Talking Taylor Law Changes;

May Conference to Explore Revisions
Talking Taylor Law Changes


The state Public Employment Relations Board will mark the 40th anniversary of the Taylor Law with a statewide conference in Albany this spring.

PATRICK J. LYNCH: Law's been misapplied.

The two-day forum could eventually lead to legislative changes to the law, which governs labor relations between public-employee unions and government in New York State.

Impasse Report

The centerpiece of the symposium will likely be a scholarly review examining the effect of compulsory interest arbitration and other impasse procedures on the bargaining process by Professor Thomas A. Kochan, the co-director of MIT's Workplace Center and Institute for Work and Employment Research.

Mr. Kochan co-authored a report on the topic more than 30 years ago, which led the State Legislature to permanently grant specific law-enforcement groups the right to binding arbitration.

The conference, which will be held at the Desmond Hotel on May 15 and 16, will be the first such gathering in more than 10 years, said PERB chairman Jerome Lefkowitz, who was part of a team that drafted the Taylor Law in 1967.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG: Opposed to any changes.

"I think that it has stood the test of time," he said during a recent phone interview, noting that there have been amendments made over the years to improve the far-reaching measure.

The symposium comes after many city and state public-employee unions have proposed making broad changes to the Taylor Law. They have complained over the past several years that the measure is biased against workers.

Mr. Lefkowitz was one of the three attorneys involved in drafting the Taylor Law, which is named after George W. Taylor, who served as Chairman of Governor Rockefeller's Committee on Public Employee Relations.

Organizing Right

The Taylor Law was one of the first comprehensive public-sector labor laws in the nation. It guarantees covered public employees the right to unionize and the ability to bargain with their employer about wages and work terms.

In return, all public employees are denied the right to strike under any circumstances. Any union that breaks that law is subject to civil and criminal penalties.

'A PLACE WITH LESS FRICTION': Public Employment Relations Board Chairman Jerome Lefkowitz, who helped author the Taylor Law more than 40 years ago, notes that contrary to popular belief, its passage actually was followed by a spurt in strikes by public employees rather than a reduction. Walk-outs diminished, he said, once union leaders realized that the law's guarantee of binding arbitration offered 'a framework where society could go with much less friction' to resolve contract disputes.

"What the Taylor Law did was provide a framework where society could go with much less friction," Mr. Lefkowitz said recently. "It made it a lot easier for the workers, governments, and citizens, to get to the place where things were headed to."

Forum's Speakers

The Taylor Law has been revised many times over the past four decades, but its main conditions and policies have largely remained the same.

The conference will include several scholars who will present papers on various aspects of public-sector labor relations. They include prominent Chicago labor attorney R. Theodore Clark, who will examine alternative statutory systems used in other jurisdictions; and Albany Law School Professor Vincent Bonventre, who will discuss the effect of recent Court of Appeals's decisions on the Taylor Law matters.

GOV. ROCKEFELLER: Driving force behind law.

Many unions contend that the law, which can be changed only by the State Legislature, allowed Mayor Bloomberg after he first took office to delay contract negotiations for years to strengthen his hand with city workers desperate for a wage increase.

The United Federation of Teachers has suggested that all municipal workers' raises at least equal increases in the cost of living. Under that plan, any unions that want additional raises or benefits would be required to negotiate a way to fund them with the city.

COLA Concerns

But two arguments could be reasonably made against guaranteeing employees raises that are at least equal to rises in the cost of living, a system similar to that used by several other smaller cities in the nation. One is that such a trigger makes no provision for instances in which the city is struggling fiscally and would not be able to meet such a mandate without either laying off employees or increasing taxes.

REVIEWING ARBITRATION: Professor Thomas A. Kochan, the co-director of MIT's Workplace Center and Institute for Work and Employment Research, is studying the effect of arbitration and other impasse procedures on the bargaining process. His report is expected to be the highlight of the Public Employment Relations Board two-day forum marking the 40th anniversary of the Taylor Law at a conference in Albany this spring.

The other, which city negotiators have alluded to, runs along the same lines as the claim made two decades ago by Robert W. Linn, who at the time was the city's chief negotiator and later served as bargaining counsel to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.

Mr. Linn questioned the longtime practice of projecting pay raises as part of the city budget, even though such projections virtually never reflected what the actual wage hikes would be. Simply budgeting for a 2- or 3-percent hike, he argued, allowed unions to use that number as a floor from which to push upward in their bargaining.

Pattern Problems

The unions have also rallied against the Mayor's Office of Labor Relations's insistence that that they conform to pattern bargaining, the system where the first union to negotiate a contract with the city sets the wage and benefit model for other labor organizations. The PBA has contended that rule does not allow individual unions to address specific problems and needs, such as recruitment and retention issues.

