Imagine working for a company. Now imagine getting a guaranteed pay raise every year, no matter how you perform or how the company performs. Now imagine your annual review, that meeting where your boss evaluates your performance and considers increasing (or decreasing) your compensation. But instead of prepping for this important meeting, you simply decide to stay home, knowing fully well that as a result of your decision to skip the meeting, your boss has been left with no choice but to give you an annual raise. Why: because his hands are tied. As a report issued today by the Empire Center for New York State Policy makes clear, that is exactly how things unfold year after year for thousands of New York State public workers.
Thanks to a misguided 30-year old statute known as the Triborough Amendment, public employers in New York are required to maintain all contractual perks for unionized workers - including automatic pay increases - after the expiration of collective bargaining agreements. Period. This law therefore provides a perverse incentive for unions to resist negotiating structural changes to those contracts, as they are legally ensured that the status quo will simply be maintained. The Amendment costs New York State government more than $130 million a year. It costs school districts almost $300 million annually. As New York prepares to rebuild the crumbling Triborough Bridge, the time is right to also tear down the troubled Triborough Amendment.
Join the conversation