Taking a Back Seat

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The New York Sun

Now that the 2006 legislative session is almost over, state lawmakers will soon be returning to their districts to raise money and hit the campaign trail with an eye toward November’s election.

But even though it’ll be a few more months before voters head to the polls, it appears there’s a huge winner already: the public employee unions of New York State.

In the closing days of this year’s session, organized labor made out like a spoiled child at Christmas, as lawmakers eager to please New York’s politically powerful unions passed a series of bills granting public employees more negotiating muscle and enhanced job protection.

Without so much as a single public hearing or a word of debate on the floor, Senate and Assembly lawmakers passed a bill that significantly strengthens the bargaining leverage of public employee unions. It now goes to Governor Pataki – who should kill it without hesitation.

The bill would award union workers a 1% raise if the state Public Employment Relations Board determines – based on a union filing – that an employer has “failed to negotiate in good faith.” This will encourage unions to make demands so extreme that public-sector managers refuse to negotiate them. Unions would then have grounds to seek a PERB ruling against the employer – with the prospect of an automatic pay hike.

The bill’s sponsors – State Senator Joseph Robach, a Republican of Rochester, and Assemblyman Peter Abbate, a Democrat of Brooklyn – said the legislation was necessary because union workers have virtually no ability to force their employers to the bargaining table. They also maintain that not only would the bill put pressure on public employers, it would also bring some relief to employees.

What the sponsors fail to mention is that public employee unions in New York already enjoy substantial leverage in contract talks under the Taylor Law. In fact, Mr. Robach and Mr. Abbate could cite no evidence to demonstrate that local governments and school districts are refusing to negotiate with their unions.

Giving unions new leverage in the form of a “failure to negotiate” penalty would make New York an outlier among states. As the New York Conference of Mayors points out in its memo of opposition, such a penalty is not found in the National Labor Relations Act, which was a model for the state’s Taylor Law.

After last December’s New York City transit worker strike, one might think lawmakers would hardly be so willing to bend over backwards for the state’s unions. Yet the PERB bill passed the GOP-controlled Senate 61-0 and the Democratic-dominated Assembly 133 to 1.

Union power also would be strengthened by another end-of-session bill mandating that all public-employee disciplinary proceedings be subject to collective bargaining – even in cities that set disciplinary standards through local laws. The legislation overturns a recent Court of Appeals ruling affirming the ability of elected officials to control the disciplinary process for uniformed employees.

The Bloomberg administration strongly opposed the bill, saying it would jeopardize the ability of the city police and fire commissioners to ensure the integrity of their departments.

“The quasi-military order and accountability necessary for public safety in the Fire and Police Departments, especially in times such as these that call for heightened security and emergency response capability, should not be placed on the ‘bargaining table’ to be traded away or even removed from the control of the affected commissioners,” said the city’s legislative memo in opposition to the bill.

Unfortunately, these arguments fell on deaf ears in the Legislature. Like the PERB “failure to negotiate” penalty measure, the bill to force collective bargaining of disciplinary standards for cops and firefighters was approved unanimously in the State Senate and with one negative vote in the Assembly. It, too, is now headed for the governor’s desk.

In yet another gift to public employee unions, lawmakers were also close to agreeing on a bill under which a strike by government workers that takes place more than a year after the expiration of a collective bargaining agreement “shall be presumed to have been caused by acts of extreme provocation.” If signed into law, the bill would provide strong grounds for unions to avoid the Taylor Law’s strike penalties, further weakening the existing anti-walkout provision.

When lawmakers gathered in Albany back in January for the start of this year’s session, they spoke of reform and how 2006 would not be business as usual.

But as is always the case, actions speak louder than words. And as the Legislature’s actions of the last few weeks indicate, reform once again took a back seat to political expediency while the state’s unions cashed in at the expense of taxpayers.

Mr. Smith is director of programs and communications for the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy (www.empirecenter.org).


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