contractor rewiring city office space was going to walk if he didn’t get something) and who could be stiffed for another month or two (already $7 million in the hole to Catholic Charities, what was another $500,000?). In a macabre briefing with reporters, the outgoing city finance director predicted that when Rendell took office in January, the city would have only $36 million of its $2 billion budget left in the treasury, good for roughly a week and a half of routine spending. After that, there wouldn’t be money for anything, not the salary of a city sanitation worker or the cost of cleaning up after a sudden snowstorm. On the eve ofthe inauguration, right around Christmastime, the city had $104 million in unpaid bills.
Merry Christmas, Ed Rendell.
Presumably, on paper at least, there was a way for the city to raise revenues sufficient to meet the needs of the budget: it could increase city taxes. Like a bolt of drugs to an addict, it would ease the pain and cause a momentary sense of relief. But once the rush was over, the need would be even worse than it had been before. In a decade of imposing such tax increases, the city’s tax base had dropped $2 billion. Another tax increase, large or small, would hasten the exodus beyond all hope.
But as Rendell and Cohen and White and city budget analyst Mike Masch got over the initial terror of the Number, something strange happened. They were seized by a sense of opportunity that was both breathtaking and unprecedented, perhaps a little bit crazy. It fell largely in the area of personnel and in the amount of money the city paid its unionized workforce each year, not simply in salaries but in health benefits and paid holidays and disability and legal-fund contributions and funeral leave and a host of other items that the unions had negotiated over the years as a legal kickback for labor peace. What that meant was challenging the city’s unions in a way in which they had never been challenged before. It also became clear that savings could be achieved by reining in city departments that seemed to find contrary to their purpose such budgetary practices as monitoring where the money went each month and actually meeting financial projections.
But the option of a bitter confrontation with the city unions wasn’t an easy one, particularly in a town such as Philadelphia, where the cause of workers’ rights had been fought with tears and even blood for nearly 150 years, stemming from a time when immigrants were paid sixty-three cents an hour for a fourteen-hour, six-day work week, with July Fourth as their only holiday. White knew intimately about the role of the unions in the city. Every day he was reminded of it by the picture in his office of a handsome and strong-jawed man who had helped lead a legendary strike against General Electric and Westinghouse in 1946 on behalf of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. The strike went on for nearly a month and a half, and when union workers defied a court injunction limiting pickets, the police rode on horseback into the crowd of strikers to break up the blockade. The next day the pickets came back with bagsof marbles to trip the horses with, and as the police flailed away with billy clubs and chased strikers across lawns, horrified residents opened their homes as sanctuaries. Some ten thousand people crowded around City Hall in a show of sympathy with the strikers, and finally, after fifty-seven days, the strike was settled when workers accepted a raise of $1.48 a day. The man in the picture was John White’s father, Francis, and John was proud of his part in providing the worker with a better life in the city. But he also knew that times had changed. According to historians, the Philadelphia strike of 1946 represented the apotheosis of plant unionism in the United States. Companies responded by using their political clout to dismantle the power of the unions, and on a far more visceral and damaging level they
Merry Christmas, Ed Rendell.
Presumably, on paper at least, there was a way for the city to raise revenues sufficient to meet the needs of the budget: it could increase city taxes. Like a bolt of drugs to an addict, it would ease the pain and cause a momentary sense of relief. But once the rush was over, the need would be even worse than it had been before. In a decade of imposing such tax increases, the city’s tax base had dropped $2 billion. Another tax increase, large or small, would hasten the exodus beyond all hope.
But as Rendell and Cohen and White and city budget analyst Mike Masch got over the initial terror of the Number, something strange happened. They were seized by a sense of opportunity that was both breathtaking and unprecedented, perhaps a little bit crazy. It fell largely in the area of personnel and in the amount of money the city paid its unionized workforce each year, not simply in salaries but in health benefits and paid holidays and disability and legal-fund contributions and funeral leave and a host of other items that the unions had negotiated over the years as a legal kickback for labor peace. What that meant was challenging the city’s unions in a way in which they had never been challenged before. It also became clear that savings could be achieved by reining in city departments that seemed to find contrary to their purpose such budgetary practices as monitoring where the money went each month and actually meeting financial projections.
But the option of a bitter confrontation with the city unions wasn’t an easy one, particularly in a town such as Philadelphia, where the cause of workers’ rights had been fought with tears and even blood for nearly 150 years, stemming from a time when immigrants were paid sixty-three cents an hour for a fourteen-hour, six-day work week, with July Fourth as their only holiday. White knew intimately about the role of the unions in the city. Every day he was reminded of it by the picture in his office of a handsome and strong-jawed man who had helped lead a legendary strike against General Electric and Westinghouse in 1946 on behalf of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America. The strike went on for nearly a month and a half, and when union workers defied a court injunction limiting pickets, the police rode on horseback into the crowd of strikers to break up the blockade. The next day the pickets came back with bagsof marbles to trip the horses with, and as the police flailed away with billy clubs and chased strikers across lawns, horrified residents opened their homes as sanctuaries. Some ten thousand people crowded around City Hall in a show of sympathy with the strikers, and finally, after fifty-seven days, the strike was settled when workers accepted a raise of $1.48 a day. The man in the picture was John White’s father, Francis, and John was proud of his part in providing the worker with a better life in the city. But he also knew that times had changed. According to historians, the Philadelphia strike of 1946 represented the apotheosis of plant unionism in the United States. Companies responded by using their political clout to dismantle the power of the unions, and on a far more visceral and damaging level they
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