By Tom Ferrick

Lord of the Rings anyone?

If you think the dust up over the Mayor Nutter’s plan to close libraries, fire stations, city pools, etc. was a big deal, stick around. They were just skirmishes.

Now, the battle begins in earnest.

The Nutter administration this week went before the arbitrators who will decide the police-and fire-employee contracts with a slash-and-burn proposal that basically seeks to take the existing contracts and shred them into little pieces.

Here is how Patrick Kerkstra outlined the proposed changes in today’s Inquirer:

In preliminary four-year offers delivered to police and fire union leaders on Dec. 31, the city proposed no pay increases and the adoption of contract provisions - such as involuntary furloughs of up to 30 days each year - that could significantly decrease police and firefighter salaries…

Nutter’s proposal would sweep away work rules that limit the city’s ability to transfer employees and set their schedules. It would eliminate four of 12 paid holidays (including police officers’ birthdays). It would reduce pension benefits and require police officers and firefighters to increase their contributions to the pension fund from 5 percent of their salaries to 8 percent. And it would lead to a sweeping overhaul of health-care benefits to “achieve significant cost savings.”

Like I said, slash and burn.

The administration declined to discuss the proposals, but the Fraternal Order of Police posted a copy on its web site - if you want to get a full flavor of the proposal.

Ready to rumble?

A word about the process: State law forbids uniformed employees from striking, so it sets up an arbitration process to determine provisions of contracts, giving a supposedly neutral third party the right to decide who gets what.

Nutter can’t dictate the terms, nor can he force concessions from the fire and police unions by taking a strike.

In the past, the city has been generous with its uniformed employees - and arbitrators even more so. The proposals presented this week are the harshest I have ever seen. When it comes to the police proposal, it adds up to 27 pages of major givebacks.

Will the city gets all the concessions it seeks?

Of course not.

In fact, the city has a bad track record when it comes to winning arbitrations.  But, the proposals send a loud and clear signal that the administration is serious about saving money and it plans to ask its 25,000 employees to bear a major share of the pain.

The police and fire departments represent the biggest hurdle to achieving those savings. They have work rules, staffing and overtime provisions built into their existing contracts that give them, de facto, management control over the departments.

In fact, when it comes to running the Police Department, the powers of the contract arbitrators and the FOP exceed those of Commissioner Charles Ramsey.

But, if the city is control is own budget - and its own destiny - something must be done about employee costs. It has to try to roll back the many concessions it has made over the years that limit its ability to manage its workforce. This is especially true when it comes to uniformed employees.

If you add in the cost of fringe benefits, the Police Department and Fire Department budgets total about $1.2 billion (30% of the total city budget) and these two departments are home to 42% of the city’s workforce.

An Orc: In Happier Days

And the mayor has no direct control over their pay, their fringe benefits and their work rules?  Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?

The sad reality is that these are the areas where the real savings are.  If you could cut police and fire costs by 10 percent a year, the city would save $600 million over the next five years. Compare and contrast this to the savings from closing (or trying to close) those 11 public library branches: $40 million over five years.
There is another factor at work here.  For better or worse, the contract granted to uniformed employees influences the contract given to the city’s 14,000 non-uniformed workers.

And the city proposals made to uniformed employees usually presage the proposals that will be made when the unions representing the city’s civilian work force sits down for contract talks later this year.

If the Nutter administration is serious about getting these concessions from its employees - and the jury is out on that -the city will have to take a strike.