NYS Taylor Law: Strike Penalties, Triborough, and Janus

The NYS Taylor Law, formally the Public Employees’ Fair Employment Act, is New York’s governing statute for public-sector labor relations. It gives state and local government workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively, sets up an independent board to referee disputes, and flatly prohibits strikes under penalty of lost wages and lost union privileges. If you work for any level of government in New York, this is the law that shapes your paycheck, your working conditions, and what you can and cannot do when negotiations break down.

Who the Law Covers

The definition of “public employer” is deliberately wide. It includes the state itself, every county, city, town, and village, school districts, public colleges and universities, public authorities, and any other body that exercises governmental powers under state law.¹ Draw a paycheck from any of those employers and you are a public employee for Taylor Law purposes.

Two groups sit outside the bargaining protections. Managerial employees are excluded when they formulate policy or play a significant role in preparing for negotiations, administering labor agreements, or handling personnel matters that require independent judgment. Confidential employees are excluded when they assist those managers in a confidential capacity. Members of the state’s organized militia are also excluded from the organizing and bargaining provisions, though the strike ban still reaches them.¹

The managerial and confidential designations sweep in a broad range of jobs, from senior administrators and policy advisors to specialists in law, medicine, and computer science.² Workers holding one of those designations cannot join a bargaining unit or be represented by a union under this law.

The Right to Organize and Bargain

Section 202 is the foundation. Public employees may form, join, and participate in any employee organization they choose, and they may equally refuse to do so.³ Nobody can force you into a union, and nobody can punish you for staying out. Both protections run in both directions: neither the employer nor the union can retaliate for either choice.

Once an employee organization has been recognized or certified as the exclusive representative of a unit, Section 203 gives its members the right to negotiate collectively over terms and conditions of employment, including how grievances get handled.⁴ The employer must actually engage. Refusing to come to the table, or showing up with no real intent to reach agreement, is illegal.

What Is and Isn’t On the Table

Bargaining subjects break into two categories, and the difference matters. Mandatory subjects — wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment — must be negotiated before an employer changes them. Unilaterally cutting pay, altering shift schedules, or changing working conditions without bargaining is an improper practice. Permissive subjects are topics either side may raise but neither can insist on to the point of impasse. Pushing a permissive subject that far is itself a violation. Whether a given topic falls on the mandatory or permissive side has been worked out case by case through PERB decisions over the decades.

Any agreement that comes out of negotiations must include a prominent notice that provisions requiring legislative approval or additional funding do not take effect until the relevant legislative body acts.⁵ Public-sector bargaining lives with that reality: the people across the table often cannot commit taxpayer money without a separate budget vote.

The Triborough Amendment

Section 209-a(1)(e), known as the Triborough Amendment, is one of the law’s most practical protections. It makes it an improper practice for a public employer to refuse to continue all the terms of an expired contract until a new agreement is reached.⁶ When a contract expires, the status quo holds. The employer cannot strip benefits, freeze step increases tied to the old contract, or change working conditions just because the calendar ran out.

There is one catch. Triborough protection disappears if the union has engaged in a strike during the negotiations, which gives the employer far more room to change terms on its own.⁶ The linkage is intentional: the legislature traded away the strike weapon in exchange for contract continuity, and violating the strike ban forfeits that trade.

Improper Practices

Section 209-a lists conduct off-limits to both sides. Charges get filed with PERB and function like unfair labor practice claims in the private sector.

Employers may not coerce, restrain, or retaliate against employees for exercising their Section 202 rights; interfere with the formation or administration of a union; discriminate to encourage or discourage membership; refuse to bargain in good faith with a certified representative; refuse to maintain expired contract terms in violation of Triborough; use state-appropriated funds to train managers in methods of discouraging organizing; or deny an employee union representation during questioning that could lead to discipline.

That last one is worth pausing on. If you reasonably believe questioning could lead to discipline, you can insist on having a union representative present before answering, and the employer must give you a reasonable amount of time to get one.⁶ The right does not extend to criminal investigations.

Unions have their own list. They cannot interfere with employee rights, refuse to bargain in good faith, or breach their duty of fair representation.

The Strike Ban and Its Penalties

Section 210 is the provision the Taylor Law is best known for. It flatly prohibits any public employee or employee organization from engaging in, causing, instigating, encouraging, or condoning a strike.⁷ No exception exists, no matter the grievance. This is the central bargain: public workers get organizing and bargaining rights, and in return they give up the right to walk off the job.

