Symposium to consider updating Taylor Law BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Press
How would you like to work in a job where your pay could rise even if your contract expired, your pension really is guaranteed, and your boss can’t — or may not even want to — do anything about it? For nearly 1.3 million New Yorkers who work in local and state government and in public schools, that’s part of life under the landmark Taylor Law that protects the public from shutdown of public service by strikes. Critics contend the collective bargaining law has also eliminated much of the motivation to strike by raising salaries and benefits with little regard for taxpayers. Management’s role is performed by governments — which is often heavily lobbied by labor. For example, five of the top 10 lobbying clients seeking to influence decisions in Albany in 2006 were unions, including two teachers unions that spent a total of $1.7 million and two public worker unions that spent $1.3 million in that election year. The Civil Service Employees Association and its locals also gave nearly $100,000 to local and state political campaigns that year, while New York State United Teachers gave $245,000, according to state records. This week, the Taylor Law is getting a rare public analysis in Albany. Economists, labor leaders and political scientists will consider whether a law that was prompted by crippling garbage, transit and teacher strikes from Buffalo to New York City after World War II and into the 1960s should be changed for the 21st century. “We look it as being a very fine example of public policy and crafted at a time of tremendous upheaval in labor and in society in general,” said Stephen Madarasz, spokesman for the CSEA. The CSEA is the largest state employee union in New York and also represents local government and school workers. New Yorkers needed such a law after the public services workers resorted to their only formidable recourse at the time and called strikes, which debilitated New York City four decades ago. Public workers sought collective bargaining rights to negotiate the fair pay, job protection and benefits their private sector colleagues got. The law created penalties for public unions and their members for strikes, including possible jail time, fines and a penalty of losing two days’ pay for every day spent on strike. It was used against New York City transit workers and their union leaders following a 2005 strike around Christmas. Madarasz said many of the critics of the Taylor Law see that public employees now have more protections and rights than private sector workers who increasingly face layoffs, outsourcing of labor and raids on pension funds. “If the private sector is being reckless in how they deal with employees, why should the public sector follow suit?” Madarasz said. “The Taylor Law in many ways is a relic of a bygone time,” countered E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy. The center is part of the conservative Manhattan Institute and is sponsoring today’s symposium at the Albany Institute of History and Art. McMahon said although the Taylor Law was promoted as a way to end strikes, public employee strikes flourished after the law was passed through the 1970s, especially by teachers’ unions. “The more rights they received, the more strikes there were … and they worked,” Mc-Mahon said. Although government offi cials first bargain with unions, they have to balance labor peace and perhaps their own political support against driving a hard deal, McMahon said. Politicians often avoid the tough spot by allowing the talks to go to arbitrator. “The word missing in all of this is ‘taxpayer,’ ” he said. “It seems like we’re working for them.” McMahon said before the Taylor Law, New York’s tax burden was 9 percent above the national average. Now, it’s 35 percent above the national average and New Yorkers pay the highest local and state taxes in the country. Although many factors were in play during that time, McMahon said the rising cost of public worker contracts was a driving force behind the tax increases. McMahon and Madarasz said they know many New Yorkers are irked by the perks. For example, while private sector employees worry about whether their pension will be around when they retire, public pensions are guaranteed by the state constitution. Teachers, except for the most senior, get automatic “step” raises each year that can be 4 percent bumps for longevity or for achieving academic and professional requirements. McMahon notes that’s not mentioned on union lawn signs that say teachers are working without a contract, or when school boards approve contract raises.
As the article states the public employees are greedy and still strike for more money even thought the poor taxpayer can't afford the taxes that they're paying now.
Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE Taylor Law: The ladling of the gravy Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
I hied myself over to Albany the other day for a little forum on the Taylor Law, which is the state law that empowers public employee unions, and the best I could come away with was a remark by Fran Turner, lobbyist for the Civil Service Employees Association: “Don’t forget, legislators are also public employees in the pension system; that helps bring along our cause.” She might have added that giving legislators a couple million dollars a year for their reelection campaigns also helps bring along the cause, but still, I thought she had an insight: The people who dependably pass the laws, session after session, to sweeten the pension benefits of all manner of public employees are themselves public employees in the state pension system. Of course! was my thought. It’s one of the main reasons why public employee unions have been able to take effective control of state and local governments. Everyone is basically on the same side. The state legislators are public employees with juicy benefits of their own, and so are mayors and police chiefs and town board members and school superintendents, and so on. And so is the governor. When the pay and benefits of one of those parties go up, everyone’s tend to go up. Sometimes, in local government, they are explicitly tied together: Administrators get whatever the unionized employees get. So when it comes time to negotiate, who is there to argue that the unionized employees get too much? Well, there’s E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, the think tank that sponsored the Albany forum and used it as a vehicle for releasing a study on the onerous effects of the public-employee gravy train, but he’s on the sidelines. He’s not at the table any more than I am, and he has no vote in the Legislature. Not that one vote would make any difference anyway. The gravy bills that the unions submit to the Legislature get passed unanimously or nearly unanimously every time, without exception, which was made amusingly clear in this little forum when the moderator asked Ms. Turner of CSEA what bills the Legislature had passed this session that CSEA had opposed and she couldn’t think of any off the top of her head. I guess not. The day the Legislature passes a bill that is opposed by CSEA or NYSUT or PEF or the PBAs will be a day that peach fuzz grows on bowling balls. Why, in the past couple of sessions our state legislators passed a bill to penalize their own taxpaying constituents for tough bargaining with the unions by granting immediate 1 percent raises for what they called “bad faith,” going up another half percent every three months. They passed a bill to block the new public safety commissioner of Schenectady from disciplining his police officers (because the police unions didn’t want such a thing). They passed a bill letting local governments require construction contractors to have union-type apprentice programs, which many local governments promptly did. And when non-union contractors started to comply, the governor stopped all recognition of new apprentice programs. The Assembly passed a bill (the Senate is waiting) to let schools avoid onerous requirements for separate construction contracts if only they will turn over construction jobs to the trade unions. Some of these actions might sound a little obscure, but they are all straight giveaways to the unions, both public employee unions and private construction unions. They are passed without debate and with little or no dissent, regardless of party affiliation. Occasionally a governor vetoes the more egregious of the bills. “The unions run the Legislature,” a legislative aide told me recently, not that I needed to be told. And yes, the juicy benefits and generous pay that these government employees of ours enjoy, as well as the large number of the employees, have some bearing on New York being the highest taxed state in the nation, which you might want to keep in mind the next time you hear your local senator or assemblyman decrying high taxes and promising relief. You might want to ask him if he plans to vote against the next union-sponsored bill giving still sweeter benefits. Fat chance! I don’t have space for the particulars about all the costs ultimately generated by the Taylor Law, but you can find them online at empirecenter.org, which is the Web site of McMahon’s think tank, a subsidiary of the Manhattan Institute. Anyway, I enjoyed the forum. I enjoyed hearing Dick Iannuzzi, president of NYSUT, the teachers’ union, say, “The growth of public employment … is a good thing,” and I enjoyed hearing him argue that since both labor and management complain about the Taylor Law it must be fair. It was a bit genteel for my coarse Schenectady tastes, but I take things as they come.
Think tank's Taylor Law claims are twisted First published: Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Manhattan Institute is at it again ("Report says Taylor Law drives up tax burden," Oct. 16). It is hard to believe that this organization passes for a "think" tank. It has ideologues who will twist the data until it shows what they want it to show. The interesting thing is that even with their twisting they couldn't get the results they wanted. For instance, the Manhattan Institute wants to take salaries earned by employees in the finance and insurance industries out of their calculations, because they make too much money and hurt their comparison. They leave in any minimum wage earners though, because they help their numbers. Even with this ruse, the private sector salaries and the public sector salaries are virtually equal.
The Taylor Law has not resulted in the costly raids on public coffers to fund extravagant pay and benefits for public employees that the institute contends. In fact, most members of my union, the New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF), make less than their private sector counterparts.
The members represented by PEF -- publicly employed physicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, computer analysts, engineers and hundreds of other job titles -- earn far less than those working in private industry. And the closer you get to New York City, the greater the wage disparity becomes.
The Taylor Law has not strengthened labor as the Manhattan Institute contends. It has weakened it by removing the strongest weapon in any union's arsenal to achieve greater wages -- the ability to strike. As a result, the current environment for employee contract negotiation strongly favors management.
The real issue here is not how well public sector employees are paid and what benefits they have. The real issue is how do we get more good paying private sector jobs with benefits back into New York, and how do we organize those nonunion workers who are already here so they too can enjoy a living wage and benefits.
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