Examining the Serious Implications

...The TWU, originally Irish in rank and file and headed by the super-Hibernian Michael Quill, had in its hands a weapon—the strike capable of paralyzing New York City—that could be used to clear the track not only for itself but for all other unions of municipal workers...

...Koch writes that while a 1 per cent wage increase to the transit workers would cost the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority $10 million, the municipal unions as a whole would be receiving $53 million from New York City if they were granted a matching 1 per cent gain...

...No one should think, though, that the Mayor has discovered a magic formula for flouting the conventionalities of city government indefinitely...

...Every year of his first term, financial observers regarded as expert in their field, and some not so expert, predicted the budget gap could not be closed...

...Still, the picture that the Mayor gives of the transit situation seems on the whole an accurate account of the position New York finds itself in at the outer edge of governability...

...Or, at least, paying them so well that necessary investment in capital goods is postponed, if not eliminated altogether, while the infrastructure of the economy deteriorates...

...Koch has nonetheless found two strategies for prevailing...

...This brings us to the second point touched upon in Mayor that deserves some attention...

...This has been the case with New York's transportation system, despite the fact that it is a relatively small part of the economy and, in theory, higher taxes might be extracted from the population as a whole to cover both wages and the cost of maintaining the infrastructure at an optimum level...

...His book does touch upon some important points, however, albeit only by implication...

...It sounds absurd, yet I must confess that Koch's book explained the political disasters of Czechoslovakia and Poland more graphically for me than far more learned and pointed works...

...Most of its publicly owned buses and two of its three subway systems were initially in private hands...

...If you want," he remembers telling Ravitch (who has since said that he was in fact bargaining constantly with Lawe), "have Diane [Mrs...

...For example, significant sections of the population, notably many nonwhite and Hispanic citizens (or certainly their leaders), are most reluctant to react positively to Koch's initiatives...

...The inevitable next question is: Why couldn't he keep from writing a book whose very conception would have reduced most other politicians to shuddering wrecks, too frightened to speak into a tape recorder in a soundproofed room...

...In passing laws that diminish the right to strike by public employees in New York State, the legislators have acknowledged the potential conflict between what we have regarded as a democratic right and socialized ownership...

...From Koch's book it is clear his ability to govern has required the kind of difficulties that have persuaded all of its citizens that New York City's capacities are limited and they must acquiesce in grossly unsatisfactory conditions...

...He has triumphed because of adversity, not in spite of it...

...It made clear why the demands for modest democratic reforms in Czechoslovakia and economic rights in Poland so frightened the rulers of the two countries that they reacted ruthlessly...

...The probability is that each person remembers a thoroughly blended mixture of what he actually said and what he merely wishes he had said, with the two now so thoroughly scrambled that the most candid individual could no longer separate them...

...The most frequently asked question about Mayor is: Why did Koch do it...

...The other aspect of municipal ungovernability derives not from the desires of a confident population, but from the city's increased dependence on the State and Federal governments even as it has had to assume responsibility for services that previously were either not provided by anyone or made available by private industry...

...He must attach great importance to friendship, for in at least seven footnotes he remarks that someone he has just fired in what is often a particularly humiliating and even tear-inducing manner has remained a very good friend despite everything...

...Their current version, in effect at the time of the 1980 confrontation Koch describes, fines each employee a day's pay for every day he or she is on strike, and deprives the union of its important dues check-off privilege...

...author, "The Living End: The City and Its Critics," "America's Housing Challenge" As everybody already knows, Edward I. Koch's opus about his experiences in City Hall is hovering at the top of the best seller list not because of its serious analysis of municipal government, but by virtue of his total lack of reticence in discussing colleagues at the highest levels of national, state and local government...

...One is to declare the city so distressed financially that its residents' expectations are reduced to a level where they can be taken care of...

...The other is to stress that the authority of City Hall is circumscribed by the overlapping powers and greater financial strength of the state and federal governments...

...Meanwhile the State Legislature, led by upstate representatives who could not swallow the double protection given state and local government employees by Civil Service plus union shops, passed a series of laws restricting the right of public employees to strike...

...One can hardly help wondering if that is as frequently the case as he thinks, or if he simply does not fully appreciate how deeply emotions can run...

...Two are worth discussing in detail because they concern issues confronting the elected leadership of every American city...

...Probably nothing contributes so much to the ungovernability of a city as the hubris that continuing prosperity gives to its people...

...Koch, the best seller, cannot resist the temptation to personalize the conflict between dealing with workers as workers and dealing with them as a crucial voting bloc in the state...

