Soon after the end of the Transit Workers Union's illegal 60-hour walkout in December 2005, Local 100 President Roger Toussaint boasted that his members had made good on a "credible threat" to strike. Later today, a state judge in Brooklyn will decide if they can get away with it. Read More
Retirees' benefits are the fastest-growing part of overall health-coverage costs for New York state and local government. They're already nearly 40 percent of the state's employee-health budget, and they'll consume more than a third of the roughly $3.5 billion New York City will spend on health benefits this year. Read More
LAST week's state Senate approval of Gov. Paterson's proposed cap on school property taxes seems to have induced a nervous breakdown in the powerful statewide teachers' union. Read More
New York's deepening fiscal crisis should refocus public attention on the need to reform the city's unsustainably costly package of generous retirement benefits for municipal workers. Read More
The media treated it as good news when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union said last week that they'd settle their next contract through binding arbitration. Read More
Education advocates in the Hudson Valley and throughout New York state are predicting thousands of teachers and aides will lose their jobs if the Legislature adopts Gov. David Paterson's proposed school-aid cuts for the coming year. Read More
New York's sinking economy still hasn't hit bottom. The state bud get gap continues to grow as tax revenues collapse into a black hole the size of Wall Street Read More
Barely three months after the state Legislature approved a $2.3 billion package of tax and fee hikes to bail out the financially troubled Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), members of the MTA's largest union have been awarded a pay increase that will break the authority's tenuously balanced budget. Read More