In director Frank Capra's unforgettable film, It's A Wonderful Life, the one truthful observation offered by the story's money-grubbing villain, Henry Potter (masterfully played by Lionel Barrymore), to the earnest, hard-working George Bailey (portrayed by Jimmy Stewart in a role that would make Stewart an American icon) is contained in the following exchange where Potter attempts to trick Bailey into coming over to his side:

Potter: "You have beaten me, George, and as anyone in this county can tell you, that takes some doing. Take during the Depression, for instance. You and I were the only ones that kept our heads. You saved the Building and Loan, I saved all the rest."

Bailey: "Yeah, well most people say you stole all the rest."

Potter: "The envious ones say that, George, the suckers."

That exchange - particular Potter's correct observation that Bailey "kept his head" during the Great Depression - has been in my own head over the past several weeks as we confront the worst economic crisis to face the country since the Depression. And predictably, the current economic debacle has been accompanied by the efforts of our own present-day versions of Potter to tempt the Baileys of the world into capitulating. Here it is worth remembering that people sometimes make the wrong economic decision less out of fear of genuine financial undoing than from fear of being tagged a "sucker."

Our challenge is to recognize the current crisis for what it is - a severe economic downturn, occasioned by the subprime mortgage fiasco, with profound consequences for credit and spending in the larger, global economy - without losing our heads. For police labor, this means casting a dispassionate, objective eye over a public agency's true financial condition and then stacking up that condition against the reality of the comparable market for police wages. This, of course, means neither overreaching nor under reaching but rather simply doing our best to ensure that wages and benefits are equitable. Indeed, this is always the task - in good times and in bad.

One thing the public understands is equity, fairness. Hew to the side of fairness and you cannot fail. Exploit another's weakness or take advantage of a singular event in economic history to drive another down, and history will expose you as the bully you in fact are. Just as the public values fairness, so too does the public abhor a bully.

In San Jose, mediation failed to resolve the impasse in contract negotiations largely because of the City's reliance on the bad economy to support its steadfast refusal to afford police officers any retirement enhancement. Thus, the SJPOA is now preparing for binding interest arbitration. In San Francisco, the SFPOA was fortunate to have secured its MOU last year before the downturn, but an unabated economic crisis carries with it the potential to pose challenges which all police agencies may have to face in the coming years.

Again, our mission, as the standard bearers for police labor in Northern California, is to "keep our heads" - to remain steadfast during a time of severe economic uncertainty. And we should not rule out the possibility that a silver lining may as yet be revealed behind the presently dark economic clouds.

American cinema's iconographic portrait of the triumph of workingman George Bailey in the midst of the Great Depression may ring true for so many Americans partly because of its resonance with historical reality. During the bleakest period of the 1930s, labor witnessed not its demise from the pages of history but, instead, the single greatest triumph of the workingman in the saga of American law: the enshrinement of labor's ideals in the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which gave unions the right to exist, organize workers and bargain collectively, thereby setting the stage for the legislation of the 1960s that would, in turn, give public employee unions like our own SFPOA and SJPOA the right to exist in the first place.

"Roll the Union On . . ."