New York – Federal Judge Continues to Block One-Day-a-Week Layoff of State Workers

New York – A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking New York’s governor from imposing furloughs on about 100,000 state workers and withholding their raises.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn had temporarily blocked the furloughs two weeks ago. He is barring Gov. David Paterson and lawmakers from submitting or enacting short-term funding bills with those provisions.

The unions challenged the provisions as violations of the U.S. Constitution.

One-day-a-week furloughs were part of one short-term funding measure approved by the Legislature, and raises have been withheld in several.

Kahn says in his order Friday that he’s not saying the state can’t take steps to address a fiscal crisis, but he doesn’t believe these measures would be upheld.

Just before the judge made the decision, Gov. David Paterson blasted the “moral” argument he says public employee unions made in court this week is arrogant, and that workers’ aversion to furloughs proves they are “soft.”

“They didn’t just say the law compels the governor to pay the workforce, they said that the governor is saying that there’s a crisis and that’s ridiculous, that there is no crisis,” Paterson told Joe Donohue on WAMC’s Roundtable. “And I think that’s outrages. And I hope that whatever decision the judge makes, and I hope that the favorable decision is at a time when were supposed to get $250 million of workforce reductions from the public employees, they gave us nothing. Not a dime.”

The governor acknowledged that the unions agreed to create a new pension tier, but repeated his displeasure that they flatly refused to forgo scheduled raises or lag their pay, as he asked.

“All they have done is say we’ve made other suggestions and the governor won’t listen to them,” Paterson said. “The other suggestion adds to their coffers by creating more jobs for public employees…The legal decision is for the court to decide, but the moral decision is that this group thought they were so special that they didn’t have to share in the economic crisis with the rest of us.”

Paterson said he was particularly irked because the refusals come at a time when he is attempting to cut schools and hospitals.

“That’s what a recession is. I think this generation has become so soft that if anybody begrudged anything for any short period of time, it is as if it’s cataclysmic. We’re living on the same planet that 35 years ago the city of New York nearly went bankrupt and the state of New York suffered severely because of that, and we’re only 80 years out from a Great Depression. You look at those newsreels, those people would have given anything to be in a position where they lost eight days over the period of an entire year. I’m jsut saying that nobody wants to do this, and I’m not saying this isn’t pain….but they closed the schools in California. What happened to the workforce there?”