A Uniformed Union Fiefdom in NYC

I've written several posts about individuals who have created fiefdoms (a D.A., a housing authority director, a city pension board attorney, the director of a council of local governments, and the CEO of a state university foundation), but none of them were union leaders. A large investigative piece in the New York Times today provides an excellent description of the fiefdom of the head of New York City's correction officers union.

Uniformed unions wield a disproportionate power in most local governments. One reason is that their support is often considered necessary to win an election. This gives them a great deal of leverage with elected officials. For one thing, mayors and local legislators rarely criticize the unions in public. For example, when in November, the mayor called for "a culture change" in the city's violent jail, he criticized the corrections department, not the union. In fact, in October, the mayor publicly praised the union president.

The Times investigation shows how many other ways the union president wields his power. The principal way is through intimidation. He allegedly walked into the office of the department's lead investigator and threatened her. And then she was replaced . . . with a childhood friend of the union president, whose brother had been on the union's executive board. A culture of violence against prisoners can derive from a culture of fear and cronyism in a fiefdom.

A former head of the corrections department said of the union president, “I came to think that my wardens believed Norman was more important to their career than I was.”

Everyone seems to believe this, and all because a union president, as this one is quoted as saying, responds to labor management issues to protect the rights of union members. That is, the rights of individual members override any other consideration, including harm to prisoners, competent management, and a culture of fear and cronyism.

The union president doesn't just wield power in the city. He also wields power in the state, partly through large campaign contributions to state legislators. This year, he helped craft a bill that would move the jurisdiction of the jail's criminal cases from the Bronx district attorney’s office to the one in Queens. It passed easily. The union president had accused the Bronx D.A. of being too aggressive with union members, while going too easy on inmate violence. So he effectively got rid of the D.A., too.

As the article points out, loyalty is an important part of the union president's power. He spends a lot of his time paying attention to everything from new recruits to those accused of misconduct. In return he gets unquestioning loyalty, so that the corrections officers are aligned behind him, and everyone knows it.

Sometimes he even employs pranks to show his power and arrogance. For example, one day, when an inmate was supposed to testify in court against two corrections officers, the union president insisted that all the buses were unsafe and would not let any of them leave the jail, even those taking inmates to a hospital for treatment.

The union president even called a press conference to attack the mayor's new appointee as head of corrections, before the appointee had started work. The criticism appears to have gone down along with the killing of promised reforms.

Two months ago, a judge recommended that five officers and a captain be terminated for brutally beating an inmate and then lying about it. The head of corrections has yet to decide what to do. It's not a position anyone would want to be in. It's hard to live in someone else's fiefdom, especially when you're nominally in charge.

It's hard to get rid of this sort of fiefdom, because the union president, who is accountable only to his members, is at least apparently putting their personal, short-term interests ahead of the interest of the corrections department and the public interest. Therefore, one must convince union members to put the public interest in an orderly, less violent, more accountable prison ahead of what they are told is their personal interest. This would require a unique sort of revolution or an incredible alternative union leader.

A mayor or council with a great deal of moral courage could start portraying the problem not as a corrections department problem but, at least in part, as a union problem.

A study of government union fiefdoms, ethical misconduct, and the disproportionate power of uniformed unions would be valuable, as well.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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