When mortal enemies Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio speak with one voice, listen. The warring governor and mayor are united in management and fiscal sanity against a cockamamie idea floated by would-be state chief executive Cynthia Nixon.
Change the state's Taylor Law, she says, to let public employees strike without penalty.
We credit Nixon for helping push Cuomo in the right direction on marijuana legalization, but what is she smoking?
The state Taylor Law, passed a half-century ago, quite deliberately struck a careful balance. It gave public workers the right to organize and bargain collectively with state and local governments _ while laying out a series of tough, escalating economic sanctions when they strike against the public they're duty-bound to serve.
Nix the second half of the deal and Nixon would not only tip the balance of power, and finances, further in the direction of public-sector unions that already rule much of the roost in Albany.
She'd potentially open the way for work stoppages by teachers, sanit men, child protection workers, public hospital employees, teachers and so on; she'd only exempt first responders. The last painful strike to hit the city, a transit workers' stoppage in 2005, paralyzed the city and cost then-boss Roger Toussaint's union more than $2 million.
Without those penalties, who knows how long it would've dragged on? And she has the gall to style herself the savior of the subways?
