union officials and the de Blasio administration will face as they sit down to negotiate.

City Labor Commissioner Bob Linn said he’s ready to work with the unions to reach fair and reasonable contracts with the right mix of savings, wages and benefits — like paid parental leave. He said ever since the mayor implemented it for managers and non-union employee, he's been eager to reach similar agreements with unionized workers.

"We have said in each of our negotiations that we are very interested in finding solutions to paid parental leave, paid family leave, and we're looking to approaches that can be appropriately fit within a collective bargaining agreement," Linn said.

He said the city must balance its obligations — those to the public, and those to the workers.