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By Bob Hennelly

New York State’s $237 billion dollar budget is a kind of Rorschach test. What you see in it depends very much on who you are. For the unions that represent essential workers, it’s a barometer of their clout in Albany a year after Covid was declared over — and after it sickened or killed so many of their members.

Unions appear to have done pretty well scoring project labor agreements for SUNY’s capital project, as well as the AI consortium. A coalition made up of 1199 SEIU and the Greater New York Hospital Association made progress on the state ending its practice of covering just 70 percent of the real cost of caring for the state’s millions of Medicaid recipients.

“1199SEIU is deeply proud of the work our members did this budget cycle to defeat proposed cuts and win a budget that ultimately makes significant investments in healthcare,” said George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU. “Medicaid is a lifeline for millions of New Yorkers, and taking the initial steps towards fully funding this program is a major achievement in the fight for healthcare equity.  We congratulate Majority-Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie for reaching a budget agreement that strengthens healthcare in New York.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul struck a hardline on Medicaid early on. “I’m going to address our spiraling costs and just tell you like it is,” she said during her January address presenting the details of her budget. “Our Medicaid spending exceeded our projections this year by $1.5 billion.”  

The governor’s spending proposal included a measure to weaken New York Labor Law 91 which makes it much harder for lawyers representing workers who are the victims of wage theft to hold the errant employers accountable. It didn’t make the final budget

“Low-wage, manual workers rely on their weekly pay frequency to keep their bills paid and food on the table,” said State Senator Jessica Ramos, chair of the Labor Committee. “The Governor’s proposal would have removed any hope for these workers to exercise their right of action, and I am proud that our conference wholly rejected the measure twice. I want to be clear: not paying your manual workers weekly is a form of wage theft, and we will not stand for wage theft in New York.” 

According to Ramos’ office, corporate behemoths face class action lawsuits including, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Walmart, Apple, Zara, Petco, and AMC Theatres, who would have “greatly benefitted from the governor's initial proposal.”

New York State’s SUNY Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn won a reprieve for a year from closure.

New York State’s AFL-CIO convinced Albany to revisit roll backs of public worker retirement benefits put on the books more than a decade ago by Gov. David Paterson and Gov. Andrew Cuomo looking to cut state spending. As Covid persisted, thousands of essential civil servants at municipal, county and state agencies took retirement early. In the era of the Great Resignation, and the Biden private sector job recovery boom, public employers now struggle to find candidates who willingly opt to work in the sector.

Mario Cilento, president of the New State AFL-CIO, called the passage of crucial Tier 6 pension reforms in the state budget “the most significant improvement for our public servants in more than 20 years.”

“It marks a momentous stride towards restoring fairness and retaining invaluable public sector workers,” he said. “New Yorkers rely on vital public services, which are only as dependable as the committed and dedicated public workers who provide them. From healthcare to education, emergency response to infrastructure maintenance, these services are the backbone of our communities, ensuring the safety, well-being, and prosperity of all New Yorkers.”

Budget makers in Albany also had to come to terms with a multi-billion dollar drop off in federal pandemic aid even as schools, hospitals and local social service agencies faced lingering after effects of the pandemic like truancy and a spike in child poverty set off when Washington rolled back the Expanded Child Tax Credit.

And then there was the Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s weaponizing of close to 200,000 migrants paroled in the U.S. at the southern border that he sent by bus to a New York City still wounded from Covid.

MEDICAID MESS

During the pandemic, the federal government required that nobody be removed from Medicaid, a lifeline for some 7.5 million New Yorkers — including roughly 65 percent  of whom were people of color — and over half of whom are employed. In 2023, SEIU 1199 and NYSNA cheered when Gov. Hochul championed a significant increase in Medicaid reimbursement rates. That increase built on the 2022 $10 billion allocation she touted as the “largest investment in health care in state history.”

This year, however, Gov. Hochul insisted on making $1.2 billion in Medicaid cuts  that she insisted were fiscally necessary even as dozens of the state’s hospital reported  being in considerable fiscal distress. 1199 SEIU and GNYHA, the leading hospital trade group,  joined forces mounting a blistering multi-million dollar issue ad campaign decrying the cuts. At dozens of locations across the state, thousands of union members and their supporters took to the streets in front of their hospitals to protest Gov. Hochul’s backsliding which would have resulted in a rollback in wages.

“The governor said cutback – we said fight back,” 1199SEIU members chanted in February amidst a raucous crowd that included hospital management New York-Presbyterian’s Columbia University Irving Medical Center. They directed their vitriol at Gov. Hochul, who they had celebrated  less than two years ago, as a health care worker champion. “We voted for her…and now she drops us,” murmured a voice in the crowd.

To break the impasse, Albany crafted a complicated plan to levy a $4 billion tax on New York State’s health insurance providers that would ultimately be reimbursed back to Albany via the federal government.

In an interview with City & State, Michael Ashby, a vice president of 1199 SEIU said the state’s long-standing formula, which only pays 70 percent of the total cost of a hospital stay for Medicaid patients, along with the planned cuts, reinforced the race-based health disparities that elected officials bemoaned during the pandemic.

“So, if I go to a hospital in a ZIP code where there aren’t many Medicaid patients, those hospitals get reimbursed at a higher rate. But what about if it’s a community like Washington Heights where people are on Medicaid and that’s where the cuts to Medicaid are directly affecting this community?” Ashby said. “Health care shouldn’t be based on the ZIP code you live in.”

The unions did not get everything they hoped for.

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union [RWDSU], which hoped to get the Retail Worker Safety Act passed requiring store owners invest in de-escalation and loss prevention training to address the wave of workplace assaults, were disappointed when Gov. Hochul opted instead for a  ‘law and order’ approach by increasing criminal penalties.

“I promised to fight the scourge of organized retail theft — and in this budget, we got it done,” the governor said. “Sophisticated organized retail theft operations are putting frontline retail workers at risk and reselling stolen goods on online marketplaces, and we're taking new steps to end this chaos.”

“We certainly understand that a law and order approach to this is certainly part of the solution, but it will only paper over the problem,” said Josh Kellerman, Policy Director with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “Ultimately, we have to have a holistic approach that is not only the police and the courts getting involved. Employers have a specific responsibility, and this is the big missing piece that they passed with the budget.”

A union survey found that only  seven percent of the companies whose stores are the scene of violent assault take any remedial action after the incident.

Kellerman noted that RWDSU employees were caught up in the May 2022 mass shooting at the Topps Supermarket where a white supremacist murdered ten Black customers.

“I mention the Topps shooting because this really does feel tied into a national political moment where we see racially motivated mass shootings targeting essential workers, but also the majority of people that died in that were customers,” Kellerman said. “This is a public health crisis. The vast majority of commerce is conducted in physical locations — a store. This is where the public convenes — in our schools and in shopping locations that have now become places of mass violence.”