UNIONS | Oct. 18–First American Trade Unions, 1648

Shoemakers at work.

Today in 1648, Boston shoemakers and "coopers" (barrel-makers) formed what are considered the first American trade unions.

The colonies had till then failed to import the English tradition of guilds, whereby craftsmen would band together to establish prices, quality standards, apprentice programs and charitable programs. The guilds in England also supported members who had retired or were beset by health or other challenges.

But these two 1648 quasi-guilds were limited to ensuring quality. The Massachusetts General Court prohibited "The Company of Shoomakers" from offering educational or charitable programs, or from fixing prices or settling disputes. 

More than a century later, the independence shown by the Boston shoemakers surfaced, as one of them has been credited with starting the Boston Tea Party.

The Philadelphia carpenter's union, formed some years after 1648, was more aggressive on behalf of its workers, and its printers and shoemakers were also aggressive at an early stage in the city's history. According to the History of Trade Unionism in the United States by Perlman and Selig: “The earliest recorded genuine labor strike in America, in 1786, was over wages paid to Philadelphia printers, who ‘turned out’ to demand a minimum wage of $6 per week." The second strike on record, in 1791, was also in Philadelphia, by house carpenters who struck for a ten-hour day.

In 1796 local shoemakers in Philadelphia organized the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers working with Cordovan leather). Three years later the organization staged a 10-week, successful strike for higher wages, the first strike in the newcounry sanctioned by a union.

JOE LHOTA | Why Is NYC Deaf to Tough-on-Crime Tune?

Giuliani Endorses Lhota

Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and 1997 campaigned brilliantly on the issue of public safety, picking up on a theme that Richard Nixon hammered at, mashing up student protests with a rise in crime to argue that lawlessness was undermining New York City.

I was the Chief Economist for the New York City Comptroller's Office for the entire eight years of Giuliani's mayoralty. I remember leaning forward with anticipation when a reporter struggled to get Giuliani to move on from"law 'n order" to his economic-development strategy.

Rudy replied something like this: "As long as corporations are moving out of New York City because of crime, as long as property values are threatened by crime in the streets, my economic-development strategy is to reduce crime." So there.

This tough-on-crime electoral strategy worked from the 1960s through the 1990s. It worked for Nixon, for Ronald Reagan, for George H. W. Bush, and for hundreds of candidates in state and local elections. Even a supposedly liberal Republican like Nelson Rockefeller signed onto a draconian drug law.

The conservative mantra was:

• Liberal police chiefs would not let the cops do their jobs.
• Liberal judges would let criminals back onto the street.
• Liberal parole boards would grant parole too easily.  

Joe Lhota saw how this worked for Giuliani. He is piping the same tune. But this time, no one is dancing, or joining in, or even listening. De Blasio continues to ride high in the polls despite Lhota's soft-on-crime ads.

Why isn't the music working any more? Lhota has a new attack ad suggesting that de Blasio would bring New York City back to the high-crime days of the 1960s and 1970s. De Blasio spokesman Dan Levitan said:

Lhota is right that we can’t go back. We shouldn’t return to the days when Republicans like Giuliani used fear tactics to divide New Yorkers against each other.

Well, here are pieces of a counter-mantra that might explain New York City's deafness to the issue:

• Crime is down in New York City and everywhere in the United States. There are lots of explanations. Here's one I like: The civil rights movement of the 1960s has calmed down groups in the cities that were hostile to the police.Having a black president surely helps establish that the country offers opportunities for black citizens.
• Police work has gotten better in NYC and all over the country. Cops are being managed more efficiently. Crimes are tracked minute by minute and are analyzed. Task forces are sent to hot spots. 
• Tough on crime means more people in prison, which is costly.  Three percent of the American population is behind bars or on parole and probation – U.S. prisons hold 20 percent of all the people incarcerated in the world. Conservatives and libertarians are increasingly about the cost of this. Legislators are showing rare unanimity on this topic. In 1994, Newt Gingrich's Contract with America promised to put more people in prison. But now he is concerned about the huge costs of the large prison population, "in dollars and lost human potential".  
• Some rehabilitation programs work. There are some successful programs to prepare ex-offenders for return to the workforce. The 2012 Republican platform called for prisons to "attempt to rehabilitate and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and future victimization."

NYC | Protecting against Future Hurricanes

NYC from POV of a Hurricane Heading North.

