In the closing hours of its 2006 session, the state Legislature rushed to approve new laws giving New York's public employee unions significant added leverage in contract negotiations with local governments and school districts.

Last week, both houses passed a bill (A.6222/S.3178) that would award union members an automatic 1 percent pay increase in any case where the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) rules that an employer has committed an "improper labor practice" defined broadly under law as "failure to negotiate in good faith." Unions that successfully file an improper practice claim against management could also avoid the state Taylor Law's most severe penalties if they go on strike.

The New York Conference of Mayors (NYCOM) called the measure "patently unfair," noting that similar penalties are found nowhere in the National Labor Relations Act, which was a model for the Taylor Law and other state collective bargaining statutes. Given the lack of any evidence indicating that local governments and school districts are avoiding contyract negotiations, NYCOM said the bill was addressing a "non-existent problem."

The New York State School Boards Association (NYSSBA) also weighed in, saying the new threat of penalties in the bill would further hinder school districts' ability to control their number-one expense item: employee compensation.

From the NYSSBA memo:

"Simply put, this bill would encourage school district unions to propose an outlandish contract and then wait for the intricacies of the Taylor Law to provoke a technical violation. For instance, if the school district does not continue to engage in the purely futile endeavor of negotiating toward a contract that has been offered purely in the interest of enticing rancor and discord, a technical violation of the Taylor Law has occurred. That done, this bill would require the school district to accept that outlandish union proposal."

Such arguments fell on deaf ears in the Legislature -- where the bill passed unanimously in the Senate and with only one vote in opposition (Michael Fitzpatrick, R-Smithtown) in the Assembly. As usual on such matters, the vote was preceded by no public hearings and no debate.

The Legislature which also overwhelmingly approved a bill (A.11088/S.7503) that would, for the first time, make disciplinary standards for uniformed workers a subject of collective bargaining in cities where discipline is now controlled by local law. Among the affected municipalities is New York City, which filed a strongly worded memo arguing that police and fire commissioners should retain the ultimately responsibility for disciplining their subordinates.

"[I]f the City is to maintain and consolidate the public safety gains it has made in recent years, the City's Fire and Police Commissioners must be allowed to retain their statutory authority to manage their departments," the Bloomberg administration said in its strongly worded memo opposing the bill. The memo continued:

"The quasi-military order and accountability necessary for public safety in the Fire and Police Departments, especially in times such as these that call for heightened security and emergency response capability, should not be placed on the 'bargaining table' to be traded away or even removed from the control of the affected commissioners over their objection. The current procedures set forth in the Administrative Code for disciplining those few firefighters and police officers who violate the public trust by engaging in misconduct detrimental to their departments have proved to be essential and remain so today. These procedures, which have been maintained by the Legislature and recognized by the courts for over a century, should not be casually placed at risk by the enactment of this bill into law. To put it directly, the stakes for the citizens of the nation's largest city are simply too high."

In the session's final hours, both houses also were close to voting on yet another union-backed measure (A.11838/S.8273) creating the legal presumption that any public employee strike occurring more than one year after the expiration of a collective bargaining agreement was "caused by acts of extreme provocation." This would provide new grounds for unions to avoid the Taylor Law's strike penalties, further weakening the existing anti-walkout provision.

As of Thursday morning, the bill was on "third reading" -- one step from passage -- on the floor calendars of the Assembly and Senate.