In New York State, The Taylor Law (Public Employees' Fair Employment Act) prohibits strikes for all public sector employees. The law also includes other comprehensive measures discouraging collective action and aims at disarming workers from what has proven historically to be the most significant actions of workers and unions. To advance a more effective and radical labor movement, it’s imperative for all public employees in NYS, including SUNY workers, to understand this law, its historical development and applications.
It is unsurprising that strikes are the primary target of anti-worker policies. Strikes are not only powerful weapons for attaining demands for workers in workplaces, they also have the potential to reveal essential workplace structures and relations to workers and the general public. According to the ideological or the natural view under capitalism, bosses, entrepreneurs, innovators, and owners of companies are indispensable, those who create and drive the wealth of workplaces and societies. Workers, conversely, are insignificant, dispensable, replaceable; parts of production that do not really matter. For the worker as an individual, this view has a reality; production seems independent, something existing without and against them. However, strikes reverse this situation; they advance a class standpoint from which the productive structure that seemed to work on its own and by virtue of the management is seen to be sustained and reproduced by workers. This is a pedagogical process. It has the important capacity to break down the conception of the insignificance of workers and the conception that profit and surplus results from the management. This lesson and the class consciousness it produces, in addition to the economic costs, make strikes feared by employers. The strikes bear, then, not only economic harm but represent a political threat to the capitalists as a class, as a process through which workers learn collective power and the real dependency of management on workers. Anti-strike laws are crucial to leave the working class declawed, propagandized, and lacking the educational experiences necessary to understand their collective power and attain a real class position in practice.
These laws are advanced in the name of continuity of business, stability, industrial peace, etc. The Taylor Law is one such example. Its historical context of origin is the beginning of the post-World War II period in the U.S., when the government and NYS heightened attacks on organized labor and increased anti-communist measures. These coincided with a growth of organized labor and collective action after the war. During the first years of the war, cooperation between the government and the union leaders, under the pretext of curbing independent labor activism in order to secure the status quo at home, increased union membership while pacifying and preventing their actions. Almost no strikes happened in the country during the war, due also to the union bureaucracy. This trend shifted towards the end of the war, with 1944 representing the year in which the most strikes took place in US history. These often involved wildcat, solidarity strikes across and within different sectors (Brecher 1972, 223).
In 1945 and 1946, the US faced one of the largest and most influential strike waves of its history. Throughout the year following the war, a total of 5 million workers went on strike, comprising one tenth of all workers in the nation, resulting in 4,630 work stoppages (Cozzarelli 2017). The first 6 months of 1946 were described by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics as “the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in the country’s history” (Brecher 1972, 228). The government strove to contain this wave of worker organizing, appointing boards to end disputes and forcing workers back to work. One instructive measure by President Truman was using wartime powers to seize the nation's railroads to prevent a strike, and when this did not work and workers went on strike, he threatened to “draft the strikers and call up the Army to run the railroads” (Brecher 1972, 229). This ended the strike, and was just one of many acts of government seizure of various striking or strike-threatening sectors.
Later, the US government passed the Taft Hartley act in 1947 (over even Truman’s veto), an important milestone leading to the Taylor Law. This outlawed closed shop workplaces, and unions had to give 60 day notice for strikes. Additionally, strikes that deemed to “imperil national health” became subject to an 80-day federal injunction. The act also prohibited sympathy boycotts and forced union officials to sign an affidavit to the government that they do not have communist affiliations (Cozzarelli 2017). In the same year, NYS further limited workers’ power by passing the Condon-Wadlin act—the precursor for which was a week-long strike by Buffalo teachers. The act made public sector strikes illegal and ruled that striking workers can be immediately fired, and if they are reinstated, they could not receive pay increases for three years and remained on probation for five. However, the penalties “were so draconian that they were rarely enforced.” Until 1964, it was enforced only seven times through twenty-one strikes, and only eighteen employees were fired (Malin 2018, 125).
By 1966, it became clear that Condon-Wadlin could not stand against the strength of the working class movement. In 1965, 6,000 Department of Welfare workers won a waiver for penalties in their settlement after their 28 days strike. Similarly, in 1966, NYC transit workers went on strike and their settlement included an amnesty for all strike penalties. These workers, like many others, proved the lesson that “there is no illegal strike, only an unsuccessful one.” Hence, the practical force and radicality of the strikes had gone beyond the legal restrictions. The Condon-Wadlin Act’s draconian measures no longer created enough fear and barrier to the workers’ struggle. So, the state and the employers had to find another way in which they took a step forward while seeming to take a step back. Thus arose the Taylor Law. 3 days after the NYC transit strike, the governor founded the Taylor committee.
