Portside

Last month, New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney was at Rutgers University’s main campus in New Brunswick. He was there to hold a town hall meeting to discuss “The Path to Progress,” an ambitious cost-cutting plan that would seek to right New Jersey’s perilous finances by cutting the state’s generous public worker pension and health benefits. Sweeney talked up his own union membership to the audience.

“Yeah, guess what? I work for a union, and I’m very proud of it,” Sweeney said. “Very proud!”

Then he got up and left the stage, drowned out by a mostly hostile audience that was largely made up of union members. They booed. They called him a “union fraud.” And they hid a speaker under the stage that took the panel assembled onstage by surprise when it started blasting out the 80’s hair metal anthem, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” 

It was the latest incident in the battle between the unions and Sweeney, their longtime foe and chief antagonist since Republican Gov. Chris Christie left Trenton in 2017.

Sweeney’s position on public worker benefits puts him at odds with their powerful unions, who wield a great degree of sway in New Jersey's elections. But it also puts him at odds with Christie’s successor, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who has received a great degree of support from the public unions since he launched his gubernatorial campaign in 2016. Instead, Murphy wants to right the state’s fiscal ship through raising taxes on millionaires. 

Sweeney had been a vocal supporter of the tax during the Christie administration. But after the Republican Congress’s tax overhaul in 2017, Sweeney said he changed his mind because the legislation’s cap on state and local taxes effectively raised taxes on New Jersey's wealthiest residents, albeit on the federal level. 

But Sweeney didn’t start out as a defender of millionaires. He grew up immersed in the construction business and trade unionism; his father headed Ironworkers Local 399 in South Jersey for 25 years. Sweeney himself served as the local’s business representative. He now holds positions with the regional and national ironworkers unions, earning $257,000 a year, in addition to his $65,000 legislative salary. 

While it’s been decades since Sweeney worked on a construction project, he’ll be the first to bring up his union membership, and he regularly cites the experience as evidence that he understands the needs of working people. 

“I’m a union ironworker. I know what it’s like to be unemployed” Sweeney said during a 2012 speech. “I sit in a union hall every morning and I see friends that I've worked with for 30 years -- grown men, tough guys, really brave, tough, honest, hard-working people, tears in their eyes. Their marriage has been destroyed, because of the economy.”

Sweeney was elected to the state Senate in 2001 and quickly started sponsoring pro-union legislation. One bill allowed state and local governments to negotiate “project labor agreements,” which require publicly funded construction projects to utilize a unionized workforce. 

Hetty Rosenstein is the New Jersey director of the Communication Workers of America, the state’s largest public worker union. She says that, at first, Sweeney seemed like he was in labor’s corner.

“He was one of the early labor candidates, and the view was that we were going to have a union member in the legislature,” Rosenstein said. “If you go back long enough, far enough, I think people liked him a lot.”

Then, in 2006, Sweeney unexpectedly announced a cost-saving plan, saying he wanted state workers to give up a scheduled pay raise and accept cuts in their pensions and vacation time. Leaders of the public workers unions were incensed. A CWA official called it an “outrageous” plan from “a guy who purports to be a friend of working people.” 

Former Gov. Jon Corzine didn’t endorse the proposal, preferring a sales tax hike to help balance the budget. But public sentiment toward government workers had shifted, and the debate over how to fix the state’s perennial fiscal problems — whether to reduce spending on public employees, or to raise taxes — continued to rage. 

Building trades workers, like electricians and plumbers (and yes, ironworkers), were among those upset about New Jersey’s high taxes, and they began complaining to their union leaders. Sweeney did not respond to a request to be interviewed. But Susan Schurman, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University and a former official with the AFL-CIO, said he could have been influenced by those complaints from the trade unions.

“This got incredibly intensified after the start of the Great Recession because…[for] the building trades, construction diminished, and people were losing their jobs,” Schurman said. “In the private sector, members of unions were getting hit hard, and they became resentful that public-sector workers didn't seem to be.”

When Sweeney became Senate President in 2010, he kept pressing for public employee concessions, backed by the vocal support of building trades union leaders. It culminated in landmark legislation signed by Christie in 2011 that required half a million state workers to pay more toward their health and pension benefits. At the signing ceremony, the Republican governor — who rose to fame by publicly sparring with union members — stood next to Sweeney and showered him with praise.

“We would not be here if it wasn’t for the five years of commitment that Steve Sweeney has put into this effort,” Christie said. “I am, in a manner of speaking, a Johnny-come-lately to this fight, compared to the Senate president.”

Sweeney argues the that benefit cuts are needed in order to protect New Jersey’s shaky finances and overburdened taxpayers. But critics note that he has supported spending more state money when it will help construction workers in the private-sector building and construction trades unions, and the developers who give them work. 

An example is the Economic Development Authority’s controversial multi-billion dollar tax incentive program, which Sweeney helped craft in 2013. One EDA program gives big tax breaks to companies that build facilities in Camden. Murphy has been an outspoken critic of the program, and a state investigation has uncovered possible mismanagement and fraud.  A WNYC/ProPublica investigation found that at least $1.1 billion of those tax breaks are going to companies associated with Democratic power broker George Norcross. Norcross, the son of another South Jersey labor leader, is a childhood friend of Sweeney’s, who is widely seen as his political patron. 

Sweeney told the business publication ROI-NJ that the tax credits are necessary because they’re one of the few sources of construction jobs in the state. But Sweeney’s detractors in the public-sector unions say his defense of the program, along with his opposition to the millionaires tax, shows he’s focused on pleasing Norcross and the South Jersey political boss’s millionaire friends.

Sweeney has at times tried to make amends with the state employee unions. In 2015 he promised to push for a constitutional amendment requiring the state to make its full annual contributions to public worker pension plans. But he ultimately backtracked and withdrew his support.

“This is the part that was just so heartbreaking to me: that you just can't believe anything he says — that it doesn't really matter how sincere he is or what he is telling you or what he promises,” Rosenstein said. “He has no problem doing a 180-degree turn and then saying, ‘Yeah, but the circumstances have changed and they're your fault.’”

Critics like Rosenstein argue that Sweeney’s shifting positions shows that he’s a political chameleon with few underlying principles, aside from the accumulation of power. But other observers say he may be genuinely reflecting the sentiments of his middle-class, slightly conservative South Jersey constituency. In Gloucester County, where Sweeney lives, Donald Trump narrowly won more votes than Hillary Clinton in 2016, despite Clinton’s 13-point victory statewide.

Schurman said that, in some ways, Sweeney’s much-ballyhooed union affiliation is beside the point.

“Steve Sweeney, and by the way Gov. Murphy as well, are both facing the challenge that every Democrat that gets elected to public office has to anticipate,’ Schurman said. “When there’s some kind of budget shortfall in a collectively bargained state...it's going to put them in conflict with the public sector unions, and in this case, it may be at the urging of the private sector unions.”

Over his decades in public office, Sweeney discovered that cutting state worker benefits could work to his political advantage, and like any successful politician, he’s stuck with what worked. But with the state’s powerful public unions united against him and without a natural ally like Chris Christie as governor, there may be less leeway to enact additional cuts in the future.