Opportunities and Limits for Mayoral-Public Employee Union Collaborations

• In Event: Co-Production and Collaborative Governance

Abstract

Relations between public employees’ unions and city governments shape the design and implementation of local policies. In a climate of national debate about the power and influence of unions in the public sector, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision for the plaintiff on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 in June of 2018 - a decision devastating public employees’ unions in numerous counties and cities. In New York City, a different story has unfolded. This study describes how the de Blasio administration took on the task of settling expired labor contracts with 148 unions. This undertaking constituted a massive fiscal challenge, a public management challenge, and a political challenge. The de Blasio administration worked not only to resolve the economic dilemmas, but additionally to shift the paradigm of labor-management relations to one of creativity and collaboration with public sector unions.
This study asks how public sector labor-management relations and public sector employee unions’ political influence affect the de Blasio administration’s efforts at policy innovation and administrative practice. How do public employee unions shape the administration’s decisions about the balance between providing public services directly versus contracting them out to nongovernmental organizations? How do these relations affect the direction of institutional reform? This study does not attempt to develop a general model of the political influence of public sector labor unions, but it does identify the potential for and limits to their policy entrepreneurship in an environment that is unusually supportive of organized labor. A close examination of three major New York City unions reveals that while these public employees’ unions differ greatly from each other and take varying approaches toward influencing policymaking, they are all constrained by their internal dilemmas and interunion fragmentation, which limit their impact on administrative decision-making. At the same time, the Mayor’s attitude toward the city’s workforce is a significant factor in how much access and power unions have over policy formation.

Author

• Elizabeth C. Eisenberg, CUNY-Graduate Center