On Labor Day, Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz released a plan to improve performance and reduce the cost of government through cooperative efforts with city unions.

Is Katz's plan sound?

The idea

The basic idea is that if management and labor focus on innovation and productivity instead of fighting, they'll mine the experience and knowledge of veteran employees to the benefit of workers, managers and taxpayers.

The framework is a series of labor-management committees throughout the government that meet regularly and share ideas. Katz's policy experts believe that in the right environment, union leaders will be flexible, changing work rules and job descriptions to improve performance and save jobs.

Katz does not rule out competitive contracting while pursuing labor/management cooperation, saying repeatedly that he's "not taking anything off the table." His experts believe, based in part on the experience of cities like Seattle and Indianapolis, that the two can work together.

If city departments measure their performance well and private companies are invited to bid for their work, the theory goes, workers and managers who trust one another and work together can compete effectively and save public jobs.

The unanswered question is whether this approach is compatible with another Katz goal: He plans deep cuts in the city wage tax, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

In more than three years, only a handful of Redesigning Government efforts in the Rendell administration have yielded concrete results, and there's no evidence yet of any huge savings.

Redesigning Government got little attention from the top and practically no staff until two positions were funded by a federal grant.

But without a widely perceived crisis like the financial crunch the city faced in 1991, it may be hard to generate the will and the means to make big budget cuts.

One more concern: The uniformed unions, representing roughly 9,000 employees, settle their contracts in binding arbitration and have been largely unaffected by the new collaboration.

The cost

The cost in time could be high. Time is a precious commodity if Katz wants to make major tax cuts in his first term, and he will face union contract negotiations within his first six months.

Collaboration can move awfully slowly. City union reps and officials from the city's Department of Human Services went away for a get-it-together retreat more than a year ago, and there is still not a single definable cost saving or productivity improvement to show for the effort.

It helps that a foundation has been laid in the Rendell years. A great many labor/management committees have sprung up, and seeds of trust are planted. Whether there's enough time for the plants to grow, and whether fruits of the labor will be big enough to fund tax cuts is a major question.

The Politics

But the crazed politics of labor relations may be another matter.

As soon as Katz got his government up and running, he'd have to start negotiating the union contracts that expire July 1. The process tends to push two sides into adversarial positions just as the new administration wants to start building trust.

That first contract will determine the terms of engagement for the two years or more - rules governing privatization, layoffs, job security and shop floor disputes. Getting what he wants without spoiling the marriage will require deft handling on Katz's part.

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