CityAndStateNY.com
August 28, 2017
“THE CLC WILL HAVE A HEAVY FOCUS DURING THIS ELECTION SEASON ON DEFEATING THE QUESTION OF A STATE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION.” —VINCENT ALVAREZ, president of the New York City Central Labor Council Court fortified with Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch, unions are bracing for the worst. ON THE SURFACE, New York labor’s stance against a state constitutional convention would appear to cast unions as
BOB LINN Commissioner, New York City Office of Labor Relations
backers of Albany’s well-documented pay-to-play culture and a byzantine electoral system with some of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation. But to understand what’s at stake for labor, a close reading of the current state constitution is required.
C&S: Is President Donald Trump’s administration having an effect on organized labor in New York? BL: From New York City’s vantage point, we are continuing with the labor relations process that we’ve been doing for the entire administration. So we’ve been solving labor problems as they come before us. We’ve settled 99.6 percent of our labor negotiations. We clearly have to be mindful of what might happen in D.C., and so I think that we need to be conservative in our approach to our bargaining, but so far we’ve been continuing to do the things that we’ve been doing throughout the administration. C&S: The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association con-
Under the state constitution’s labor section, as framed in 1938, “No laborer, worker or mechanic, in the employ of a contractor or sub-contractor engaged in the performance of any public work, shall be permitted to work more than eight hours in any day or more than five days in
tract has expired, and District Council 37’s expires in September. What’s the status of those negotiations? BL: We’ve had meetings with the PBA; we’ve had bargaining sessions with the PBA. We’ve had initial conversations with DC 37, and we are exploring ways of going forward. We inherited every labor agreement expired by at least three years, some cases, five years. And I don’t think that is a good way to have your collective bargaining structure in place. You should be bargaining timely and you should be solving contracts as they expire. C&S: You switched things up last year, trying to incentivize city employees to focus more on preventative
health care services. Has that been effective? BL: It has indeed been effective for savings. We increased the charge substantially for using the emergency room while we have lowered the cost of visiting your primary care physician. We had exactly that impact, and last year we’ve had a dramatic (10 percent) reduction in the use of emergency rooms and increased utilization by primary care physicians. Nationally, health benefit increases have been at about 7 percent per year on average around the nation. We have reduced our increases in health care costs to 4 percent. That is a pretty dramatic moderation of the cost of health care increases in comparison to other employers nationwide.
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