Cuomo's War On Unions

Expect a very bad four years if you are a member of a labor union in New York State:

Andrew M. Cuomo will mount a presidential-style permanent political campaign to counter the well-financed labor unions he believes have bullied previous governors and lawmakers into making bad decisions. He will seek to transform the state’s weak business lobby into a more formidable ally, believing that corporate leaders in New York have virtually surrendered the field to big labor.

And even as he girds for war, Mr. Cuomo, the state attorney general and an expert practitioner of political hardball, also plans to lavish attention on individual legislators, who he says are sick of being demonized and eager for accomplishment after years of gridlock and enmity.

In a rare extended interview, Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, insisted voters can believe he will succeed where other governors failed, saying he has the savvy and the experience to maximize the leverage of the state’s highest elective office. “I know these guys. I know them very well,” he said of the state’s political class. “I’ve played with them, I’ve played against them. I know this game. I know it extraordinarily well. I know what they’re capable of, I know their strengths and I know their weaknesses.”

Cuomo thinks that business and Wall Street have surrendered to labor?

What drug is he on?

Just in education, over the last ten years I have watched the teachers union cave on merit pay, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, the charter school cap, longer school days and longer school years.

I have seen my union grant a Tier Five pension for new hirees in order to get back two days of work. In fact, after Klein added another day at the end of the year, it turned into just one day.

Meanwhile I have seen the hedge fund managers and the Wall Street CEO's take bailout money and use it to hand themselves Christmas bonuses.

I have seen these same Wall Street criminals hijack public education with their backroom poker games and push public schools out of their own buildings so that the charter schools they back can have the space.

I have seen the bankers game the housing market and now the foreclosure market and stick the taxpayers with the bill, even as they engage in fraudulent activity and crime.

And Cuomo thinks labor is the problem?

Holy mother of mercy, the next four years are going to be very, very bad.

And if you're a teacher, well, listen to this news:

While his father once spoke of campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, Mr. Cuomo is campaigning in PowerPoint: he began the interview with a slide show describing his model for creating what he called a “new paradigm” to tackle the state’s ever-swelling budget.

New York, Mr. Cuomo argued, should move away from what he called the “block grant” model of spending, especially in areas like school aid, municipal aid and Medicaid. In each area, he said, he would cut projected spending but create pools of bonus money that can be won — by cities and villages, by school superintendents, by unions — in public competitions much like the federal Race to the Top education grant program.

Great - no more state aid grants.

Instead, everything will be a Race to the Top competition.

You can bet that if you want state aid for education, Cuomo is going to force you to add hours to both the school day and the year, substitute merit pay programs for salary steps and perhaps even change the teacher evaluation system to "All Test Scores/All The Time."

And this guy is the Democrat?