Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

State Workers’ Union Rejects Contract, Risking 3,500 Layoffs

ALBANY — The second-largest union of New York State employees has rejected a package of wage and benefits concessions negotiated by the Cuomo administration, blowing a hole in the state budget that could now prompt the largest wave of layoffs in two decades.

The union, the Public Employees Federation, which represents 56,000 state workers, announced on Tuesday that its members had voted 54 percent to 46 percent against the five-year contract in mail-in voting over the last several weeks. Nearly 70 percent of the membership cast ballots, officials said.

The labor pact, reached in July, would have imposed a three-year freeze on wages and higher health insurance costs in return for protection from broad layoffs for two years. That deal was virtually the same one that the largest union of state workers, the Civil Service Employees Association, approved in its own vote last month.

The president of the Public Employees Federation, Kenneth Brynien, said union members were ready to make sacrifices given the state’s shaky fiscal condition. But he said a majority of workers concluded Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was not being reasonable in the concessions that he sought.

“The cuts that are demanded of them in this tentative agreement were just too many, and they cut too deep,” Mr. Brynien said at a news conference in Manhattan on Tuesday. “The sacrifices were too great, and they said, ‘Enough is enough.’ ”

The labor vote roiled the capital, where Mr. Cuomo’s aides waited barely two hours before announcing that they planned to proceed with laying off 3,500 workers. The administration said it would begin notifying most of those employees on Wednesday. The layoffs would amount to the largest wave of job cuts since the early 1990s, when Mr. Cuomo’s father, Mario M. Cuomo, was governor.

“In this economic reality, rising state work force costs are unsustainable,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. Referring to federation members, he added, “I urge them to reconsider.”

Mr. Cuomo’s advisers made clear that they believed Mr. Brynien and other union leaders were to blame for the rejection of the agreement. Howard B. Glaser, the director of state operations, said in a statement that the vote represented “a failure by P.E.F.’s leadership to effectively communicate the benefits of the contract to its members.”

“Layoffs could still be avoided,” Mr. Glaser said, “if P.E.F. clearly articulates to its members the benefits of the contract as well as the consequences of rejection and schedules a revote.”

Labor leaders spent the past several months trying to convince state workers that the concessions, including the first-ever furloughs and a requirement that workers pay a larger share of their health insurance premiums, were worth accepting in order to win some protection from layoffs. They were seeking to avoid the same fate as their union counterparts in Connecticut, where state workers in June rejected a labor deal, prompting a budget crisis.

Mr. Cuomo’s budget, approved by lawmakers last winter, relied on $450 million in so-called work force savings. The governor said he would achieve those savings either through labor negotiations or broad layoffs, giving him significant leverage in his talks with workers fearful of losing their jobs.

But some federation members were vocal in their criticism of the tentative agreement, which they said was overly painful and did not provide strong enough layoff protections in return for the concessions. Wages were to be frozen for the first three years of the pact, with raises of 2 percent in each of the following two years; the protections from layoffs would evaporate after the first two years.

Mr. Brynien gave another example of what many union members considered an unfairness: the governor’s refusal during the legislative session this year to seek the extension of a temporary income tax surcharge on high-earning residents. That position put Mr. Cuomo at odds with other Democrats and labor.

“The state should not be demanding this level of sacrifice from us while it’s not demanding those same sacrifices from the wealthiest New Yorkers,” he said.

On the union’s Facebook page on Tuesday, some workers reacted to the vote by applauding their fellow union members for standing up to what they saw as mistreatment from Mr. Cuomo. Others said they were outraged that a majority had voted to reject the contract knowing that jobs were at risk.

“I knew it would be close; I didn’t know which way it would go,” Kathy D’Arminio, council leader of Division 399, a branch of the federation in Binghamton, said in an interview. “I think people were unhappy with a five-year contract, people were unhappy with the furlough days. And the insurance premiums were another biggie.”

“I think we need to get together and decide where we’re going to go,” she added. “We want to get back to the table as soon as possible.”

Several hundred federation members were only days away from being laid off when the union reached its tentative agreement with the governor in July.

But the layoff threat from Mr. Cuomo did not appear particularly intimidating to all federation members, many of whom hold white-collar jobs and tend to be more highly paid than the members of the Civil Service Employees Association.

“They looked at it and said, why should I give up anything, and that’s a fairly compelling argument if you don’t care about the people losing their jobs,” said Edmund J. McMahon, senior fellow at the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a research group that favors reduced government spending.

Mr. McMahon said he was not surprised that federation members rejected the contract, because state law locks in incremental pay increases after a public contract expires and before a new one is agreed upon. Preserving the status quo also locks in other aspects of the current contract, which expired at the end of March. And for the most part, he said, workers have a sense of whether their own jobs are at risk.

“They all know where they are in the pecking order,” Mr. McMahon said. “They have a pretty good idea who’s going to lose their job, and most of them can say it’s not going to be me.”

Mr. Brynien said he had asked Mr. Cuomo and his negotiators to return to the bargaining table and awaited their response. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, struck a note of sympathy with the union, saying that he hoped a resolution could be reached between the administration and the union.

“I do not wish to see layoffs,” Mr. Silver said in an interview. “I would hope that something can be accomplished in avoiding those layoffs.”

Danny Hakim contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: State Workers’ Union Rejects Contract, Risking 3,500 Layoffs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT