The Empire State was a scene of growing public-sector labor unrest in the mid 1960s. Government employees from Long Island to Buffalo were lobbying for the same organizational and collective bargaining rights as private-sector workers. Municipal unions in New York City had been negotiating contracts since the late 1950s, yet essential city services had been repeatedly interrupted by strikes or threats of strikes-culminating in a disastrous walkout by transit workers in January 1966.
From this atmosphere of recurring crisis would arise a trailblazing new statute establishing the ground rules for unions to organize public employees and collectively bargain contracts with New York’s counties, cities, towns, villages, school districts, public authorities and special districts.
The Taylor Law was designed to create a comprehensive framework for orderly resolution of labor-management disputes in state and local government. After a rocky start, it succeeded. Strikes by public employees in New York are now rare. The vast majority of contract negotiations are settled without resort to third-party intervention.
But New Yorkers have paid a steep price for labor peace. Over the past 40 years, the number of state and local government jobs has grown at more than twice the rate of private-sector employment in New York, and the average pay of state and local government workers is higher than that of private-sector workers in most regions of New York.
Personnel costs are a major element in what Governor Eliot Spitzer has described as a “perfect storm of unaffordability” threatening the state’s future. Employee salaries and benefits-which account for 71 percent of municipal government operating expenses and fully three-quarters of school district expenditures across New York-are a key ingredient in the nation’s heaviest state and local tax burden. Efforts to reduce this burden are hampered by aspects of the Taylor Law that have evolved to the distinct disadvantage of management.
Informed by the perspective of an experienced labor negotiator, this paper reviews the background of the Taylor Law and highlights Taylor Law provisions and precedents in need of reform. These include:
The 40th anniversary of the Taylor Law also is an appropriate time for state officials to strongly reaffirm their commitment to the law’s prohibition on strikes by public employees. Any weakening of the law’s penalty provisions for unions and employees who participate in illegal strikes clearly would be against the public interest.
This paper is organized into three sections. The first reviews the background and development of the Taylor Law. The second explains how subsequent amendments and PERB rulings have limited management options. The third recommends needed reforms to better balance the playing field between the legitimate interests of government employees and broad public interest. Interspersed throughout are narrative exhibits and charts illustrating the cost and consequences of the Taylor Law.
Government with a Union Label
The nearly 2 million New Yorkers who are union members comprise 24 percent of the state’s workforce-the highest rate of unionization in the country, double the average for all states, although New York has tracked the national decline in union membership over the past 35 years.
Fully half of all union members in New York State work in the public sector. Although most states allow at least some government workers to unionize and collectively bargain, New York has the most heavily unionized public-sector workforce of any state. At least 69 percent of New York government workers-including a small component of federal employees-are union members, compared to a national average of 36 percent.
These estimates probably understate the true extent of unionization in New York’s state and local governments and school districts, where supervisors (such as principals, police sergeants and maintenance foremen) as well as line workers commonly are unionized. at least one out of every eight workers in the empire State is a unionized government employee; in the rest of the country, the ratio is roughly one out of 19.
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