Mayor Bloomberg yesterday announced a deal with a union representing the city’s doctors that could increase pressure on the teachers, police, and firefighters to make concessions on productivity in exchange for raises.

Mr. Bloomberg has offered the unions representing the city’s employees a 3% to 4% raise this year, but said any increase above that would have to be paid for with workplace efficiencies. Yesterday, the union representing about 1,250 physicians agreed to a new contract along those lines, giving some doctors more than a 10% raise in exchange for longer work hours.

The Doctors Council, which represents physicians who work for the Health and Hospitals Corporation, the Health Department, and other city agencies, agreed to the bargaining pattern the Bloomberg administration set earlier this year with one of the city’s largest unions, District Council 37, which represents most of the city’s administrative staff. The DC 37 workers gave up compensation time and some vacation days to get more money.

“This is a win-win, producing higher salaries and flexibility in managing the HHC workforce,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters in the Blue Room yesterday.

“All the agreements we have made, and can make, are already in the budget. If a union wants to come up with more, with productivity savings, they can do that. When it comes to labor contracts, I would like very much to pay our municipal workforce more, but if we are going to do that, we have to generate the savings in real hard cash.”

The Doctors Council union members will receive a $1,000 lump sum cash payment and a 4% pay raise, two increases which Mr. Bloomberg said he had already accounted for in his budget. The increases on top of that were a result of union concessions, the mayor said. On February 1, doctors who work for the HHC will get a 5.79% percent raise, while those employed by the Health Department and other city agencies will receive a 6.2% pay increase in exchange for working an extra 2.5 hours a week.

Those who work in the hospitals will work 40 hours under the agreement while those employed by the city agencies will work 37.5 hours a week. The union also said they would put together a committee to try to wring out another 1% pay increase through productivity enhancements. The contract will expire June 30, 2005.

“We’ve very proud of what we’ve done,” the president of the Doctors Council, Barry Liebowitz, said, adding that he had sent a survey to his membership in July 2003 asking if they would be willing to work more hours in return for a heftier raise. “72 percent said yes, and we created a contract based on productivity of hours to get to where we’ve gone,” he said.

The mayor has forged similar agreements with 12 of the city’s unions and announced yesterday he had also reached an agreement with the union that dispatches calls for fire alarms. The city’s most vocal unions, though – the police, fire, and teachers – have not agreed to similar work rule changes, and those talks are at an impasse.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has made education a key plank in his re-election platform, singled out the teachers for their intransigence yesterday. “So far, the teachers union has not come up with any of the savings to come up with monies to pay them over the pattern or the reforms we think are necessary to improve the school system,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters yesterday.

“Let’s assume the teachers were willing to work an extra period during the current day while they are already in the school,” he suggested yesterday. “They used to work covering for each other, there was a contract change in which they stopped doing that. If they covered for each other, we’d need fewer substitute teachers. That would be a perfect way to generate savings we could share with the union.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s suggestion drew immediate fire from the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. “What he’s really saying is that he thinks our high school teachers – who already have some of the largest class sizes in the state – should work with more than 200 kids a day rather than the 170 they now see,” Ms. Weingarten said. “Teachers in shortage areas now have the option of teaching a sixth period for an extra $9,000 a year. Is the mayor proposing that math and science teachers who now take advantage of this provision get a pay cut?”

Ms. Weingarten told her members earlier this month that the city had walked away from the contract negotiations. “We made a proposal and they never came up with a counterproposal,” she said. The two sides had discussed a 14% pay increase, but they couldn’t agree on the work rule changes that would pay for it.

Mr. Bloomberg has pledged to reform the teachers’ 200-page, $9.5 billion contract, which covers everything from workloads to compensation, assignments, evaluation, and promotion. The contract affects more than 134,000 employees of the Department of Education, about 109,000 of whom are teachers. The teachers have been working without a contract since May 31, 2003. Some education researchers and political leaders say the work rules in the contract make it harder for principals to run good schools.

Once the UFT declares an impasse, the state board looks to determine whether an impasse actually exists. If it decides that there is one, the board appoints a mediator to work with the two parties to reach an agreement. The teachers have already had one meeting with the mediator, union officials said.

If that doesn’t work, the board ap points a three-member fact-finding panel, which assesses the situation and makes recommendations. The results of the panel are not binding on teachers as they are for firefighters and police unions. If the fact-finding panel fails to work out the differences, the union can turn to the courts.

Fact finding is an arcane procedure. Arbiters are appointed by the parties and the discussions typically take place in a law firm’s offices. The city’s labor negotiators are currently working on fact finding for the police. Teachers union officials said they don’t expect to get to that process until the new year.