The Taylor Law maintains the prohibition of strikes. However, it ties labor disputes to lengthier procedures including processes involving representatives from government and employers, and makes the penalty for strikes less harsh in some senses. One significant development of Taylor Law was the creation of the agency of Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), in recognition that “to guard against strikes, a substitute must be provided for resolution of bargaining impasses” (Malin 2018, 131). PERB was now the mediator between labor disputes, and would appoint a “fact finding board” of neutral parties if an agreement was not possible. Eventually with the amendments in 1969, a full procedure was established for impasses’ continuation beyond the fact finding board. All of this presents a lengthy process that confines the struggle between workers and employers to one between bureaucratic officials and government, with as little participation and action of rank-and-file workers as possible.
Additionally, the Taylor Law consists of continuing penalties for strikes. The most significant ones are loss of dues check-off and penalization of workers for two pay days’ for each day they strike, to be collected by the employer. There are also penalties that would imprison union officials who start, condone, or support a strike. These penalties were enforced in most strikes, in contrast to Condon-Wadlin penalties. The pay day penalty is significant for making it costly for unions to strike, while offsetting costs or even allowing employers to profit from strikes. A report sponsored by the Department of Labor, published in 1981, thus noted that the union representatives saw “2 for 1” as a strong deterrent against striking. In addition, the report tells of unions reporting that the penalty sometimes had the consequence of the employer wanting to prolong the strike because they were profiting from it (Olson et al. 1981). The Taylor Law thus not only makes strikes more difficult to organize through lengthy mediation and strong deterrents, it also makes strikes a means of profit if they do occur.
Still, after the Taylor Law, the expiration of union contracts represented a moment of intensification of labor conflicts. This was resolved by the Triborough Doctrine in 1972. This ruling was extended and codified into the law as the Triborough Agreement in 1982. It ruled that contracts continue after expiration until a new ones are formed under the condition that the unions do not strike. This enables the continuance of the status quo without disruptions and furthers the incentives for unions not to strike (Furman 2020). It also creates situations in which workers can go years while they await their next contract, like the CUNY workers who once bargained seven years to get a contract (Wood et al. 2020). Since the Taylor Law and Triborough, there has been a substantial decrease in strikes and “the motive power in New York public sector collective bargaining is the frozen status quo coupled with a heavy dose of mediation by PERB” (Malin 2018, 9). In these ways, Taylor Law is a strong force for continuing the status quo, and reducing and channeling the essential conflicts between labor and employers to those between union bureaucrats and employers, mediated by the government. Rank-and-file workers are left behind, their most important action is prohibited and their mass participation in bargaining largely nullified.
The history of the Taylor Law illustrates that it is the result of careful engineering of a balance between management, stalling, deception, and punishment. Once it was clear that its predecessor, the “harsher” Condon-Wadlin act, was unenforceable and transcended by workers’ brave resistance, the state found the sly development not in the upscaling explicit oppression of workers but in incorporation of conflicts and resistance in the lengthy and tedious machinery of bureaucracy where workers themselves don’t play a role. Therefore, the history of the emergence of the Taylor Law is the gradual taming of workers’ activity and workers’ separation from labor struggle by creating incentives against workplace actions and giving importance to processes wherein a small number of higher union representatives are key agents.
The Taylor Law’s proponents claim that labor peace or continuance of business without disruptions is accomplished through the act. For the workers, though, while the status quo remains exploitation and domination, “peace” only represents a deceptive discourse to pacify effective mass action. Simply, there is no other workplace based action more effective and important than strikes for workers’ struggle as a class. Our review of Taylor Law’s history also shows that labor law is historical and dependent on the class struggle. It is frequently enforced to workers and employers differently, and its practical reality is not always the same as its formal one. In labor law, many things that were once legal for workers become illegal and many things that were illegal become legal depending on the strength of the organization and activity of the workers.
We should keep these in mind considering Taylor Law’s future. Will NYS workers regain their right to strike, a right that they not only upheld but employed strongly in the past? We cannot say for sure, but we can say for certain that workers cannot wait for the right of strike to be handed back by the good-will of the state or employers. If the right to strike will be reinstated, it will be reinstated through actual practice. A truly pro-worker labor law that is only advanced through workers’ own mass actions and organization.
References
Brecher, J. Strike!. Straight Arrow Books, 1972.
Olivia Wood, Tatiana Cozzarelli. “CUNY Faculty and Staff Have Gone One Year without a Contract - It’s Time to Strike.” Left Voice, February 29, 2024. https://www.leftvoice.org/cuny-faculty-and-staff-have-gone-one-year-without-a-contract-its-time-to-strike/.
Malin, Martin H. (2018) "The Motive Power in Public Sector Collective Bargaining," Hofstra Labor & Employment Law Journal: Vol. 36: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/hlelj/vol36/iss1/5
Olson Craig, James Stern, Joyce Najita, and June Weisberger. Rep. Strikes and Strike Penalties in the Public Sector , 1981.
Furman, Jonah. “New York City’s Teachers Union Doesn’t Remember How to Strike.” Jacobin, October 9, 2020. https://jacobin.com/2020/09/new-york-teachers-union-strike-united-federation-of-teachers.
