1.0 - I. Introduction

• Jurisdiction: New York

I. Introduction

The growth of job protections and benefits for public employees in New York State was, in the beginning, a story of lobbying, informal negotiations, occasional strikes, and other associational activism for the purposes of obtaining improvements in the terms and conditions of employment.

Before the advent of collective bargaining and other protective legislation,³ the doctrine of sovereign immunity effectively blocked public employees from asserting contract and tort claims against their employers.⁴ By the time this obstacle was overcome, a formidable body of statutory law was already on the books regulating the public sector employment relationship. Consequently, the common law has played a lesser role in the story of public sector labor and employment law in New York than in the private sector.

In recent decades, however, there has been a relative decline in the importance of substantive legislation in New York as the source of public employee benefits and protections with the notable exception of pensions and interest arbitration. Following enactment of New York’s landmark Taylor Law and the New York City Collective Bargaining Law in 1967, which gave public employees the statutory right to organize and negotiate collective agreements, public employee organizations redirected their primary efforts from lobbying legislators and other public officials to formal negotiations at the collective bargaining table. This chapter...