What a Striking Employee Pays

The best-known consequence is the two-for-one penalty. For every day or partial day on strike, the employer deducts twice that day’s pay from later paychecks.⁷ A five-day walkout costs ten days’ wages. Deductions begin no earlier than thirty days and no later than ninety days after the violation is determined, and the employee receives no pay for any day on strike. On top of that financial hit, a striking employee can be removed or otherwise disciplined for misconduct.

What a Striking Union Pays

A union that PERB finds responsible for a strike can lose its dues-deduction privileges. PERB sets the forfeiture for a fixed period or indefinitely, weighing factors like willfulness, the effect on public health and safety, and the union’s financial resources.⁷ Losing automatic dues deduction hits hard, because the union has to collect from every member by hand.

Courts can also enjoin employees back to work, and if the union defies the order, contempt fines follow under the Judiciary Law. If those fines outrun the union’s cash and securities, PERB can order dues deductions to continue despite the forfeiture so the money flows straight to the court.⁷ One safeguard exists on the union side: PERB can treat “extreme provocation” by the employer as a mitigating factor in setting penalties.

How Deadlocks Get Broken Without Strikes

Because striking is off the table, the law provides a structured way out of impasse.⁸ The first step is mediation. PERB assigns a neutral mediator who tries to help the parties close the gap. The mediator cannot impose terms.

If mediation fails, PERB appoints a fact-finding panel of up to three public members. The panel reviews positions and financial data from both sides and issues public recommendations.⁸ The recommendations are non-binding, but they land in public, which creates political pressure on whichever side rejects them.

Police officers, firefighters, and certain other law enforcement personnel end up somewhere different. If mediation does not resolve the dispute within fifteen days, either party can petition PERB to send the matter to a public arbitration panel with one member chosen by each side and a neutral public member chosen jointly. The panel’s decision is binding.⁹ The legislature carved out this track because prolonged public-safety disputes create risks the general process was not built to handle.

The Public Employment Relations Board

PERB is the independent agency that makes the law work day to day.¹⁰ Its jurisdiction runs across the full life of a public-sector labor relationship: resolving representation questions and drawing bargaining-unit boundaries, investigating and adjudicating improper practice charges with the power to issue cease-and-desist orders, administering the mediation and fact-finding and arbitration processes, and determining strike responsibility and setting penalties including dues-deduction forfeiture.

PERB decisions carry legal weight. A party that ignores a cease-and-desist order can be held in contempt, and courts generally defer to PERB’s factual findings unless they lack substantial evidence.¹⁰

What Janus Changed for Dues and Non-Members

For decades the Taylor Law let unions collect “agency shop fees” from non-members in a bargaining unit, on the theory that non-members should share the cost of representation they were legally entitled to receive. In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court held in Janus v. AFSCME that compelling non-consenting public employees to subsidize union speech violates the First Amendment, overruling its own 1977 precedent.¹¹

New York amended the Taylor Law effective April 2018 in response. Employers must begin deducting dues within thirty days of receiving a signed authorization, and electronic signatures now count; revoking authorization requires a writing that follows the terms of the authorization itself.¹² Unions must still represent non-members in contract negotiations and in administering the agreement, but they are no longer required to represent non-members in disciplinary grievance arbitrations (where the employee has the right to proceed independently), in investigatory questioning, or in statutory proceedings. Unions can now offer legal, economic, or job-related benefits beyond the collective bargaining agreement exclusively to dues-paying members. Employers must notify the union when an employee is hired, promoted, or transferred, and must give the union access to meet with new employees during work time.

The practical result is that unions lost guaranteed non-member revenue but gained tools to make voluntary membership worth choosing. The core duty to represent every unit member in bargaining remains; the line between what members and non-members get everywhere else has sharpened considerably.

1
New York State Senate. New York Civil Service Code 201 – Definitions
2
Office of Employee Relations. Management/Confidential (M/C)
3
New York State Senate. New York Code CVS – Civil Service Law 202 – Right of Organization
4
New York State Senate. New York Code CVS – Civil Service Law 203 – Right of Representation
5
New York State Senate. New York Code CVS – Civil Service Law 204-a – Agreements Between Public Employers and Employee Organizations
6
New York State Senate. New York Code CVS – Civil Service Law 209-a – Improper Employer Practices and Improper Employee Organization Practices
7
New York State Senate. New York Civil Service Code 210 – Prohibition of Strikes
8
New York State Senate. New York Code CVS 209 – Resolution of Disputes in the Course of Collective Negotiations
9
New York State Senate. New York Civil Service Code 209 – Resolution of Disputes in the Course of Collective Negotiations
10
New York State Senate. New York Code Civil Service Law 205 – Public Employment Relations Board
11
Justia Law. Janus v. AFSCME
12
New York State Senate. New York Civil Service Code 208 – Rights Accompanying Certification or Recognition