The Last Union Town

So Nutter’s position is somewhat delicate: He has the freedom to push against the unions, except that he needs to maintain cordial relations with the municipal unions. But then again, many of the municipal union members are black. So the current situation — the push to bring racial balance to the unions — offered the one brilliant situation in which he could tiptoe between the fault lines unharmed.

He lobbied hard, pulling and pushing against what he called an “apartheid” on Philadelphia job sites, which are full of people who don’t live in the city. “I think finally many citizens, black and white, have said enough is enough,” he says. “We’ve got an excessive crime rate going on in this city, with all this work taking place and people in Philadelphia not having those opportunities.”

Union leaders say Nutter is playing the proverbial race card, aligning himself with black power brokers against the unions, and employing inflammatory language like “apartheid” as a political weapon. It’s a tactic he’s used before, they say: Just look how he maneuvered his way to the top spot at the Convention Center, when John Street was mayor. “I don’t like Nutter,” Gillespie says. “I don’t like him for what he did to Bernie Watson and John Street over at the Convention Center.”

That’s where this story, like all such stories about Philadelphia, must pass through a maze of political allegiance and intrigues. Here’s the union leaders’ version of what happened in 2002: John Street was on the verge of a deal with the city’s unions to do work at the Convention Center, except for the lone-holdout carpenters union. Nutter was a councilman at the time. He undercut Street and orchestrated a coup at the Convention Center by aligning himself with Republicans and Sam Katz, Street’s opponent in the upcoming mayoral election. The coup pushed out previous chairman Bernie Watson, in part on the premise that the Convention Center needed a black leader, which seemed absurd since it had had one: Bernie Watson. Nutter presented himself as a suitable replacement, and so — by playing the factions against each other, and capitalizing on race — he emerged as chairman of the Convention Center, overseeing the most ambitious project in the state.

Problem is, that’s not what happened, according to the true mastermind of the deal: Sam Katz. “Bernie Watson was already retired in Florida,” he says. “And Michael Nutter had nothing to do with making Michael Nutter head of the Convention Center. He didn’t even ask for the job. I approached him about it and pushed for his appointment because, frankly, I thought it would help my mayoral campaign. It would show that I, a Republican candidate, could work with minorities and Democrats. To say that he somehow orchestrated a takeover is just nonsense.”

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