ALBANY - Powerful guys making six-figure salaries are in a titanic contest in Albany, and the pawns they risk are as many as 8,700 unionized workers including laborers, clerks and group home counselors making less than $30,000 a year.

It's Albany's inevitable clash. Powerful public worker unions that rose to great influence in New York state government through political contributions and huge memberships against politicians who fed that growth but now are forced to slash years of overspending in a historic fiscal crisis.

It's a conflict neither Gov. David Paterson nor union leaders can afford to lose.

Paterson, making $179,900 a year, is following through with his months-old threat to enact rare state layoffs - up to 8,700 of them - in the state's unionized work force by July. He said he is left with no choice after union bosses refused to agree to relatively modest contract concessions including foregoing 3-percent raises this year.

As for Paterson, he gave up 10 percent of his salary and eliminated the 3-percent raises to his management team. In exchange, he promised no layoffs for managers in a decision that also saved enough to bring down the number of potential rank-and-file layoffs by 200.

Last week, The Associated Press revealed Paterson had floated an offer to the unions that would allow for half the raises this year and next while crediting the full 3-percent and 4-percent raises for pension purposes and guaranteeing no layoffs for two years.

Union bosses, including CSEA President Danny Donohue who makes a base pay of $168,604, and PEF President Ken Brynien, who makes a base pay of $137,622, responded with scathing press conferences. They called the governor's bluff, with Donohue even questioning whether Paterson was on bad drugs or needed a psychiatrist.

“It's not about substance,” CSEA spokesman Stephen Madarasz said in an interview. “We can't open the contract. If we open one contract, what's to stop every other employer to say, ‘We want to reopen the contract?' You set a precedent. You can never again do good-faith bargaining.”

He wouldn't say if rank-and-file members knew of this week's offer, calling it moot because the membership staunchly supports its leaders and is galvanized against Paterson.

“If all he has to say is we have to give him something back, we have nothing to talk about,” Madarasz said. “They simply, for political purposes, want to inflict pain on the union.”

He's got a point. A hard-fought contract benefit compromised is often a benefit lost forever. And tough talk is usually good politics for governors.

It worked well for Paterson last summer and fall as he warned about the growing fiscal crisis and the need to cut spending, even though few listened.

“This crisis is as undeniable as it is dangerous,” Paterson said in a July 31 speech to the National Press Club. “States are going to have to practice the fiscal discipline and make the difficult decisions that we've eschewed for decade after decade,” the Democrat said. “The time for action is now.”

Back then, he got cheers.

Today, as he's been trying to turn rhetoric into action as well as because of his own notable political missteps, Paterson is tanking in the polls. Helping to push Paterson down were repeated TV, radio and print ads by public employee unions opposing his funding cuts that affect members' jobs. All painted Paterson as uncaring and bumbling, the latest and most successful media blitz by public worker unions that have vexed governors for 30 years.

Last week's Quinnipiac University poll found 65 percent of New Yorkers felt Paterson and the Legislature ultimately lacked the political courage to make those tough decisions in the massive state budget. That 2009-10 budget, adopted late on April 3, included an 8.7 percent increase in spending after many of Paterson's cuts were rolled back in agreements with lawmakers.

As for Paterson, Quinnipiac found voters, by a 60 percent to 28 percent margin, disapproved of the job he is doing, the lowest ever for a New York governor. Sixty-three percent said he doesn't deserve to be elected in 2010.

In this latest fiscal fight, neither Paterson nor the union leaders are budging, as thousands of union families statewide nervously wait.

Paterson, a baseball fan since he was a kid, sees a lesson in the famous double-play combination of Tinkers to Evers to Chance that helped the Chicago Cubs win the 1908 World Series even though the stars were no longer speaking to each other over a disagreement about cab fare.

“That is something that Americans should understand,” Paterson says, “We don't always have to like each other. We don't always have to agree with each other. We don't even always have to speak to each other. But if we work together, we can find some ways out of the economy's woes and into prosperity in a lot sooner period than we might have thought.”

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Michael Gormley is the Albany, N.Y., Capitol editor for The Associated Press. He can be reached by e-mail at mgormley(at)ap.org.

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