A bill headed to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk would make major changes to how school superintendents, town supervisors, and mayors handle bad behavior by public employees. New Yorkers face punishing consequences if she lets it become law.
Since the 1950s, state law has guaranteed public workers accused of incompetence or misconduct a number of protections, including the right to a hearing under rules designed to shield them from arbitrary or unjustified firing.
But the legislation, which passed the State Senate and Assembly amid a flurry of hundreds of bills earlier this month, would change the procedure local officials must follow when they want to suspend or fire an employee. It would force officials to hire an arbitrator, who typically charges thousands of dollars per day, to oversee any hearing, and it would force local governments and school districts to keep paying an accused employee in virtually all cases until a hearing can be held.
The groups pushing the changes — public employee unions, primarily New York State United Teachers and the Civil Service Employees Association — insist they're necessary to ensure a “fair” process. But they’ve failed to muster a single example where the decades-old law, with its guardrails and appeals, has left a worker mistreated. Their suggestion that people are being fired arbitrarily is especially hard to fathom given the difficulties schools and municipalities have had, amid a tight labor market, in hiring to meet basic operational...
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