The Mayor Does Have a Contingency Plan: Fleecing Unions
November 30, 2024
When mayors draft their annual budgets, they typically set aside a portion of money to deal with unanticipated expenses and revenue shortfalls called contingency funds. The Mantello administration allocates $0 to contingency in its 2025 budget proposal, which would be the first time that Troy has done that since 2011.
Because the Mantello administration is also very bullish about revenue, many residents and officials are understandably concerned that Troy may be budgeting for best-case scenarios with no backup plan if anything falls through. We do not feel that this analysis is very fair. All available evidence suggests that the Mantello administration does have a contingency plan: fleecing union workers.
MASKING FINANCIAL MISSTEPS BY ERODING BARGAINING UNITS
As of the November 7 Regular Meeting, Troy’s vacancy list includes 54 open positions – the highest that figure has been all year. Of the open positions, 36 are in CSEA’s bargaining unit, 12 are in the PBA’s, 3 are in UFA, and 1 is in UPSEU. Over three-quarters of all positions that have been left vacant for more than six months belong to CSEA – the union representing rank-and-file workers outside of public safety.
We need not wonder whether the Mantello administration is deliberately leaving these positions open. In a September 25 Times Union article, the mayor tells Ken Crowe – explicitly –
“Troy has left positions vacant which has saved money.”
We can see rank-and-file vacancies being treated as a second contingency fund quite straightforwardly in Ordinance 67, where over $1.6 million in unused funds for salaries and social security are transferred to cover budget lines where the Mantello administration knowingly overspent without Council approval.
What this essentially means is that city employees are doing the work of several employees at once to cover the mayor’s costly financial mistakes and mismanagement. What the growing vacancy list tells us is that this is completely unsustainable, because many employees will leave workplaces where they are treated poorly if they have attractive skills and are unencumbered by a very location-specific sense of duty and/or psychological baggage.
SLOW-ROLLING CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS
When an employee belongs to a union, the terms and conditions of their employment are negotiated by management and workers during bargaining sessions. At the end of those bargaining sessions, the new terms and conditions are formalized in a document called a collective bargaining agreement. Because collective bargaining agreements are contracts that generally last several years, these negotiations are very important and time-consuming.
Troy is uncompetitive with surrounding employers because its unions have gone without contracts for long stretches at a time. This often demoralizes workers, because it demonstrates that management has so much contempt for them that they can’t even look them in the eyes to talk about workplace conditions. Just as importantly, it means that workers are denied cost-of-living and other salary adjustments that compound over time. Besides LARPing as a construction worker for photos, two of the most important ways we can judge a mayor’s record on labor issues are:
(1) whether they allow contracts to expire; and,
(2) whether they agree to reasonable terms.
CSEA’s collective bargaining agreement expires on December 31, 2024. After punting a bargaining session with CSEA this summer, the administration again canceled on October 29. At the November 21 finance meeting, CSEA’s labor relations specialist shared that the union still had not met with the administration at the bargaining table. This means that CSEA employees will very likely be working without a contract in 2025.
The administration’s 2025 budget proposal also does not factor in raises for most CSEA employees. This is a very negative deviation from past practices when the city is budgeting during contract negotiations. That – in combination with a blockbuster PBA contract, no real contingency, bullish revenue estimates, and a flurry of spending for recreational activities – means that CSEA will need to claw raises from other lines in an unnecessarily tight budget.
UFA – the union representing 117 of the city’s firefighters – will also see its collective bargaining agreement expire on December 31. Though their contract fight is less public, we can imagine it is not going great, since the president of the union was unlawfully suspended without pay. CSEA employees agitating for better working conditions have also been unlawfully punished by upper management.
In summary — It is uncharitable to assert that the Mantello administration has no contingency plan. It is clear that they do have one: it is merely offensive, inadequate, and self-defeating. If the city’s workers call on the community for support during contract negotiations, we hope that you will all join us in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the union brothers and sisters who make Troy a lovely place to live.
