Fight The Taylor Law.

The Greater New York Local of the Socialist Party - USA calls for an immediate end to New York State's anti-union Taylor Law.

The 1967 'Public Employees-Fair Employment Act' made it illegal for any public employee or organization of public employees to go on strike, or even to " instigate, encourage, or condone a strike." That's right. Individual working people can be fined for so much as saying a strike is OK.

Even under capitalism, workers are SUPPOSED to have a right to bargin. How can they bargin when they have nothing to threaten? Doesn't that explain why so many NYC public employees go years without contracts? No limits are put on the coercive power of bosses, but public workers in this city can be forced to go to work by the police, forced to accept any pay and conditions the bosses demand. The 1967 law is just a retread of a 1947 law that was dumped after upstate millionare Governor Nelson Rockefeller found city officials wouldn't throw striking Transit Workers in jail as the law demanded, probably because the mayor knew the cops would have put HIM in jail if he tried.

It's time New York State recognizes that one of a working person's most basic human rights, the right to withold your own labor, can't be made a crime. When our rights are a crime against the state, then it's the bosses who should be in jail.
-- SPNYC 1/3/2006
spnyc(at)newyorksocialists.org
http://www.newyorksocialists.org.