Opinion ID: 2118776
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Taylor Law Preemption

Text: Section 12-307 of the Administrative Code is entitled Scope of collective bargaining; management rights. Section 12-307 (a) (2)which derives from former section 1173-4.3 (Local Law 1 of 1972 § 10), which, in turn, derives from Executive Order 52 of 1967, which, in turn, derives from the Agreement negotiated by the City and the unions in 1966specifies that matters which must be uniform for all employees subject to the career and salary plan, such as overtime and time and leave rules, shall be negotiated only with a certified employee organization, council or group of certified employee organizations designated by the board of certification as being the certified representative or representatives of bargaining units which include more than fifty percent of all such employees, but nothing contained herein shall be construed to deny to a public employer or certified employee organization the right to bargain for a variation or a particular application of any city-wide policy or any term of any agreement executed pursuant to this paragraph where considerations special and unique to a particular department, class of employees, or a collective bargaining unit are involved. Section 12-307 (a) (4) of the Administrative Codewhich also derives from former section 1173-4.3 (Local Law 1 of 1972 § 10), which, in turn, derives from Executive Order 52 of 1967, which, in turn, derives from the Agreement negotiated by the City and the unions in 1966specifies that all matters, including but not limited to pensions, overtime and time and leave rules which affect employees in the uniformed police, fire, sanitation and correction services, ... shall be negotiated with the certified employee organizations representing the employees involved. In Local Laws 18 and 19 of 2001, the Council amended section 12-307 (a) (4) to include fire alarm dispatchers, EMTs and advanced EMTs and their respective supervisors within the definition of employees in the uniformed services. This changes the scope of collective bargaining and takes off the bargaining table the question of whether or not considerations special and unique to these classes of employees justify a variation from the citywide agreement regarding pensions, overtime and time and leave rules. In enacting Local Laws 18 and 19, the Council declared that special and unique considerations exist, allowing these employees to make an end run around collective bargaining. The Mayor correctly protests that the Council may not do this because section 201 (12) of the Civil Service Law (Taylor Law) confers upon him the exclusive authority to negotiate with municipal unions on the City's behalf, and local law may not supersede this authority ( see Civil Service Law § 212 [1]; see also Matter of Yonkers P.B.A. [City of Yonkers], 23 PERB ¶ 4519, at 4540 [1990] [city's mayor properly refused to implement pension benefit agreed to by city's legislative body and PBA and not negotiated or otherwise endorsed by mayor because a public employer's duty to negotiate rests not with its legislative body but with its chief executive officer, and any intrusion into the negotiations process by the legislative body must be by agreement of the parties]). The Council contends that the changes to the CBL brought about by Local Laws 18 and 19 are merely procedural and do not confer substantive terms and conditions of employment. To say that the scope of collective bargaining is merely procedural is to confer upon the Council powers and authority vested with the Mayor under section 201 (12) of the Civil Service Law. The Mayor has certain management rights allowing him to enforce limitations on the scope of collective bargaining. He is free to alter the scope of collective bargaining during negotiations with public employees, although he may not, of course, limit it more narrowly than the terms and conditions of employment outlined in the Taylor Law. The Mayor may negotiate away a management right by, for example, expanding the job titles exempt from the citywide agreement. The majority intimates that the Council may similarly cede a management right because Local Laws 18 and 19 have something to do with the procedure by which bargaining units are determined, which is a proper subject of local legislation, citing Civil Service Law § 206 (1) (addressing disputes concerning the representation status of employee organizations) (majority op at 31). Supreme Court similarly tried to characterize Local Laws 18 and 19 as somehow substituting for Civil Service Law § 207, a Taylor Law provision that a local legislature may supplant with its own substantially equivalent provisions and procedures. But Local Laws 18 and 19 do not address representation status as commonly understood. Disputes over representation status generally relate to which job titles properly belong in a bargaining unit, or which union properly represents a unit ( see McKinney's Cons Laws of NY, Book 9, Civil Service Law § 207, Notes of Decisions). Further, as the majority concedes, the CBL otherwise supersedes the Taylor Law's provisions for determining representation status. Importantly, section 12-309 (b) of the Administrative Code commits representation disputes to the Board of Certification, not the Council. