Big-City Mayors Have to Stand Up to Big-City Unions, by Matthew Yglesias

Big-City Mayors Have to Stand Up to Big-City Unions, by Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias | Bloomberg — Read time: 5 minutes

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Big-City Mayors Have to Stand Up to Big-City Unions

Analysis by Matthew Yglesias | Bloomberg

April 9, 2023 at 8:17 a.m. EDT

CHICAGO, IL - APRIL 04: Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. Johnson won in a tough runoff against the more conservative Paul Vallas after the two outpolled incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot in February. (Photo by Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images) (Photographer: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images North America)

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Chicago’s mayoral election should stand as a warning to anyone who cares about the future of America’s cities, not so much because of the result but because of the choice it presented. Both candidates were beholden to unions, and neither gave much indication he’d be willing to stand up to his base of support when necessary — and in Chicago, as in other US cities, it will almost certainly be necessary.

Last week progressive Brandon Johnson, the teachers union candidate, defeated moderate Paul Vallas, the police union candidate. He must now govern a city facing a revenue shortfall of some $373 million as federal relief funds come to an end.

Remote work is a blow to the finances of every American central city. Slowing population growth poses a particular challenge to cold-weather cities, whose residents tend to leave for warmer climes. And pre-Covid Chicago, unlike America’s major coastal cities, was not already overpriced and underbuilt. So the city can’t unleash economic growth by just updating its zoning laws and making it easier to build.

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Simply put, Chicago’s leadership needs to allocate fiscal losses among the city’s relevant stakeholders. And it has to do so in a way that reduces rent-seeking and improves the efficiency of city services and the quality of life.

That’s a difficult task for even the most skilled politician. The incumbent, Lori Lightfoot, proved to be overmatched politically — she didn’t even make the runoff — but she genuinely tried to hold both police and teachers accountable and make the city work better.

Her would-be successors, by contrast, offered a superficially polarized choice that neglected the reality that the problems of urban education and urban policing have a lot in common. Both police officers and teachers are held in high esteem by most people who (with some reason) regard these professions as more honorable and service-oriented than, say, politics or journalism. This gives the unions that represent them a level of political clout over and above their formal bargaining power.

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Almost by definition, however, what’s best for public-sector workers — especially long-tenured or even retired public-sector workers, who have the most influence in union politics — is not necessarily what’s best for the public.

I’ve spent most of the past three weeks in Chicago, and the thing I heard depressingly often from supporters of both candidates was a kind of double-negative argument: Not that their guy would be able to put his best ideas into practice, but that he wouldn’t be able to implement his worst ones. Then they made the opposite case for their opponent.

Johnson fans assured me that a relatively pro-business city council would not let him pose a new “head tax” on downtown businesses that could scare off employers and impede efforts to get companies to bring people back to work. But they warned me that a mayor squarely aligned with the police union and national conservative forces really could cover up police misconduct without improving public safety. Vallas supporters, by contrast, told me that it was absurd to imagine that the city council or the state legislature would allow conservative policy ideas to take root in Chicago. Meanwhile, they said, Johnson could easily frighten corporate leaders and induce a police pullback.

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These are both pretty good arguments as far as they go — making large-scale policy change is always much harder than candidates let on — but the debate was a depressing reflection of the impoverished state of the city’s politics.

Johnson doesn’t really have much of an agenda for urban reform, just a list of things he’d like to spend money on. It’s almost as if it was copy-and-pasted from a progressive agenda developed in the pre-Covid era for a much richer coastal city.

It’s probably true that he won’t, in fact, be able to impose big new tax increases. So then what will he do? Only 20% of Chicago high school students are at grade level in reading or math proficiency. Chicago teachers walked out on the job over Covid protocols as late as January 2022, by which time schools were fully operational almost everywhere else in the US. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to further empower a union this proud of its own militance and disregard for its public responsibilities.

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Vallas, meanwhile, had so little control over his fans in the Fraternal Order of Police that he couldn’t stop them from hosting a political rally for Ron DeSantis in the Chicago suburbs in the middle of a campaign in which one of his opponent’s main arguments was that Vallas was a crypto-Republican backed by shady out-of-city interests. The FOP’s poor judgment, and Vallas’ lack of sway over the group, raised legitimate questions as to whether his “tough” posture on crime would actually have helped the residents of Chicago’s poorer and less safe neighborhoods.

The tragedy of all this is that everyone — teachers, cops, businesses, ordinary residents — benefits from a more functional city. Cities that can’t respond to negative revenue shocks will end up losing people and tax dollars, entering spirals of decline that diminish not only workers’ pension funds but also residents’ quality of life.

I am under no illusions about how difficult it is to govern Chicago, or any large US city for that matter. But I also believe that America’s cities would be better off if their mayors were as skeptical of the public-sector unions that support them as they are of the ones that don’t.