My Chelsea friend Bob Trentlyon, former publisher of our neighborhood newspaper, this week sent me his latest thoughts on the New York Bight.

The Bight is the large area of water encompassed within the two arms of Long Island and the New Jersey Coast, which make an angle slightly more obtuse than 90 degrees (see map at right).

As Trentlyon says:

These two arms ... have helped guide major storms to New York City, whether Northeasters or hurricanes, that have traveled north on the gulf stream from the Caribbean. Storms have descended on NYC since the last ice age. They have become fiercer and more frequent. NYC, located between Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean is practically defenseless. 

Trentlyon passes along a long list (prepared by John Rentoff) of serious hurricanes that have swept down on New York since the year before the founding of Harvard College:

August 1635, August 1638, October 1723, August 1788, September 1815, September 1821, November 1861, September 1869, September 1874, August 1879, September 1882, August 1893, October 1894, September 1904, September 1938 Long Island Express, September 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane, August 1954 Carol, September 1960 Donna, August 1976 Belle, September 1985 Gloria, 28 August 1991 Bob, 16 September 1999 Floyd, 27-28 August 2011 Irene, 28-29 October 2012 Sandy. 

What lessons does Trentlyon have for us?

• Don't build on the flood plain. Build on higher ground away from the shoreline. Much of NYC is high enough above the water level not to be affected for a very long time, possibly forever. However, he says, the waterfront is extremely vulnerable.
• Protect Manhattan. Trentlyon thinks "it would be smart to protect much of Manhattan, Brooklyn and parts of Queens by building a five-mile storm surge barrier from the Rockaways to Sandy Hook." He also favors a smaller surge barrier at Throgs Neck to protect from flooding and storm surges in the East River.
• He thinks that closing off the entryways when storm surges or flooding threaten makes a lot more sense than building endless miles of walls.

Earlier reports by Trentlyon are here and here.

I hope that Bill de Blasio, once he is elected Mayor, will obtain the advice of the Army Corps of Engineers and local environmental experts to build on the hurricane planning of the Mayor Bloomberg to consider carefully the most cost-effective way of  reducing the risks to NYC of future hurricanes.

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CRUZ | Dems Should Give Him an Award

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas)

I hereby nominate Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for a Prize for Outstanding Service to the Democratic Party.

Surely he has done more for the Democrats than anyone else alive.

• Would de Blasio be so far ahead of Lhota in New York City's mayoral race without Cruz?
• Would Cory Booker have won his Senate spot so "handily" in New Jersey without Cruz?
• Gallup shows unfavorable view of GOP at all-time high of 62%. It shows favorable view at an all-time low of 28%. We have to thank Ted Cruz.

You may ask: What about Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1995-96? Didn't he help the Democrats just as much by shutting down the government? It was longer then, 27 days (in two parts) vs. 16 days.

Trillion-Dollar Coin

But no. Gingrich only put in play Bill Clinton's budget. By adding in the debt ceiling Cruz has called into question Uncle Sam's constitutional obligation to pay U.S. debts.

Also, Gingrich did not cause such divisiveness in his own party, which should pay continuing dividends to the Democrats. Gallup shows hardly a blip in GOP favorability ratings during that period.

Cruz absolutely deserves the prize. I recommend the award be a facsimile of the Trillion Dollar Coin, which was considered as a way around the debt ceiling. The Treasury would mint it as permitted under FDR's gold legislation of 1933-34 as subsequently interpreted and amended, and the Fed would take it in as an asset, with a trillion-dollar liability to the Treasury per coin.

BOARD OF ELECTIONS | What's the Matter?

The mechanical voting machines, rescued
from storage.

The New York Times recently devoted an editorial - "Mismanaging the Vote" to the shortcomings of the "slow, often loony" Board of Elections in New York City.

The Times says the Board seems to operate on the basis of who you know rather than what you know.

Here are three highlights of what is wrong with the Board of Elections.

Shocker #1: Return of the zombie voting machines (see photo). These huge monsters from the Jurassic era were brought back out of storage for the Mayoral Primary because the Board of Elections could not figure out how to enable in time the optical paper-ballot system authorized in 2010, even though we had a run-through in 2012.

