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
Research
New York City's average compensation cost per municipal employee is $106,743, and has grown 63 percent since fiscal year 2000, according to a Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) released yesterday. While base pay has grown faster than inflation d Read More
The chairman of India-based outsourcing giant Satyam, which has done work for a third of Fortune 500 companies, has confessed to a massive accounting fraud. He wrote that he had overreported profits and underreported liabilities until the fraud Read More
The city of Detroit lost its investment-grade credit rating from S&P Tuesday night, slipping to BB after just barely hanging on to a halfway decent rating for the past two decades. New York is not Detroit. But since one of Detroit's major problem Read More
Over at NY Public Payroll Watch, E.J. McMahon Gov. Paterson and others for allowing the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority to abdicate one of its main responsibilities -- negotiating a better contract with the New York City local Tr Read More
The Empire Center's SeeThroughNY.net offers a new trove of payroll data on the city and public-authority governments. An analysis of the data shows how top-heavy New York City's public-sector payroll is compared to at least one other relevant downst Read More
Thousands of union members will gather in Albany today to demonstrate against Governor Paterson's proposed state budget cuts, and most of them will no doubt be pushing organized labor's soak-the-rich income tax hike as an alternative. But Steve Kag Read More
New York City is record tourist travel to New York for this year. But broken down by quarter (numbers exclusively reported by FiscalWatch for the moment, although anyone can ask the city for them), the figures tell a more sober story. Read More
Of next year's expected $700 billion federal infrastructure stimulus package, New York state likely will get $4 billion for mass transit, with most of that money going toward city projects, including a second station on the planned extension westwa Read More
New York City projects a 1.8 percent decrease in sales-tax revenue this fiscal year, cutting $85 million out of cash receipts. But early post-Christmas estimates of holiday sales point up the likelihood that New York will further slash its sales-tax Read More
State comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, in a quest to become the Ghost of New York City Yet to Come, released his on the city's budget yesterday. The document illustrates starkly what is going to happen in New York if we do not face the inevitable. We'v Read More
Smart private-sector companies are aggressively slashing white-collar pay and benefits to get costs under control amid slumping revenues. New York's public sector, by contrast, has no such clear, assertive plan, even though the state* and the MTA to Read More