SUNY University-Wide Human Resources
Manual
Collective Negotiations - Evolution of the Taylor Law
by John Cummings, Director of
Human Resources Emeritus, SUNY Binghamton
Prior to 1947
There were no
New York State laws dealing with public employees other than the Civil Service
Law, which dated back to 1909.
1947
Condon-Wadlin Act was passed as the result of a teacher's strike in Buffalo
and other strikes in Rochester and New York City.
- Public employees were
considered to have terminated their employment if they went on strike
- Could be rehired but
only on a probationary status for 1 year and with no pay raises for 6 months
- Condon-Wadlin was rarely
invoked and more rarely enforced
1966 (New Years Day)
New York City
transit workers go on strike
- 35,000 employees struck
for 13 days causing massive disruption and a significant public outcry
- This demonstrated that
Condon-Wadlin was not effective in dealing with public employee strikes (they
could not fire all 35,000 transit workers)
- Governor Rockefeller
and the State legislature approved special legislation exempting the transit
strikers from Condon-Wadlin
January 15, 1966
Governor Rockefeller
appointed a "Committee on Public Employee Relations" with George Taylor
as its chair. The charge to the committee was to "make legislative proposals
for protecting the public interest against the disruption of vital public services
by illegal strikes, while at the same time protecting the rights of public employees."
March 31, 1966
The committee
produced a unanimous recommendation. Taylor felt the recommendations recognized
that "Public employee have rights which should be recognized, but without
a roughshod infringement on the fundamental rights of everybody else. A new
balance has to be effected, but in such a way as to permit the public employer
to carry out his essential functions."
- The committee sought
to change the emphasis in state law from the punishment of strikers to providing
a way for public employees to have some participation in the establishment
of their conditions of employment in a form of collective bargaining appropriate
to the public sector.
- Taylor wanted to
use a new term "collective negotiations" in place of collective
bargaining; he felt it was more appropriate to the public sector. [This
is why throughout this manual you will see collective negotiations rather
than collective bargaining used.]
- The committee found
that public sector employees had the right to representatives of their own
choosing and an obligation to "recognize the collective negotiations
must be conducted within the framework of our democratic political structure
out of which the civil service idea has evolved."
- The committee recommended
that strikes continue to be prohibited. They could not balance the right to
strike by public employees with the need of public employers to continue essential
public services (public employers have no ability to close or to "lock-out"
its employees).
- The committee felt
that strikes could be prevented if public employees were given the right to
organize and to collectively negotiate and if there were other procedures
for resolving any impasse that might occur.
The committee's recommendations
were in the following areas:
- At that time, NYS did
not have any statutory declaration of the right of public employees to organize.
The committee recommended that public employees be granted this right and
that a statutory means be created to resolve disputes on representation issues.
The committee also proposed criteria for unit determination (community of
interest, employing agency authority, and the capability of the employee-employer
unit to carry out its public service mission)
- The committee proposed
means for resolving deadlocks in collective negotiations without resorting
to strikes, which would continue to be illegal. The committee and Taylor felt
that strikes could be avoided if public employees (and employers) were given
other ways they could participate in to resolve any impasse that might arise
in the course of collective negotiations. These means included agreements
in advance of collective negotiations by the parties as to how impasses would
be resolved. If this did not work, the committee recommended that the Public
Employment Relations Board (also created by the "Taylor Law") could
attempt to resolve the deadlock by mediation and then fact-finding. The fact-finding
would be done by a three-person panel and would be made public. Taylor and
the committee felt that public disclosure of the fact-finding report would
put public pressure on the parties to reach an agreement. Finally, if all
of these steps failed, the appropriate legislative body could impose an agreement
on the parties.
- Taylor and the committee
recommended that strikes by public employees continue to be illegal, but with
penalties that differed from those previously imposed by Condon-Wadlin. The
committee also proposed that any work stoppage or slowdown by public employees
designed to cause a change in their terms or conditions of employment should
be considered a strike. The penalties proposed by the committee included injunctive
relief and fines imposed by the courts, discipline of individual striking
employees under section 75 of the Civil Service Law, and the loss of representation
status and dues check-off by public employee organizations that cause or condone
a strike.
- Taylor and the committee
felt that no strike penalties and no law would work unless the people involved
wanted it to work. Taylor also believed that public employers in general,
and those in New York in particular, were many years behind the private sector
in their collective bargaining, employee relations sophistication. Only eleven
(11) formal collective bargaining contracts with public employee organizations
existed in New York State at the time the committee was making its recommendations.
Having skilled and knowledgeable people to deal with public employee problems
that were more complicated than any in the private sector was a requirement
if any public-sector employee-relations legislation was to work. Taylor wanted
public employers to set up and train effective offices for public employee
relations.
April 1967
In April 1967
the State legislature passed the Public Employees' Fair Employment Act (Article
14 of the NYS Civil Service Law). It was signed by Governor Rockefeller on April
21, 1967 and became effective on September 1, 1967. The Act soon became known
as the "Taylor Law" because, as Taylor put it: "its provisions
were so controversial the politicians did not fight to have their own names
on it." While the politicians did not have their name on it, they did make
their own changes to the recommendations made by Taylor and his committee.
- The legislature concurred
with the committee's recommendations to allow public employees to organize
and negotiate collectively, to prohibit strikes by public employees, to establish
procedures for impasse resolution, and to create a Public Employment Relations
Board (PERB).