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any local law authorizing a legislative body (rather than a mini-PERB) to make a unit determination would ever pass muster as substantially equivalent to the Taylor Law. Of course, the Taylor Law does not require a mini-PERB jurisdiction to develop its substantially equivalent provisions and procedures through collective bargaining. Historicallyand uniquelythis is simply what the City chose to do to preserve the delicate balance in the complex relationships and competitive interests typifying its public sector labor management relations. As a result, section 212 may very well authorize the Council unilaterally to enact a local law amending the Administrative Code's provisions and procedures in those areas where this statute specifically grants the power to legislate (e.g., representation status or impasse procedures). In short, I am not implicitly assert[ing] that the City's power to legislate ... extends only to ratifying agreements the Mayor and the unions have already reached (majority op at 31-32). I am asserting, however, that Local Laws 18 and 19 do not fit within any of those areas where section 212 authorizes the Council to act on its own. Specifically, they have nothing to do with the only such area even alluded to by Supreme Court and the majorityrepresentation status. The majority also argues that the Mayor's preemption argument proves too much because if the 2001 local law is preempted, the two-tiered system and its exemptions must have been bogus to begin with (majority op at 31). This proposition springs from the false premise that the scope of bargaining derives its existence and force from local law originating with the Council. In order to explain away a plainly inconsistent factthat the two-tiered system and its exemptions were in place from 1967 through the end of 1971 without benefit of local lawthe majority advances the novel notion that this was only because the original CBL author[ized] the Mayor to provide by executive order for both the general rule and the exception (majority op at 31). But Local Law 53 of 1967 simply deferred to the Mayor, stating that matters within the scope of collective bargaining were to embrace whatever he designated by executive order. Mayors had exercised authority over the scope of collective bargaining long before 1967. Indeed, Executive Order 52 of 1967 superseded Executive Order 49 of 1958, which granted various rights to employees, including the right to engage in collective bargaining ( see generally Ruffo, The Residue of Sovereignty in New York Public Employment, 39 Alb L Rev 165, 174 [1975]). The two-tiered system and its exemptions, expressed in section 5 of Executive Order 52, were not rooted in the original CBL. Instead, they were called for by provisions of the Agreement negotiated between the Mayor and the unions in 1966, which the Council later ratified when it incorporated section 5 into Local Law 1 of 1972. This was once widely acknowledged. As Eric J. Schmertz, a preeminent labor law expert and an original impartial member of the Board of Collective Bargaining observed: Certain provisions of the [CBL] are the result of collective bargaining relations between the City and its employees which existed prior to the enactment of the [CBL]. One of these is a section of the [CBL] which creates various levels of bargaining  (Schmertz, The New York City Fire Department Under the New York City Collective Bargaining Law, 3 Hofstra L Rev 605, 611 [1975] [emphasis added], citing former Administrative Code § 1173-4.3). The unions also once recognized that the Council did not have the authority unilaterally to amend section 12-307 of the Administrative Code to expand the definition of employees in the uniformed services. When the union representing district attorney investigators was frustrated in its efforts to slip free of the citywide agreement, it turned to the Legislature for relief. In 1989, the Legislature amended section 12-307 of the Administrative Code so as to include district attorney investigators among the employees in the uniformed services ( see Budget Report on Bills, Bill Jacket, L 1989, ch 776, at 18 [recommending veto because measure is an attempt to legislatively attain what was not successfully negotiated in the collective bargaining process]). To the dismay of a succession of Mayors, the Legislature may enact legislation that trumps a Mayor's position in collective bargaining. Until the majority's decision today, the Council was not similarly empowered. In sum, the Taylor Law legitimizes and protects agreements collectively bargained between a public employer and a public employee union, whether or not the agreement's terms, or some of them, are also recited in statute or local law ( see Civil Service Law §§ 204, 204-a). The majority concludes, however, that if a legislative body ratifies an agreement (here, the collectively bargained provisions establishing the two-tiered system), a fortiori, it must be empowered subsequently to amend what it has ratified (here, Local Laws 18 and 19). This proposition conflicts with the Taylor Law. For example, after the State finishes collective bargaining over a new contract with its public employee unions, the Legislature routinely amends the Civil Service Law to implement the agreement by (at a minimum) setting out the salary schedules that the Governor and the unions have agreed upon ( see e.g. L 2004, ch 103). No one would ever suggest that (absent some amendment to the Taylor Law) the Legislature might have authority to enact legislation revising these salary schedules unilaterally because they were initially ratified in legislation ( see Association of Surrogates & Supreme Ct. Reporters within City of N.Y. v State of New York, 78 NY2d 143 [1991] [recognizing role of Legislature in ratifying collective bargaining agreements and holding that, after having once ratified multi-year agreement, Legislature may not subsequently enact legislation altering negotiated payroll schedule even though annual appropriations are required]). Similarly, the Council may not expand the exemptions from the citywide agreement just because it codified in local law the scope of bargaining provision that the Mayor and the unions agreed upon at the bargaining table. As the Mayor laments, Local Laws 18 and 19 have put into play rights and obligations considered settled for nearly 40 years. Indeed, their enactment in 2001 likely signals the demise of the two-tiered system: in 2005, the Council adopted Local Law No. 56 (2005) of the City of New York to list numerous additional job titles in various departments, which the Council unilaterally deemed exempt from the citywide agreement. Because the Taylor Law prohibits the Council from operating as a freelance negotiator at liberty to make concessions on the scope of bargaining at the Mayor's expense, I respectfully dissent. Order affirmed, with costs.