Yesterday’s vote by the delegates of the United Federation of Teachers authorizing a resolution to strike makes this a timely moment to look back on the Taylor Law. The Public Employees Fair Employment Act (Section 14 of the New York State Civil Service Law), as the Taylor Law is formally known, was passed in 1967 with the backing of Governor Rockefeller. The legislation followed the New Year’s Day transit workers strike of 1966, which shut down New York City for 12 days, costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars.

The law has been aptly described as giving state employees the right to bargain collectively in return for taking away the right to strike. In fact, it had never been legal for state employees to strike, but earlier laws were so draconian that they were rarely enforced. They did little to discourage strikes. The Taylor Law, on the other hand, works to balance the need of the state to ensure that it can provide its citizens with police officers, firemen, teachers, and other state workers, with the union’s right to organize and bargain collectively.

In the private sector, a company could summarily fire workers or cut their pay once the workers’ contracts expired, but under the 1982 Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law, state employees’ contractual rights are extended until a new contract is reached. In exchange for this, they are precluded from going on strike or engaging in work slowdowns. The UFT’s own web site notes that a strike would remove the Triborough Amendment’s protections, and annul the teachers’ holdover contract.

President Weingarten of the UFT has announced that “We’re prepared to strike. We’re prepared to do what we need to do to get the respect of the city.” But Mayor Bloomberg is hardly to blame for the delay under his predecessor, and he has already reached an agreement in principle with the union, under which teachers would work an extra 20 minutes a day in exchange for a 15% raise. We’d be surprised if most New Yorkers understood the logic of these raises, considering the city’s financial straits.

The mayor’s office is projecting the city will have a $5 billion deficit next year, and some of the teachers’ pay for next year would be financed with a one time infusion of about $400 million in state aid, which the city would be compelled to pay in the future. One of the things to remember at the moment is that the teachers have been benefitting for years from the Taylor Law their delegates have just voted to authorize them to break.