The New York Post gave up a lot of editorial real estate this morning to a lengthy but mostly silly argument against organizing home day care workers. Robert Ward of the Business Council of New York State claims the “powerful public employee unions” (like the UFT) should not be allowed to add new members as this would be some kind of burden on the state.
It gets worse: the next argument is that home-based day care workers stand to lose all Federal funding if they join a union. Who knows where he got this idea. At least three states have already granted unionization rights to home day care workers and federal funding was never at issue.
The Business Council attacking low-wage, mostly female and minority workers who care for the state’s most vulnerable children is not a pretty picture. But Ward’s not done.
After the usual attacks on public employees for soaking the taxpayers, and an unflattering picture of TWU chief Roger Toussaint, we finally get to the money graph: Roger and Randi Weingarten want to amend the Taylor Law, and this could weaken the employer advantages that law now protects.
The Taylor Law does not penalize state or city employers in any way for failing to engage in negotiations or for bargaining in bad faith, but it imposes draconian penalties if unions strike. This is evidently more than fine with Ward and the Business Council. In fact, he writes, “The law does need reform–but to enhance protections for the public, not for the unions.”
Evidently the Business Council views the hundreds of thousands of public employees who clean their streets, educate their children, police their neighborhoods, run their trains and put out their fires as a special interest group, not part of the public of their state.
This is why the Republicans are going to lose the governorship and probably a lot of other state offices. They speak for the “public” as if the public wasn’t union members, state and city employees, poor women, children in need of quality care and average folks seeing their paychecks shrinking.
What part of “sheesh” doesn’t Ward understand?
