Mayor Mamdani: End Pattern Bargaining; Start Collaborative Bargaining

Dear Mayor Mamdani,

I was so happy to hear you touting the purpose of your new Office of Mass Engagement, that its purpose is to “organize New Yorkers to participate in City decision-making… reach communities that have historically been excluded from policymaking; embed public feedback directly into City policies, programs and services.”

You said, “the answers to the very questions that are flummoxing so many in the highest levels of government could in fact be answered by those that we are currently walking past or overlooking or not even listening to.”

Do you know who has been historically excluded from participation in decision-making and policymaking? Whose answers have not been listened to? The hundreds of thousands of New York City residents who work directly for you – our municipal workforce.

Firefighters, clerical aides, plumbers, school crossing guards, architects, dockhands, software engineers, emergency medical technicians and many, many more.

It's time to start listening to them and embedding their feedback into policies, programs and services by implementing what I call “collaborative bargaining.”

Mayor Mamdani, in your inauguration speech, you rightly bemoaned that numerous city services are currently not delivered with the excellence that you hope to achieve. But that’s most directly the fault of the city’s labor relations policy, developed over many decades and many mayors.

If you want to upgrade the provision of public services, agencies need to regularly talk to the workers that provide them about improving work, workplaces and service delivery. I’m not talking about cutting out unions – just the opposite.

Collaborative bargaining means having regular discussions with union reps and interested workers at every level, right down to whatever constitutes the “shop floor” – a nursing station, a sanitation depot, a carpentry shop, a school – and an openness to negotiating win-win solutions, rather than simply (as today) asserting unilateral managerial control of policy and decisions.

It won’t be easy to change our current labor-management culture. But look at what it has wrought.

The problems of city labor relations policy

As an assemblymember, Mayor Mamdani, you’ve been divorced from the minutia of municipal contract bargaining, but as a public employee and sometime union officer I’ve watched it – and suffered from it – for decades.

For one thing, it happens only every four or five years, and then only between a handful of Office of Labor Relations personnel and a handful of union leaders, and with very unambitious goals and objectives. OLR’s bargaining practices resemble that of private employers trying to minimize labor costs.

It has been so successful that many city agencies can’t hire or retain qualified employees at the wages they offer. Horribly, there are perverse bargaining incentives to replace skilled veteran workers with inexperienced but cheaper new hires. But that’s only part of the problem.

New York State’s public-sector labor laws allow OLR to refuse to bargain about most service delivery issues. Unless OLR agrees – it doesn’t – the United Federation of Teachers cannot bargain about class size; that’s why it had to go to Albany.

Unions can’t bargain even about seemingly mundane matters like shift and tour scheduling (other than economic reimbursement for the schedules management unilaterally establishes). Unions cannot bargain about the ways their members interact with their clients, or the way services are provided.

And since what has come to be called “bargaining for the common good” is legally outlawed in New York City, unions are disincentivized from talking to the communities and constituencies they serve. The sorry truth is that both the actual providers and consumers of public services lack the ability to make change, or even meaningful processes to advocate for change.

These are the divide-and-conquer practices adopted from the private sector world – but without even the one constraint on (most) capitalists, that if the services they provide get too bad, customers will move on. Generally, city residents don’t have that option – with a glaring exception: charter schools!

I won’t tell you that unions are wholly blameless for this state of affairs, Mayor Mamdani, only that it’s city policies which created the mess, and city policies that can fix it. Hemmed in by years of a neoliberal economic and political agenda, most unions have learned to lower their sights and imaginations.

Because the scope of bargaining is so limited, they rarely engage with their members about their workplace needs, or try to empower workplace reps; that would only lead to heightened expectations and later frustrations.

It's no wonder, then, that under these circumstances, “productivity” and “excellence” are treated as scary words, mandates to just work harder, rather than as aspirations to improve pride and pleasure in work.

Toward collaborative bargaining

Instead of just suppressing costs, the primary imperative of any socialist administration should be to maximize service – measured both quantitatively and (especially) qualitatively – per unit cost.

That means thinking about “productivity” in an entirely different way, requiring a completely different bargaining mindset – one based on agency cooperation and collaboration with its unions and employees. It means privileging the voice of municipal workers about how this goal can be accomplished.

It is a well-known trope, but true nonetheless, that the best experts on how to do the work better and more efficiently, and how to make the workplace more enjoyable, are the workers themselves.

And, of course, they would also like to address the nagging workplace concerns that also produce a demoralized workforce. Yet their experience is that changes that come down from above – some of them good and useful; others not so – are implemented without consultation.

Mayor Mamdani, in my own work about unions I have often used the phrase, “bottom-up change from the top.” Well, you are “the top.” You can facilitate change. Last week, I heard you say that you want your new mass engagement office to “support agencies in delivering high-quality engagement and more effective public services.”

So cut out OLR’s central and circumscribing role in bargaining and enjoin agency heads to embrace a different form of labor relations, a collaborative exploration of how services can be delivered better, and worker treatment and morale improved, not only across whole agencies but also in individual workplaces.

Your District Council 37 contract expires in the fall. Can you and Henry Garrido seize the opportunity to decentralize all but the basic wage number bargaining down to its locals? Can you tell your agencies: “I want you to fix problems, I want you to encourage your workers to participate in decision-making and policymaking, program development and implementation”?

Can you tell them to make it a priority for all levels of management to meet with union reps and committees and work out solutions? Can you impress on them that encouraging worker initiative and responsibility is not just good practice but an important social goal as well?

Just a year ago, we would have called the possibility of collaborative bargaining a pipe dream. Adams? Cuomo?

We could only look forward to more of the same miserable, parsimonious, high-handed policies that have produced decades of ossified and bureaucratically creaky service delivery.

You can change that, Mayor Mamdani, if you are not afraid to trail-blaze new methods of engagement that simultaneously improve service delivery and worker agency in the delivery of those services.