- The legislature changed
the strike penalties recommended by the committee, approved the three-person
structure for PERB but required that no more than two of the three could be
from the same political party, and added provisions allowing New York City
to adopt its own program and mini-PERB.
1967 to 1969
The new law had
many critics and detractors despite the fact that it seemed to work fairly well.
Although there continued to be a few highly publicized public employee strikes
(principally teachers and sanitation workers in New York City and some State
employees in mental hygiene units), from September 1967 to January 1969, over
1,000 agreements were negotiated covering over 750,000 public employees. During
this period, several committees were asked to study the impact of the new law
and to recommend changes to it.
- The legislature created
a special Joint Legislative Committee on Public Employee Relations to the
study the Taylor Law. This committee sent a report and recommendations to
the legislature on February 3, 1969.
- The Governor reconvened
the "Taylor Committee" (the Governor's Committee on Public Employee
Relations). This committee submitted its report and recommendations on January
23, 1969.
The 1969 Amendments
As a result of
the reports and recommendations of the committees noted above and as the result
of a number of bills introduced independent of the committees, a number of amendments
to the Taylor Law were approved by the legislature and the Governor. These amendments
were designed to strengthen the original law and to add items originally omitted
from it.
- Improper Practices:
The law as originally passed in 1967 contained nothing dealing with so called
"unfair labor practices". Although the law gave PERB some implied
authority to declare certain practices unfair and to remedy them, the law
did not specify what those practices were. PERB's original Rules of Procedure
defined them generally as reprisal, interference with representation procedures,
and refusal to negotiate. The 1969 amendments spelled out the "improper
practices" for both employer and employee organizations (see section
209-a of the Taylor Law). The law was also modified to qualify PERB's authority
to remedy improper practices (see section 205.5 of the Taylor Law).
- Meaning and Scope
of the Duty to Negotiate: The term "agreement" was defined by
adding section 204.13 and the need for legislative approval to implement any
part of an agreement which is beyond the power of the public employer to implement
on its own authority was added. A duty to negotiate in good faith was imposed
by making a failure or refusal to do so an "improper practice" (see
above) and by giving PERB the authority to direct the parties to negotiate.
Finally, PERB was given the authority to determine which subjects are, and
which subjects are not, "terms and conditions of employment" within
the meaning of the law and thus to define the scope of what was required to
be negotiated (mandatory and non-mandatory subjects).
- Impasse-Resolving
Procedures: The statutory impasse procedures were modified by changing
the timetable for the issuance and publication of fact-finder's reports and
recommendations and by authorizing fact finders to "assist the parties
to effect a voluntary resolution of the dispute." (Section 209.3(c) of
the law). The contractual impasse procedures were modified by giving the parties
greater latitude in fashioning ways to resolve contract impasses by adding
arbitration as one of the means for doing so. The arbitration was to be voluntary,
impartial, and, according to PERB, binding.
- Strikes: Section
210 was modified by making it illegal for a public employee (in addition to
an employee organization) to strike or to cause, instigate, encourage or condone
a strike. In addition, anyone who supervises public employees is prohibited
from authorizing, approving, condoning, or consenting to a strike. It was
also presumed that anyone who was absent on the day(s) of a strike or who
withheld their services in whole or in part on the day(s) of a strike had
participated in the strike. The penalties for striking and violating the law
were also toughened. The chief executive officer of the government involved,
having determined that an employee had engaged in a strike, was required to
notify the employee that the employee was being placed on probationary status
for one year and that the employee would be fined 2 days pay for each day
of strike participation. These new penalties were in addition to the possibility
of other penalties through disciplinary action. Employees were given the right
to challenge the determination that they had violated to no-strike provisions
of the law. The penalties against employee organizations were also modified
by removing the ceiling on the amount an employee organization could be fined
by the courts if the employee organization violated a court-ordered injunction.
Finally, the amendments provided that a strike might be condoned and the penalties
avoided if it could be shown that there was "extreme provocation"
on the part of the public employer.
1969 to the Present
The Taylor Law
has continued to be amended and modified over time, as have PERB's Rules of
Procedure. The law has withstood the test of time and has been a model for similar
laws in other states. So much of what we do in our day-to-day professional lives
is a direct or indirect result of the Taylor Law. Understanding how it came
to be should help our understanding of its current application.
Reference(s):
McKinney's Consolidated
Laws of New York (annotated) Book 9, Civil Service Law
Article 14-Public Employees' Fair Employment Act
The Taylor Act: A Primer
for School Personnel (and Other Beginner at Collective Negotiations;
NYS IL&R Bulletin 59, May 1968
and
The Taylor Act Amendments of 1969; NYS IL&R Bulletin 62, June 1970
Walter E. Oberer, Kurt L Hanslowe, and Robert E Doherty
Industrial Peacemaker;
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979
Edward B. Shils, Walter J. Gershenfield, Bernard Ingster, William M. Weinberg
Chapter 9, "Taylor's New Public Sector Solutions: The Taylor Law"
by Bernard Ingster
Letter dated February 3,
1969 from Frank G. Rossetti, Chair of the Joint Legislative Committee on Industrial
and Labor Conditions (with staff report and suggested modifications) to Perry
B. Duryea Jr., Speaker of the Assembly