Shocker #2: A $13 million runoff election for a $2.3 million office. The runoff was for one NYC-wide office, Public Advocate, with an annual budget of a little over $2 million. The cost of the runoff was reported as $13 million, or about $100 per actual voter since only a tiny percentage of NYC residents bothered to vote. But the true cost of the runoff was much higher, when we include: (1) The cost in time and productivity to all the people who turned out for a needless election, (2) The cost of the extended campaign. (3) The systemic cost to the future of democracy of wearying the huge electorate with an runoff for a tiny office.

Board of Elections proposed
paper ballot for Nov. 5 NYC
election.

Shocker #3: The Board of Elections typeface tempest. Chester Soria reported in the Gotham Gazette Friday that the Board of Elections is at sea over problems with increasing the size of the typeface on the November ballot from an illegible 6 points to an illegible 8 points (see photo). ("Normal" type faces are 10-12 points.) The typeface trauma took over most of the most recent Board of Elections meeting. The board’s ballot coordinator told the Board of Elections of the dilemma: (1) The ballots had to be ready by October 2 to meet election law deadlines. (2) But approval awaited Corporation Counsel consent because treating voters in different districts differently might be illegal. The crisis is a symptom of a disease -- creeping growth of both multiple languages being added to ballots and additional choices offered to voters. These developments have stressed the optical scanning system purchased from Election Systems & Software, a Nebraska-based company. Ballots shown during the meeting were for 60 Queens polling sites with English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and (new) Bengali translations on the same ballot. A solution proposed at the meeting was... multiple ballot pages! The commissioners decided on a conference call Thursday and put off a decision. The Board will reveal its deliberations at the earliest at its next public hearing on Oct. 15. (Update – the six-point typeface will be used on November 5 – so much for legibility.)

This is indeed madness, with no method in it. Guiding principles are conspicuously missing. Here are some ideas, none of them brand new, and some of which may require a Charter Revision Commission to implement:

1. Short, Simple Ballots, Please. KISS. These complicated, illegible ballots are out of control. (a) There is a tradeoff in legibility for the goal of putting multiple languages on the ballot. The Board of Elections could issue translations into multiple languages for local newspapers and bloggers and post them and mail them. (Why just five languages on the ballot? NYC is home to 800 languages.) The ballot itself should operate on the principle – keep it simple, stupid. (b) The "short ballot" movement, which had a strong representation in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century in the form of the National Municipal League, argued for a ballot offering candidates for a single office at each level of government and against slates of committees, which are impossible for the ordinary citizen to evaluate properly.

Sample Instant 
Runoff Ballot.

2. Use Instant-Runoff Ballots. There is an easy solution to wasteful runoff elections: an instant runoff. Voters rank candidates by order of preference. If no candidate passes the minimum threshold (in NYC, 40%) to win an election, the votes of the last-place finisher are redistributed according to preferences on the ballots. This step is repeated until a candidate crosses the threshold.  Instant runoff voting is already used in local elections in London, England; Wellington, New Zealand; Minneapolis and St. Paul,Minn.; San Francisco, Oakland and San Leandro, Calif.; and Cambridge, Mass. After the general election next month, the City Council should have hearings on this idea and the Board of Elections should come up with a plan.

3. Make the Board of Elections Accountable. The Board of Elections must be redesigned and made more professional. It could be headed someone appointed jointly by the Mayor, Comptroller, City Council Speaker and one of the Borough Presidents selected from them as their spokesperson, in a procedure similar to the selection of the head of the Independent Budget Office.

4. End Party-Based Primaries for Local Elections. End party-based primaries and party identification on the ballot. Primary elections should be non-partisan, although political clubs and party organizations can continue to endorse, petition for, and campaign for candidates. Nonpartisan primaries would encourage more New Yorkers to vote and would ensure that a maximum number of people decide who will be the top officials. A 2003 proposal recommended that the top two vote-getters in a Primary be the candidates for Mayor in the general election.

5. Eliminate the Public Advocate Starting in 2018 or 2022. New Yorkers are lucky that Bill de Blasio is a more promising mayoral candidate than we have any right to expect, coming from the Public Advocate's office, with a budget whittled down so much over the years that it does not provide sufficiently relevant experience for being Mayor. The Public Advocate has a big incentive to run for Mayor or Comptroller because the Public Advocate's office requires few decisions that create opposition. Make plans to scrub the office... or give it something real to do. If there is a vacancy in the Mayoralty, the Council Speaker or the Comptroller could become interim Mayor until a special election.