New fight seen over N.Y.’s Taylor Law

But one school boards official remembers being “floored” when Ianuzzi said the union planned to push for “reform” of the state’s Taylor Law, which governs relations between public employees on the one hand and school districts and local governments on the other. It was a jaw-dropper for the association members because they, too, wanted “reform” of the law.

Since the TWU local 100 transit strike of 2005 I’ve agreed that the Taylor Law needs to be reformed. If the argument that public employees should not be able to strike because their jobs are too important to cease working, then there has to be other ways to allow them to have leverage in barganing equal to what going on stirke could leverage. Otherwise the strike and the threat of a strike is the only barganing chip that unions have.

A commenter on the Journal News website raised a point that it seems that public employee unions fail to acknowledge the cost of healthcare and pensions. The commenter said that unlike private corporations the school board and governments can’t go out of business so they pass the costs onto the taxpayer. I don’t think it’s that public employee unions don’t know the reality. I think they know full well what a municipality can and cannot afford. In the case of the transit strike the MTA had the money they did not have to raise fares like they did a few years ago.

Yet the commenter raised an interesting point about the cost of healthcare and how paying the rising cost of healthcare is hurting public and private institutions. Ford Motor Company has raised this many times. They are for universal health coverage because of this, yet the insurance companies lash out reigning the rest of corporate America in. The unions have had major battles with car makers over offshoring of manufacturing jobs. The unions have even had to make concessions because they realize what the companies can and cannot afford to do; especially since the US car manufacturers have had bad months facing stiff competition and are now in need of a bailout aka corporate welfare (it’s okay to save corporations but not people right? Oh, it’s not socialism when they do that right? Government can interfere with business then right?).

If it’s about fixing healthcare as it seems to be the case then clearly single-payer healthcare is the way we must go. As for the pension issue I have to do more research into how much it is costing companies private and public to maintain pension plans. I think pensions are better than putting your retirement into a 401k plan.

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