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by Robert Polner
Scrappy city firefighter and police unions are getting ready to grumble, hoping their pickets and ads will get the ear of the White House and go a long way against a GOP mayor rolling out a Republican-red carpet at Madison Square Garden.
On Monday, when the keys to the Garden are handed to the GOP to prepare for the Aug. 30-Sept. 3 convention, members of the uniformed services along with teachers will stage an informational picket, with their leaders prepared to sustain their presence until the last canned political speech is delivered.
While Mayor Michael Bloomberg might actually enjoy the symbolic value of being picketed by teachers -- the sum of all fears of unionization by his party -- for him or any other Republican VIP to be booed by the brethren of 9/11's heroes is another thing.
The unions are hoping the White House will get the message and place a discreet call to Bloomberg to ensure that the unions get satisfaction at the bargaining table before President George W. Bush shows up.
"We are taking advantage of a national spotlight in hopes that somebody in the Republican Party in Washington will say to the mayor: 'Look, sit down and work out something with these guys before the convention,'" said Al O'Leary, spokesman for the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
New York's firefighters and police have been working without a contract for two years, despite devastating loss of life by the much-acclaimed heroes who were among the first to respond to the terror attack on the World Trade Center.
The two unions rejected Bloomberg's proposal to boost salaries by at least 5 percent plus a $1,000 bonus over three years. Bloomberg is demanding productivity savings to pay for raises.
What will result from the convergence of labor and GOP political maneuvering is uncertain, especially since the unions' push for higher wages is vulnerable to being subsumed by anti-war protests, terror alerts and the high-stakes presidential race.
"Are we whistling in the wind? We'll whistle as long as we can and as loud as we can," O'Leary said.
The city's unions began to bristle through a half-page advertisement in The Washington Post last week. A full-page ad will soon appear in regional editions of The New York Times in the Northeast, O'Leary said.
While the unions have every intention to razz Bloomberg, there's no sign they plan to hound him as similarly contract-less police have dogged the mayor of Boston, where the Democratic convention will be held July 26-29.
Rather than brawn, it's political sensitivities that New York municipal unionists -- barred by the Taylor Law from striking -- are banking on, said Richard Steier, editor of The Chief, which covers the city's civil service work force.
"It'll be tougher for the Republicans to pigeon-hole the people who are out there protesting as just a bunch of lefties and un-American people if you have police and firefighters, the heroes of 9/11, as a big part of that picket line," he said.
Rich Bond, a Republican political consultant in Washington, D.C., and former head of the Republican National Committee, said he had little doubt the Bloomberg administration will keep the convention's planners "well informed" about the progress of contract talks.
A Bloomberg spokesman said the mayor doesn't negotiate contracts through the media, while GOP convention planners weren't
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