Letters to the Editor
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
‘Police Union Head & OCB’
Your article on the City Council Committee hearing on the Taylor Law contained a factual error [“Police Union Head Moves To Quash Office of Collective Bargaining,” March 31-April 2]. I never supported the idea of disbanding the city’s Office of Collective Bargaining, as suggested by Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. In fact, I never talked about OCB, as it wasn’t the subject of the hearing.
As chair of the Municipal Labor Committee, I have many dealings with the OCB and find the agency to be fair and reasonable. Many of my colleagues would say the same.
The OCB discussion misses the point: The Taylor Law is stacked against municipal workers and needs to be reformed. That was clear from both my and Mr. Lynch’s testimony.
I made two common sense proposals to fix the Taylor Law. First, to penalize any party that stalls the bargaining. There should be real deadlines in the law and they should be enforced. Real deadlines prompt parties to roll up their sleeves and engage in the give and take of good faith bargaining.
Second, pattern bargaining should not be allowed to trump all other bargaining criteria. If there had to be one controlling factor, it should be a prescription that employees are entitled to – annual cost of living increases. If a union wants more, or the city thinks it should be lower, they would have to make that case.
There is no question the Taylor Law must be fixed, but the answer is to find ways to instill fairness into what has become a totally unfair law.
RANDI WEINGARTEN
President, United Federation of Teachers
Chair, Municipal Labor Committee Manhattan
‘Civil and Dignified’
The burdens we face with 11 million illegals in the United States are of our own making [“Civil and Dignified,” Editorial, March 28, 2006].
If we let them, our self-procuring politicians will turn law and order into a human rights bleeding hearts concern.
Those who oppose amnesty gussied up into some thing else are accused of mean spiritedness and of no longer being true to this country’s origin or history as symbolized in the welcoming torch held aloft by the Statue of Liberty.
It’s also pure folly to try to score points by pointing to the enriching effect that every previous wave of immigrants has had on this country’s culture and well-being or to expect from people of good will that the current wave would have any less felicitous an effect. But all this is beside the point.
Our own more recent or more distant forebears didn’t crash the gates or laws of this county in order to avail themselves of its glories, and of those, the greatest, without which all others would be null and void, is the rule of law. When the law can be violated at will with impunity, who will respect it?
JULIUS GORDON
Douglaston, N.Y.
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