Bending the Facts to the Thesis

...For another, we can no more go back to the Wagner years than the auto industry can reverse the verdict of the Battle of the Overpass, or the Steel-workers can forget the lesson of the Gary strike...

...The procedure is obvious: Use only the evidence that strengthens your argument and ignore the rest...

...Several unions blindly uphold the status quo, in my view, refusing to make necessary reforms...

...He blames labor for New York City's inefficient bureaucracy, although this was an issue years before the unions attained power...

...Yet Sumner Rosen of the Institute of Public Administration, in a study soon to be published, indicates that managerial inefficiency was just as prevalent when workers were unorganized...

...To prove, for example, that John Lindsay is a patsy for labor, he shows that from 1957-65 the average annual wage increase for New York City policemen and firemen was 6.5 per cent, whereas from 1965 to the present the yearly rise was 11.8 per cent...

...But propaganda, not accuracy, is his primary concern...

...In terms of material gains the strikes were all failures...

...His focus is on the entrance of minority groups into the civil service...

...Horton is not particularly enlightening or helpful on the subject of equal employment either...

...Horton should at least take the trouble to investigate the realities of the situation that he is deploring...

...it is in the higher-paid, higher-skilled, supervisory and managerial jobs that blacks and Puerto Ricans are underrepresented...

...Left out of this picture is the simple fact that in 1965 the inflationary spiral began...

...Horton shows no understanding of the political history of the labor movement...

...But Horton has little or no background in labor relations, and his book reveals no attempt to comprehend the important questions...

...Many fair complaints could be lodged against labor organizations in New York City...

...He suggests that collective bargaining in the public sector is not analogous to negotiations in the private sector because municipal unions are monopolistic...

...Reviewed by Victor Gotbaum Executive Director, District Council 37 of the State, County and Municipal Employes Union Though purporting to fill the need for a comprehensive work on municipal labor relations, this "study" is actually nothing more than a partisan polemic...

...The effect on the public would be practically identical whether Local 1199 closed all the voluntary hospitals or District Council 37 shut down all those operated by the City...

...The author, an associate professor of business at Columbia University, writes in his preface: "The basic thesis of this book is that organized civil servants have been 'winners' in city labor relations, and public officials and the public have been 'losers.'" He then so deftly distorts the facts that one can't help but be impressed with the way he proves his proposition after having the temerity to tell us "the subject is seen through the eyes of a political scientist...

...For one thing, he seems unaware that in the Wagner years collective bargaining did not take place publicly, but at Gracie Mansion or in the Budget Director's bathroom...

...that the organization of civil servants has made them an obstacle to improving management...

...I don't happen to believe that decentralization is always a progressive concept...

...In fact, a major reason was the union's insistence that a provision for community boards be written into the law...

...moreover, municipal workers have long been fighting for the kind of job training and upgrading that would enable them to acquire needed new skills...

...Yet another of Horton's distortions is to take both the struggle of the United Federation of Teachers against decentralization and the opposition of District Council 37 to the initial plan of the City's new Hospital Corporation as evidence that all municipal unions are conservative forces in New York...

...And when he notes that New York's hospital workers are the best paid municipal hospital workers in the nation, he does not compare them to those in private institutions...

...We will have to wait for a more objective writer to tell us how to upgrade our lower-paid public employes...

...Finally, in pining for a return to the Wagner years, when labor relations were conducted in the open, Horton moves away from propaganda and into fantasy...

...I am merely trying to illustrate the emptiness of Horton's heads-management-wins-tails-labor-loses approach...

...Indeed, Rosen argues that changes negotiated with labor are the only hope for real reform...

...Promotion, however, not entrance, is the problem...

...how to professionalize and stabilize collective bargaining...

...Thus, two unions are labeled conservative because one opposed local boards and the other was fighting for them...

...Also missing are comparisons with private industry and other public sectors, although as it happens figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that unions throughout the country, both private and public, have made larger gains since 1965 than before...

...Attempting to demonstrate the municipal unions' inordinate use of power, he alleges that, with a single exception, every strike by public employes exacted generous concessions from the Lindsay administration...

...Horton is a master of statistical sleight of hand...

...it may, indeed, deny the community an opportunity to participate...

...Complex and bewildering problems plague urban governments, but Horton's only answer is to point his finger at the unions...

...Does he seriously believe that the strikes by elevator repairmen, fuel truck drivers and telephone operators—In areas where citizens are unable to choose alternative services-differ from those by public employes...

...Minority workers abound in the lower economic positions of the City hierarchy...

...Any genuine student of labor relations knows that the important distinction is not between private and public trade organizations, but between different kinds of occupations...

...Since he did not bother to interview any of the officials of District Council 37, he has absolutely no idea why the Corporation's plans were opposed...

...He maintains, too...

...Similarly, when Horton declares that city clerical workers receive pay equal to that of their private sector counterparts and enjoy greater fringe benefits, he does not mention the higher wages of clericals working for other public employers...

...how to train and enhance the authority of managerial personnel...

...and above all, how to stop the Professor Hortons from making a profession of misleading the public...

...No data are cited to back up this assertion because there are none to cite...

...Occasionally, Horton can find no facts to support the point he is making, and in those cases he forgoes proof altogether...

...The real need is to provide minority groups with a career ladder, giving them the opportunity to obtain the necessary prerequisites for advancement...