...Anyone who has the answer to that knows more about Ed Koch than his psychoanalyst would, if he had one...

...Anyone listening to Mayor William O'-Dwyer explain at a public hearing in the late 1940s why raising the fare would not help cover the subway deficits was treated to an exercise in non-Aristotelian logic that may have seemed funny at the time, yet in retrospect is almost tragic...

...The problem is that in a society with free elections, workers in the socialized industries vote, and vote powerfully, so that the official responsible for invoking the penalties of the law faces political retaliation...

...It sounds a little like the Mayor imagines marriage to be a series of conjugal visits, as in modern penology...

...In New York, that official turns out to be the Governor...

...For it leads to the real question of how a socialist state can be the sole employer of all workers, and simultaneously encourage them to vote in the elections to pick those who will negotiate with them...

...Their suspicions provoke the response from him that these groups unfairly expect to be dealt with differently than others...

...At the same time, the Mayor's popularity with a considerable majority of the white voters might well be substantially reduced were he to accede to the wishes of the blacks and Hispanics for special treatment...

...But that does not happen in public transport, the one socialized industry we have in New York, and the danger posed to a fully socialized political democracy would appear to be infinitely greater...

...As for his understanding of matrimonial matters, Koch writes that when he was trying to get former Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Richard Ravitch to offer to bargain around the clock with John Lawe, head of the Transport Workers' Union (TWU), he asked Ravitch to spend the night at the hotel where the negotiations were being held...

...A number of participants in these conversations have complained about being quoted inaccurately...

...What Koch's budget balancing has proved, in other words, is that in times of trouble, it is possible to move people to control their appetite for improvement...

...It is apparent from both the book and the record that Koch understands the demands for better conditions will become louder as finances improve, and he realizes the efficiencies in operations proposed by his staff are easier to make when demands are muted...

...And the official who has to face the demands of the other municipal unions determined to equal what the transit workers would win if the imposition of the antistrike law were avoided is the Mayor of the City of New York...

...Ravitch] come down and stay at the hotel with you...

...One of the most interesting passages in Mayor, describing the transit strike of 1980, raises disturbing issues of public policy...

...There is only one answer: He couldn't keep from doing it once the idea was proposed to him, or came floating unannounced into his mind...

...Public ownership, besides making fare increases a heavier political burden than they had been before, made keeping down operational costs a political nightmare...

...There is little left to be said about these indiscretions, except that they somehow appear less refreshingly frank when printed than they often do when merely spoken...

...Costs continued upwards, and now there was not even the shadow of private management to share some of the blame with the Mayor and his minions...

...Koch delights in peppering the narrative with sharp, apposite descriptions of the people involved, purportedly verbatim accounts of what someone said to someone else and, above all, what he said to everybody...

...As is well known, except for a few bus lines and all taxicabs, New York today has a socialized public transit system...

...After the takeover, ironically, the municipal authorities found themselves in no less an embrarrassing position...

...The first is the ancient question of whether a city as big and diverse as New York is, in fact, governable...

...It seems quite possible for a democratic socialist state to find itself paying wages that give the workers buying power that cannot be satisfied by the state's ability to produce...

...While these disappointments and defects also elicited strong criticism of the Mayor, particularly on the grounds that he was not doing as much as he should for minorities and the poor, his critics have thus far not been able to force his administration to spend on municipal improvements the money needed to balance the budget...

...Yet the Mayor did close it—by getting citizens to accept, even to grin about potholes, dirty streets, disreputable parks, and the emergence of an unprecedented problem of homelessness...

...This changed because it was politically embarrassing for the city government to permit fare hikes that opponents could charge were increasing private profits at the expense of the working-class passenger—especially since the city had loaned the private subway builders much of the capital they used to build the lines...

...I think, rather, it is a problem that goes to the very heart of how the industrial nations can combine freedom with economic plenty...

...I wish I believed with Koch that the issue could have been resolved by a little temporary roughness on the part of former Governor Hugh Carey...

...The system, smacking of old-style politics, came to an end when Quill met Mayor John Lindsay in a replay of the battle of the Boyne...

...For years, the TWU was nevertheless kept under control by the magic of Quill's brogue, his blackthorn walking stick, and the histrionic abilities of a series of mayors who were able to settle a strike in the backroom of a swanky saloon by futurizing its excess costs and holding the cash gains of the workers to a minimum...

...It is regrettable that the Mayor spends so much time discussing matters on which he hardly appears to be expert, like friendship and the relationship between husbands and wives...

...Yet the conflict far outstrips the personality clashes, or even the jurisdictional disputes, between the Mayor of New York State's largest city and the Governor...