Negotiations between Wu administration and city’s largest police, fire unions move closer to arbitration – The Boston Globe

If that fails, they’ll head to arbitration, which is when both sides present their top priorities to the committee and state labor officials issue a binding contract by which both sides have to abide.

Since her campaign, Mayor Michelle Wu placed a heavy focus on public safety contracts as a vehicle to deliver reform, but increasingly the state’s labor committee is getting involved at the unions’ requests.

Lou Mandarini, the Wu administration’s senior adviser for labor issues, said the city’s been treating unions “well and fairly.” He added that all of the city’s labor agreements had expired by the time the mayor came into office. Most are now closed, save for the public safety ones.

“We’ve done a pretty good job clawing our way out of a deep hole,” he said.

For police, Wu has called for diverting nonviolent 911 calls to alternative response teams, capping how much overtime officers can work, and requiring officers to proactively report data — by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood — on the use of force.

But those changes remained unpalatable to the union after around a dozen bargaining sessions between the administration and the BPPA, which has 1,600 members and is the largest police union in the city.

The BPPA ultimately filed for arbitration in December, saying the two sides were at an impasse. The city rejected that characterization. Ultimately, the state labor committee deemed it necessary to take over last month.

“At the end of the day, our crystal-clear objective is to make certain that the hardworking men and women of BPPA are fairly and properly valued and compensated for the incredible work done day in and day out to make Boston one of the safest cities in America,” Larry Calderone, the union’s president, said in a statement.

The fire union, Local 718, which represents around 1,600 firefighters, filed with the JLMC in April. The committee voted to take jurisdiction a month later.

City officials in April criticized the union’s move, calling it a “unilateral rush” to the state after just a handful of bargaining sessions. The union has said it doesn’t want to get to arbitration, and it said there’d been a “communication breakdown” with the city.

State law forbids police and fire unions from striking. The JLMC was created specifically to help municipalities come to terms with their police officers and firefighters or reach an agreement on procedures to resolve their disputes.

A spokesperson for the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development, which oversees the labor-management committee, said it is “in the process of scheduling mediation sessions with the parties. The mediation process is confidential and thus we cannot address what happens during those sessions.”

The Boston Police Superior Officers Federation ― which represents the department’s sergeants, lieutenants, and captains ― filed for arbitration last week, looking to have the state similarly take jurisdiction in its negotiations with the Wu administration.

In its filing, which the union provided to the Globe, lawyer Patrick Bryant wrote that “the City has violated its refusal to bargain in good faith by refusing to provide requested information in a reasonable and timely manner, engaging in surface bargaining by engaging in dilatory tactics, refusing to make proposals on topics it has deemed ‘must have,’” among other complaints.

City officials characterized the talks with the superior officers as “pretty contentious” but said they still believe both sides can avoid arbitration.

The city is also hoping to come to terms with the Boston Police Detectives Benevolent Society, which includes three bargaining units of detectives, superior detectives, and civilian criminologists. Negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, and the union has not filed for arbitration with the state.

Arbitration decisions are made by a panel that includes a union designee, a city designee, and a “neutral,” who essentially acts as a tiebreaker.

After an arbitration award comes down, the city council votes up or down to fund it, as the body does for all union contracts. There’s been discussion among progressives on the council in recent years about rejecting police contracts that they say do not go far enough toward reform, although such a move would be unprecedented.

Meanwhile, the union that represents the roughly 360 Boston EMS workers recently ratified a contract with the city. The EMTs, paramedics, lieutenants, and captains covered by the contracts will get 2 percent raises over the next three years on top of retroactive hikes for the past two years ― a success story for a group that’s long complained about getting paid less than police and firefighters.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Matthew Anderson, the president of the bargaining unit, said in an interview. “This contract’s not going to get us to complete parity, but it’s a step.”

The contract for the union, which is under the umbrella of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, comes with an accompanying memorandum of agreement exempting new hires from residency requirements for three years, and it enshrines new efforts to reroute some mental health calls to clinicians.

“This is a real win-win, I think, for the membership, for the city and I think for our department,” EMS Chief James Hooley said in an interview.

The union membership voted to ratify the contract last month, and it’s now pending city council approval.

Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com.Follow him on Twitter @cotterreporter.