LOU MANDARINI, a labor lawyer and son of a top union leader, met future Boston mayor Michelle Wu in the trenches of Elizabeth Warren’s 2012 Senate campaign. A decade later, they were together in another trench, this one full of 48 expired union contracts across city government, with Mandarini serving as the mayor’s senior labor policy advisor.
They’re still digging out. But over the last two years, the big ones have been checked off the list: the Boston Teachers Union, the firefighters union Local 718, and, just this month, the city’s biggest police union.
The Wu administration and union leaders have come to the agreements while avoiding verbal blows at the negotiating table. That’s a surprise, particularly in the case of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, since in one corner there was a left-leaning mayor who campaigned on police reform in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and in the other corner a union that has leaned hard to the right, been fiercely resistant to change, and been saddled with recent leaders who faced charges of child rape and overtime fraud.
Enter the avuncular Mandarini – the Boston Herald has called him Wu’s “labor-whisperer” – who says treating union officials with respect is key. “Don’t demonize your opponent. Don’t question your opponent’s motives. I mean, I’m actually slipping here by even saying opponent,” Mandarini said on The Codcast before correcting himself to say “person at the other side of the table.”
Mandarini, whose full name is Louis Mandarini III, grew up on the North Shore, with a father, Lou Mandarini Jr., deeply involved in union politics. For more than 50 years, the elder Mandarini was with Laborers’ Local 22, and he also served as Greater Boston Labor Council president. At September’s Labor Day breakfast, where Wu announced the agreement with the firefighters union, she called the elder Mandarini a “mentor, guide, and trusted adviser” and wished him well in retirement.
The son worked as a reporter before turning to law. His resume includes Boston-based Segal Roitman, which calls itself “New England’s oldest and largest law firm exclusively representing labor unions, employees, and employee benefit funds.” Mandarini went on to become executive director of an organization that handles health insurance, pension, and annuity benefits for construction workers, overseen by both labor unions and management.
On The Codcast, he pointed to Wu as the primary driver of the approach that eschews adversarialism, as well as being clear that she would not sign a contract that did not include reforms. “Sit down, talk about the problems that you have, what you need, what they need, the mutual difficulties that we both have,” he said.
Several hours after the Codcast conversation with Mandarini was recorded, the mayor’s office announced they had come to a tentative four-year agreement with another city union, AFSCME Local 93, which represents roughly 2,000 employees in various City Hall departments. Details were not immediately available before a ratification vote by the union. The news came as Wu walked into the union’s holiday party, held inside their Beacon Hill headquarters last Thursday.
On the changes in the new patrol officers’ union contract, Mandarini said efforts were underway at the federal, state, and city level, through legislation and commissions, allowing City Hall to write reform into the contracts. “There is a climate, a need for police reform and changing the way we do things,” he said.
The contract’s reforms included a list of offenses in which arbitration cannot be used by accused police officers to keep their jobs, the first time such a list has been created. The contract also paves the way for a “stem to stern” overhaul of the private paid “detail” system, a lucrative perk that deploys officers to Red Sox games and concert venues, as well as busy intersections. Roughly 40 percent of details go unfilled because there aren’t enough officers to staff them.
The new system will set up tiers, with the top tier covering events with 5,000 attendees or more and aforementioned intersections, while the second tier covers everything else. The system will be open to municipal police officers (such as City Hall guards), Boston Housing Authority Police, and college and university security officers, a move sought previously by other mayoral administrations.
For a union, work is a tough thing to negotiate away. “‘That is our work and we own it’ crashed into the reality of where we are in the city of Boston” and the unfilled slots that went empty, Mandarini said.
As for the list of offenses where arbitration is now off the table, it includes serious crimes like armed robbery and child rape, but not domestic violence, something several city councilors noted even as they voted to approve the BPPA contract earlier this month. “I think it’s 100 percent our intention to grow that list” in future negotiations, Mandarini said. “That list is not the list that says everything else is OK. That’s the list we were able to reach through collective bargaining.”
“But that is a pretty robust start to a situation where there were no limitations whatsoever prior to the time we started,” he added.