A New reality descended on the city’s municipal labor lead ers yesterday from Albany.
In a remarkable feat, Gov. Cuomo persuaded officials who run the Civil Service Employees Association to accept a five-year contract that freezes wages in Years 1 through 3 and provides 2 percent raises in Years 4 and 5.
Workers would also have to take nine days of unpaid leave over the next two years.
Finally, they’d have to cough up more to cover their health insurance.
If the pact is ratified, the unmistakable signal to everyone involved in labor negotiations in New York would be that the landscape has been dramatically altered.
“It’s a significant change people should be concerned about,” one union official conceded.
Union-backed demonstrators who have been hammering Mayor Bloomberg for weeks about budget cuts they complain will decimate the “middle class” have just witnessed the state’s top Democrat reduce real wages for 66,000 middle-class workers.
Labor leaders who’ve been holding out for deals that can’t possibly be attained now have to grapple with the fact that other government workers are willing to forgo raises entirely.
Those leaders hoping an arbitrator will see things their way need to find a new strategy.
“Let me put it this way,” said one union insider. “No union going into arbitration is going to want to have that [the CSEA pact] as the most recent deal [serving as a precedent].”
About 280,000 of the city’s 300,000 employees don’t pay anything toward their health premiums.
They have to take into account that, by comparison with the state, Bloomberg’s request for them to contribute 10 percent of the cost now appears realistic.
The CSEA is considered weak by the standards of the city’s municipal unions, which have far more political clout than their upstate counterparts.
And the state is in far worse financial shape than the city, which gave Cuomo’s threat to lay off 10,000 workers genuine thrust.
But the package tentatively achieved by Cuomo is so sweeping that it creates a new level of expectation by taxpayers that municipal unions will adjust to the new economic reality.
There’s also pressure on Bloomberg.
Whatever contracts he reaches will inevitably be compared to Cuomo’s.
And zeros are really hard to beat.