"Pattern bargaining ignores market conditions and effectively denies the right to negotiate a contract to every union but the first to settle, and that flies in the face of the Taylor Law," said PBA President Patrick J. Lynch in a statement.

The Bloomberg administration has stridently opposed all the suggested changes to the Taylor Law.

In 2002, the New York State AFL-CIO issued a 19-page report detailing eight specific recommendations for reform. Those suggestions included providing an effective remedy when public employers are found to have refused to negotiate a collective-bargaining agreement in good faith.

In a similar vein, Mr. Lynch has proposed that the city be required to pay interest on all retroactive raises. For the PBA, in five of the past six rounds of bargaining, dating back to 1991, the union's contract has been submitted to arbitration because of stalled negotiations, with only a 1994 contract reached at the bargaining table.

A Costly Process

Those proceedings have been drawn out and expensive for the PBA and city negotiators, with both sides forced to use a cadre of lawyers and expert witnesses to argue their case before arbitration panels.

"When arbitration is required, the panel need only apply the statute criteria fairly in order to settle the dispute in a manner that works for both parties," Mr. Lynch said. "If that had been done consistently, there would be no need for pattern bargaining and wages would be set by the market as they are elsewhere in our society. The legacy of pattern and arbitration panels which are unwilling to apply the criteria fairly is that some New York City titles are paid well beyond the market wage while others are paid far below."

Mr. Kochan, who taught at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations from 1973 to 1980, is currently reviewing the arbitration process with data submitted to him by PERB. In 1976, he wrote a similar report on the issue, successfully arguing that it should be a permanent provision of the Taylor Law. The provision was initially added by the State Legislature on a three-year trial basis.

A Peaceful Alternative

"I've asked the people at the PERB to pull together the data to look at to ground my analysis," he said, referring to his new study. "We'll just have to see what the record shows."

Prior figures have shown that there is no significant difference between the results of arbitration and negotiated settlements. The right to arbitration, though, has given unions a peaceful alternative to a strike if they believed management was being unreasonable.

The AFL-CIO report also noted that New York leads the nation in the percentage of the work force which is unionized, in no small part due to the huge numbers of public employees who have chosen to organize under the Taylor Law.

"But it cannot be claimed persuasively that the Taylor Law works simply because most of New York's public employees are unionized. That is but the beginning," the document added.

The report argued that the measure does not work well or fairly in some basic respects. "The Taylor Law needs structural change if it is to be the model of enlightened and balanced labor relations policy during the 21st century that the framers originally intended," the report asserted.

Last October, Mr. Lefkowitz argued that critics of the law assume that the arbitration right and the provision against striking have greater influence than they do.

Wagner Opened Door

"The laws were more an effect than a cause of social development," he remarked during a speech at the Empire Center for New York State Policy of the Manhattan Institute for Policy on Oct. 16, 2007. "The primary function of the procedures was to provide a legal structure by which an inexorable process was fulfilled with a minimum of friction and anguish."

During that address, he noted that until the middle of the 20th Century, public employers successfully resisted collective bargaining and city and state workers sought to achieve job protections and to enhance their benefits through the enactment of civil service laws.

"The breakthrough for bargaining took place in 1954 when Mayor Wagner of New York City promulgated an order that gave to city employees the rights of organization and representation," he recalled. "It authorized the establishment of joint labor-management committees to meet and consider mutual problems in the field of labor relations, but no negotiations."

In 1959, Wisconsin was one of the first state's to authorize the organizing of municipal employees and teachers, but that statute contained no enforcement procedures.

Seven years later, Governor Rockefeller was looking for a way to persuade Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Michael J. Quill to call off the union's costly strike and to prevent the likelihood of future walkouts.

"I replied that giving public employees a right to organize might accomplish the latter," Mr. Lefkowitz remembered, noting that he later worked to craft the Taylor Law to accomplish that goal.

Strikes Rose, Then Fell

He pointed out that in the immediate aftermath of the Taylor Law there was a very large increase in the number of public-sector strikes, exceeding 30 in one year.

"During the last couple of decades, however, the number of public sector strikes in New York State has declined to about one a year, well below the pre-Taylor Law number despite the increase in unionized employees," he said. "As I have suggested, this is because of the improved skills of the representatives of unions and governments as well as of PERB mediators."

The most recent high-profile strike was the TWU's three-day walk-out in December 2005. The union has been without dues check-off rights for nearly nine months as punishment for that strike.

That strike and the punishment levied afterwards led TWU Local 100 officials and other union leaders to renew the call for reforms.