Testimony of Randi Weingarten before Civil Service Committee on the Taylor Law: March 30, 2006

Mar 30, 2006 4:43 PM

The state Taylor Law is in need of repair. In this new world where the quality of the work force means more than anything else in the effective delivery of public services, the Taylor Law does not strike the proper balance between government and its employees to allow effective collective bargaining to occur. Instead, we have a process that is stacked against workers, and therefore one that demoralizes them more and more, rather than spurring them to do the best they can.

The Taylor Law presumes good-faith negotiations, but it provides no incentive for public employers to negotiate timely contracts. The law also has allowed the city to impose lock-step pattern bargaining, which offers no opportunity for unions to negotiate a contract tailored to the particular needs of their members or the services they deliver.

Through no fault of our own, municipal unions routinely go two, three, sometimes four years without a contract. While workers who strike face heavy penalties under the Taylor Law, public employers who refuse to bargain in good faith suffer no such harsh consequences.

Why is a real timetable important? Look what happened in budget negotiations in the State Legislature this year. Because state lawmakers wanted to have an on-time budget, they rolled up their sleeves and made the compromises needed to reach a settlement that included the $11.2 billion for school construction mandated by the court in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit.

A deadline creates the pressure to get to a settlement. Without that pressure in collective bargaining, the city has been able to impose its will on its work force. It’s palpably unfair that the city does not have to engage in the give and take of real bargaining. For example, in our last round, Chancellor Klein never showed up at a single bargaining session. His first appearance was before the fact-finding panel, more than two years after the expiration of our contract. All the while, the chancellor had veto power. That is not a level playing field.

The city’s ability to endlessly stall without repercussions means unions have virtually no leverage at the bargaining table, and when unions turn to the dispute resolution processes available to them under the Taylor Law, arbitrators, time and again, have ruled that the pattern must prevail.

Pattern bargaining may allow the city to contain its labor costs, but it creates a situation where an agreement that works for one union is imposed on all the others, regardless of the particular needs and circumstances of their members.

So unions and their members get punched twice: they have to wait years for a new contract and when that agreement is finally reached, it doesn’t address their particular needs.

Every UFT/DOE contract since 1991 has been signed long after the prior contract’s expiration. Teachers have to grade papers on time. Like everyone else, they have to pay their bills on time. Why shouldn’t they be entitled to contracts signed on time? It’s an outrage that public employees in this city must routinely wait years for a wage increase.

Our most recent contract was 27 months late. By then, Mayor Bloomberg had negotiated a wage agreement with another large union that had a much greater impact on our own contract’s final terms than our proven contention that city schools were losing almost 50 percent of its new teachers in their first five years of service because the pay of New York City teachers was simply not competitive and because the conditions undermined rather than fostered teaching and learning.

Bloomberg is only the most recent in a line of mayors who have exploited this weakness in the Taylor Law to win the upper hand in collective bargaining and impose a pattern-bargaining agenda. The city should not be permitted to intentionally suppress wages by delaying bargaining with certain unions, then using the pattern as a bar to additional wage increases.

Feeling no urgency to settle, the city lets contracts expire and then gets mad when union leaders make their case publicly as a way to try to force the city to bargain in good faith.

While holding all the other unions at arm’s length, the city reaches an agreement with the union of its choice and then proclaims that agreement to be the “pattern” that all other municipal unions must accept even if it is totally unsuitable or philosophically wrong for them.

Once that first agreement is in place, the city again uses delay to its advantage. If the other unions balk at its terms, the city sits pat and waits and waits.

What recourse do municipal unions have in this situation? Under the Taylor Law, we can ask the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to declare an impasse, a request that the city routinely contests, resulting in further delay. When we eventually prevail, the contract dispute goes to mediation, which rarely ends the stalemate. Next, depending on the union, the dispute moves to binding arbitration or non-binding fact-finding, both of which involve a trial-like procedure that takes months to complete.

At the end of this protracted process, regardless of how compelling the argument, arbitrators have ruled time and again that the pattern trumps all else. In this round, any substantial increase above that pattern was funded by “productivity” improvements or cost savings.

