Posts tagged Kathy Hochul
NEW YORK: The Union Gave Them the Wrong Data. The Pols Cited It Anyway.
April 12, 2024 // Meanwhile some school districts are considering layoffs because they used temporary COVID funds to staff up (again, contrary to union claims about Tier 6 hindering hiring). Finally, Senator Jackson and Mayor Evans borrowed a dubious line from labor, bemoaning how state law now “mandates a retirement age of 63 with 40 years of service.” Trouble is, it doesn’t. Nothing in state law requires anyone to work 40 years for anything. People need only work five years to vest in a public pension in New York (which Governor Hochul and lawmakers trimmed from 10 years in 2022). And they can begin collecting a reduced pension as young as age 55. Malik Evans
Chief of MTA’s biggest union promises ‘massive confrontation’ over $15 NYC congestion toll: ‘Not going to take this’
March 11, 2024 // The chief of the MTA’s biggest union — which once supported New York’s controversial congestion pricing plan — is now threatening a “massive confrontation” with transit management over the proposed $15 daily toll to enter Midtown or Lower Manhattan. The head of the national Transport Workers Union, John Samuelsen, issued the threat in an interview on Thursday, which came just days after he escalated his battle with Gov. Kathy Hochul and her MTA chairman, Janno Lieber, by placing a full-page ad in Monday’s Post recruiting a primary challenge for the Democrat.
NY dock workers urge lawmakers to sink Hochul’s new waterfront commission
January 29, 2024 // Hochul proposed the new waterfront unit for New York’s side of the harbor to replace the prior Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, a bi-state agency founded in 1953 by a Congressionally authorized compact between New York and New Jersey. But the bi-state agency dissolved last year after New Jersey pulled out after 70 years, saying it was a relic that was impeding port business. Empire State officials sued New Jersey to keep the bi-state commission intact — saying anti-corruption enforcement remained essential — but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Garden State had a legal right to sever the contract.
NYC Teachers, Migrant Students, and The Clash of Two Titans
January 27, 2024 // Among those policies were Assembly Bill A6328A and Senate Bill S9460. SB 9460 placed a mandatory limitation on the number of students per teacher—which will predominantly benefit wealthier areas. According to an analysis from the city’s Independent Budget Office (IBO), the law will require at least an additional 17,700 new teachers by 2027—when the law takes full effect. Officials have tried to warn of the law’s cost tradeoffs, namely that because the city’s highest-poverty schools already have smaller classes, they stand to benefit the least from the state’s class size cap. This means that funding will benefit wealthier areas, as opposed to the highest-poverty areas. Assembly Bill A6328A, also supported by UFT, codified migrants as a protected class, extending the right to a free education for every resident between the ages of 5 to 21, regardless of citizenship status. Since the new laws have passed, it’s estimated that 53,000 new migrant students have enrolled into public schools, 85% of which are non-English speaking.
Popular Union-Busting Tactic Banned in New York in ‘Major Victory’
September 7, 2023 // New York has banned captive audience meetings, a popular union-busting tactic used by companies during organizing periods to disseminate anti-union information. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill on Wednesday morning, making the state the fifth in the U.S. to make such meetings illegal. “This legislation will help to ensure that all New Yorkers receive the benefits and protections that allow them to work with dignity,” Hochul said in a statement on Wednesday. “My administration is committed to making our state the most worker-friendly state in the nation, and I thank the bill sponsors for their partnership in our mission to establish the strongest and most robust protections right here in New York.”
OPINION: Pritzker risks bankrupting Illinois to curry favor with Big Labor
August 14, 2023 // Members of AFSCME Council 31 eagerly voted in local union meetings over the past two weeks to ratify the contract, which negotiators had tentatively agreed to on July 1. And who could blame them? The contract also includes a $1,200 “stipend” paid to every worker merely for ratifying the contract. Pritzker, a Democrat, included these bonuses in his last contract negotiation in 2019, ostensibly to compensate workers for the financial “hardship” of being state employees under his Republican predecessor, Bruce Rauner. Predictably, such payoffs have now become standard operating procedure. The governor celebrated his and AFSCME’s windfall by tweeting out, “Illinois is a pro-worker state through and through.” The pronouncement was eerily reminiscent of Biden’s one-time campaign promise to become the “most pro-union president you ever saw.”
32 Knowledge Tracker How New York’s Democratic Socialists Brought Unions Around to Public Renewables
June 20, 2023 // ince they did not initially have access to state-level union leaders, the DSA organizers started by building relationships with local utilities unions across the state. Public Power New York recruited hundreds of volunteers to help steer the victories of numerous DSA-endorsed state legislators in 2020 and 2022. One successful candidate was climate organizer Sarahana Shrestha, now a state assemblymember from the Hudson Valley. She unseated her long-tenured Democratic primary opponent, in part, by highlighting his opposition to the BPRA. The bill began to move in Albany in a real way when unions outside of the utilities sector, like the New York State United Teachers, the New York State Nurses Association, and the Service Employees International Union, endorsed the bill. Once the bill passed the state Senate in the summer of 2022, the utilities unions took a more serious interest in the plan. The BPRA’s labor provisions include prevailing-wage assurances and require that all the NYPA’s renewable projects include collective-bargaining agreements for every employee, including contractors and subcontractors. These agreements must be in place before work can start on a project. The law creates a $25 million just-transition fund to retrain fossil fuel–sector workers who could lose their jobs, and specifies that union leaders must be consulted in this process. It also prioritizes hiring these retrained workers for the NYPA’s renewable projects.
Op-ed – New York: Lawmakers pass bill banning ‘captive audience’ meetings
June 14, 2023 // “Employers have become much more aggressive in using captive audience meetings to force workers into hearing the employer’s one-sided propaganda on unionization and other issues,” Appelbaum said in a statement following the legislation’s passage. “These meetings often leave workers feeling pressured and intimidated. It is time that the law catches up to the reality of the moment by allowing workers to refuse to attend these meetings without fear of retaliation.” Three states, Connecticut, Oregon and, most recently, Minnesota have banned the meetings. After the Connecticut ban passed, a coalition of U.S companies led by the U.S Chamber of Commerce sued the state in federal court, arguing that the law is preempted by the National Labor Relations Act and that it breached employers First Amendment-protected freedom of speech.
Push in states for $20 minimum wage as inflation persists
March 30, 2023 // Cindy Lee, the owner of a bowling alley in Endicott, New York, said she’s struggling to pay off loans taken out during the pandemic that kept her business afloat. “All this cost all at once is just going to kill us. I definitely will have to cut corners somewhere with employees if wages are raised,” said Lee, adding that she’d also have to increase prices on bowling, food and liquor. The federal minimum wage in the United States has stayed at $7.25 per hour since 2009, but states and some localities are free to set higher amounts. Thirty states have chosen to do so.
NY union wants more remote work for state employees
March 17, 2023 // Spence called for New York to do more on remote work flexibility and go beyond what was proposed in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget for the Empire State. Hochul’s budget would not only consider more flexibility for public employees to work remotely, but it allocated over $18 million to address worker shortage issues. Yet it was not enough for Spence, who has been pushing for public employees to remain as remote workers on a long-term basis and has clashed with state lawmakers over the remote work issue during the past year. The union president asserted that New York public employees are leaving New York for other states that offer more remote work flexibility and have a lower cost-of-living. Neither PEF nor Spence outlined specifics about flexible remote work and which incentives could lead to higher retention rates of employees.