Finally, Chicago is going to drop the fourth person from its garbage-collection crews. This sounds like a big step forward for city taxpayers, but hold the cheers. All the extra laborers will be shifted to other slots in the oversized Department of Streets and Sanitation.
That`s the pattern throughout the new settlement between Mayor Washington and union leaders representing the city`s 11,500 blue-collar workers. There are a few changes that eventually can lower payroll costs, but any substantial savings are years down the line.
The mayor and his negotiating team should have held out for a better deal. In return for giving trade-union employees their first formal contract, they should have demanded changes that would bring pay scales and working conditions in line with those in other cities and private industry.
For decades, Chicago mayors gave their blue-collar workers inflated wages and soft work rules in exchange for the job insecurity that goes with a patronage system. If you fell out of favor with your committeeman, you were out of a job. Seniority didn`t count as much as your precinct`s voting record. Grievances went to the ward office or the fifth floor of City Hall, not to an impartial arbitrator.
This new agreement sweeps out the old system and replaces it with the job protection that union leaders wanted. But it does little to reduce the inflated wages and the inflated work force that were part of the patronage system. Not much of a tradeoff for taxpayers.
For example, the 340 laborers removed from the garbage crews will be put to work sweeping streets and cleaning vacant lots. That will make city neighborhoods look better, assuming it actually happens. But the switch gives no relief to city taxpayers, who for years have been supporting the nation`s most expensive garbage-collection system.
The mayor decided to keep the 340 displaced laborers because he doesn`t want to lay off union members before next year`s mayoral election. But he can avoid layoffs and still reduce the bloated Streets and Sanitation payroll. The 1986 city budget gives him money to fill 330 new and vacant positions in that department. He should not fill a single one. By shifting excess employees into productive jobs, he can cut the Streets and Sanitation payroll and improve services at the same time. He even has a blueprint for doing this: a four-year-old management study gathering dust somewhere in City Hall`s reference library.
The new agreement makes only a small dent in the wage system that has overpaid thousands of city workers for decades. Parking lot employees at O`Hare Airport will no longer be classified as truck drivers; some repair workers will no longer be considered electricians. But these changes apply just to new employees, and they affect only a few of the jobs that should be downgraded. Most electricians, machinists, carpenters, painters and other city trade unionists still will get construction wages even though they do maintenance work. That gives them 25 to 35 percent more than their
counterparts in private industry.
The construction trades get high hourly pay because their jobs are seasonal and they have few fringe benefits. City Hall`s trade unionists, however, get paid 52 weeks a year and have lavish fringes. Their hourly wage should be scaled back to bring them in line with private industry, and this first formal labor contract provided the context for doing it.
Chicago government can`t get away with its excessive spending much longer. Financial forecasts provide abundant proof that the cuts it has avoided for years are imminent. They will be much more difficult to make now that many of the excesses have been formalized in labor contracts.
