By Steve Levy
Once again, an exposé on the outrageous salaries of public employees on Long Island was published and, once again, we can bet the farm that not a damn thing will be done about it by our state or local representatives.
The article noted how pressure from the public unions on Long Island and New York has led us to the point where a “pool of Nassau County employees making more than $300,000 nearly doubled last year, after Suffolk County saw a similar spike the year before, a Newsday analysis found. A group of 178 current Nassau employees took home between $300,000 and $457,000 last year, up from 91 the year before. Suffolk saw a similar trend in 2023, when 258 employees made more than $300,000 versus 81 the previous year…Nearly 240 Suffolk employees made more than $300,000 in 2024.”
Newsday quoted Lillian Clayman, a labor history professor at SUNY Old Westbury. Politicians gain power by satisfying union demands, Clayman said, describing the practice as “quid pro quo.” Nassau and Suffolk unions are “very vocal about who they support and don’t support,” she said. “Any politician worth their salt who is looking for votes,” she said, is going to support good union contracts.
Ar Rafee of the Empire Center for Public Policy stated the following: “The higher pay you see is kind of a product of how strong the [union] bargaining units are,” he said.
They’re absolutely correct in their analysis that these outrageous salaries, overtime and pensions are a direct result of the undue influence of municipal unions on the elections of candidates for elected office.
So how do we mitigate the influence of these municipal unions? One way is to legally challenge the concept of municipal unions donating to the elected officials who will negotiate their contracts as being a violation of the Constitution’s Guarantee and Equal Protection clauses.
The Guarantee Clause prohibits measures that farm out the decision-making powers of management, says constitutional attorney Philip Howard. That’s what happens when contracts tie the hands of managers to implement efficiencies.
Secondly, as we have stressed at the Center for Cost Effective Government, the argument could be made that taxpayers are placed at a disadvantage vis-à-vis public employees because the employees’ union is able to legally influence the elected officials who are sitting on the other side of the negotiation table by handing them a donation.
That’s why both Franklin Roosevelt and union leader Samuel Gompers took positions that opposed the creation of public unions.
There is another way that avoids court challenges. It is through the use of the public financing system, which is now in place on the state level and other jurisdictions. A simple condition can be tied to the acceptance of public funds, whereby no one can accept the public funds unless they first agree to refuse donations from the municipal unions.
Another solution to the huge pensions bulked up through excessive overtime is to ban overtime payments from being factored into the base of an employee’s pension.
The state Legislature limited the use of overtime for these purposes with the Tier 6 legislation that took effect in 2012. But when no one was looking last year, they started to reverse these reforms.
Our center’s analysis noted that, if overtime were prohibited as of this day for all employees who retire in the future, state taxpayers could save $50-$80 billion over the next two decades.
The problems have now been identified, as have the solutions. The only question remaining is whether there will be the political will to effectuate them.
Steve Levy is Executive Director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.”