Conspiracy Time

Sometimes, something catches your eye, rings a bell, nudges your memory or just makes you go, "Hmmmm." This is one of those times.

We were doing a bit of light reading with the Arbitrator's decision and we ran across this paragraph at the bottom of page 8. It's a quote by Arbitrator Benn regarding a previous decision he handed down in 2009, specifically in the case of County of Boone and Boone County Sheriff and Illinois Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council. It states the following:

• ... With an economy in free-fall, unemployment marching steadily upward, credit markets frozen, businesses laying off or closing, revenue streams diminishing, government intervention programs of massive proportions seeking to prevent further harm and not knowing whether, when or to what degree those programs will succeed in stopping the
  blood-letting, how am I as an interest arbitrator rationally supposed to set the economic terms of a multi-year collective bargaining agreement which the parties unsuccessfully attempted to reach before the economy crashed ...?

That would appear to convey the arbitrator's reluctance to lock in future economic terms (read "pay raises") when he cannot see where the economy is headed and what the effect will be of certain actions taken. The date on this decision is listed as 23 March 2009.

23 March 2009. Hmmmm. This means something. Ding-a-ling.

Time for a Google Search. Let's type in "Daley pulls raise offer" and see what happens.

Top search result yields this:

• March 21, 2009

  
  
  BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter/fspielman@suntimes.com

  With tax revenues plummeting, the Daley administration has pulled off the table an offer to raise the salaries of Chicago Police officers by 16.1 percent over five years, according to City Hall sources.

  The decision to withdraw a contract offer the Fraternal Order of Police deemed inadequate to begin with could further depress police morale, which is already so low the union took a no-confidence vote on Police Supt. Jody Weis.

  It also could prompt the FOP to pull the trigger on arbitration, a potentially risky move for both sides.

Ah yes, we remember that day well...wait a minute. What's that date?

21 March 2009.

So Shortshanks pulls the raise offer off the table two days before the future arbitrator writes in his decision that...

• ...how am I as an interest arbitrator rationally supposed to set the economic terms of a multi-year collective bargaining agreement which the parties unsuccessfully attempted to reach before the economy crashed ...?

Wow. Talk about your odd coincidences. It's almost as if Shortshanks knew that if he played his cards right, his negotiating team could get an arbitrator who didn't like to predict the future and could therefore be assumed to err on the low end of economic terms. Not just any old arbitrator, but the exact same arbitrator that had granted the FOP a pretty fair win in the last contract. Why wouldn't the City have struck him in the first round of arbitrator choices knowing his history?

Maybe Shortshanks has a time machine.

Or a source that had access to a decision that came out two days later and the City decided it would be worth the risk to pull the 16.1% offer before it had a chance to be countered? Or worse, accepted?

Discuss among yourselves. It certainly makes us wonder, but then again, who are we?