The most recent bargaining round demonstrates just how unfair the process is.

True to past practice, the city rebuffed the UFT’s request to begin bargaining before its contract expired in May 2003. It ignored our demand for negotiations for four months. That September, the UFT presented its demands at the first bargaining session. We filed an unfair labor practice complaint with PERB two months later when the city failed to respond to us. In February 2004 — eight months after the contract expired and five months after the first bargaining session — the city finally played its hand. It presented us with an eight-page contract that stripped educators of all their rights. A half-dozen fruitless bargaining sessions later, we asked PERB in March to declare an impasse in contract talks.

While it stalled the UFT and other unions for nearly a year, the city was engaging in real and substantive bargaining with District Council 37, which had suffered thousands of layoffs the year before. Sure enough, that April, the city and DC 37 agreed to a contract that offered a $1,000 lump sum in the first year, 3 percent in the second year, and another 2 percent in the third year, half of which was funded by cutting starting salaries of new employees and other concessions.

No one begrudges DC 37 for making that deal. That union had its own needs. What I take issue with is the city’s position that the rest of us had to accept the same basic terms.

The DC 37 agreement worked for its members, but it was not suitable for educators. While $1,000 for DC 37 members amounted to about 3 percent of their pay, it represented approximately 2 percent for our members, who earn more on average. The city and the UFT agreed that we should not reduce the starting salaries of new teachers because it would harm recruitment of quality teachers, but even so, the city insisted that we come up with similar savings elsewhere.

At the bargaining table, we argued that New York City would not be able to keep high-quality teachers if the pay for most of them continued to be 14 to 26 percent lower than that which teachers earn in the suburbs. A three-year contract paying an aggregate 4 percent increase would leave us further behind.

Besides salary, we had other important bargaining demands unique to educators: lower class sizes, safety issues, child care. The city felt no compulsion to engage in real good-faith bargaining over any of these issues because they were not part of the DC 37 agreement.

That summer, the city and the UFT gave bargaining one more shot at PERB’s urging. When eight months more of contract talks between the city and the UFT led nowhere, we renewed our request to PERB to declare negotiations at an impasse.

The dispute resolution process took another eight months, culminating in the release of the fact-finders’ report in September 2005. The panel agreed with the UFT that city school systems must compete for teachers with higher-paying suburbs, but it still refused to repudiate pattern bargaining. To pay for its proposed 11.4 percent wage increase over 37 months, the panel recommended a series of time-for-money swaps and non-economic productivity changes in exchange. Finally, in October, 28 long months after the expiration of our previous contract, we reached a tentative “pattern-conforming” agreement with the city that was the best agreement possible in this climate, but not the best agreement that could have been reached by the parties if they had bargained in the absence of the DC 37 settlement.

All the UFT and the other municipal unions seek is a level playing field. The Taylor Law has to be changed to create an enforceable timetable, and to make pattern bargaining one factor, but not the pre-eminent factor.

Reform of the Taylor Law has been a top priority of the state’s organized labor movement at least since 2000, when the state AFL-CIO set up a Taylor Law Task Force to recommend changes to the law. Yet year after year, each attempt to fix the law has fallen victim to Albany’s gridlock.

Last year, the UFT backed legislation that would have expedited the process for ending contract stalemates involving only city teachers and principals. The bill established a real six-month deadline on negotiations before state intervention and escalating penalties against either side for failing to bargain in good faith.

It was a modest bill that provided a modest fix. Yet Governor Pataki vetoed it in December after the bill passed in both houses of the Legislature.

So we are back at Square 1. Stalling is not a legitimate bargaining strategy. Pattern bargaining does not allow for a process of real give and take, which is the essence of productive negotiations.

We need a labor relations process that facilitates fair and timely collective-bargaining agreements — one that prevents stalling and de-emphasizes pattern bargaining. The rejection of these commonsense Taylor Law reforms could lead to more job interruptions, not fewer, as the frustration among public employees grows.

We would appreciate any support the City Council can give us to achieve this goal.