The Governor’s Office of Employee Relations (GOER) was established by Article 24, Section 650 of the Laws of 1969: "The legislature hereby reaffirms its policy to promote harmonious and cooperative relationships between the state and its employees to protect the public by assuring, at all times, the orderly and uninterrupted operations and functions of state government; and recognizes that furtherance of such policy requires creation in the executive department of an office of employee relations with staff and skills requisite to act as the governor’s agent in conducting collective negotiations, to assure the proper implementation and administration of agreements reached pursuant to such negotiations , and to assist the governor and direct and coordinate the state’s efforts with regard to the state’s powers and duties under the public employees’ fair employment act."
On one recent afternoon, four of GOER’s longest-serving employees reminisced over lunch about the "old days" of the agency. Coincidentally, all four had begun their careers with the agency as secretaries and moved through the ranks to become professional staff. Their recollections were mostly personal, but all agreed that the agency and State government as a whole had undergone a significant amount of evolution since the Taylor law was enacted in 1967.
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GOER initially began with Director Abe Lavine, two Assistant Directors and three secretaries – the term “support staff” had not yet been coined – and borrowed employee relations practitioners from agencies with extensive expertise in particular areas. Over time, many of these borrowed staff became full-fledged GOER employees. Prior to GOER’s inception, wage and benefit matters for State employees were determined by three individuals: Alton Marshall, Secretary to Governor Rockefeller, Dr. Norman Hurd, Director of the Budget, and Ersa Poston, Civil Service Commissioner. “We were all kind of figuring it out as we went along,” one early secretary recalled, “No one had done this in New York before, so all of the rules and procedures were groundbreaking.” The other unanimous memory was of long, hard hours–until dawn and over more weekends than anyone cared to recall–especially in the agency’s early years. The agency’s first major involvement was in determining unit designations, consisting of deciding which titles would fall into which bargaining units. “We would come to work in the morning, and when five o’clock came around, we’d be told ‘you’re not going home tonight,’” said one of the agency’s earlier stenographers. “We were working these terrible hours, with no chance to go and get any supper. After a while we got smart and brought in some peanut butter and crackers.” After units had been designated, the next step was to determine which unions were going to represent which units. The initial communique from GOER went to 30 different unions. The first written union contract ran from April 1, 1969 to March 31, 1971 between the State and the Police Benevolent Association, and covered the Noncommissioned Officers, Investigators and Troopers. Many issues were decided in “departmental negotiations,” and only those which pertained to all bargaining unit members were decided at the unit level. Now the trend is more toward a universal agreement with all unit members that includes issues which only pertain to a few. |
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GOER’s charter was so nebulous in those early days that the agency’s filing system consisted of two file folders, labeled “Correspondence 1" and “Correspondence 2.” “When they finally got around to ‘Correspondence 3,’ we figured that we had enough to go on to set up subject files. Until then, no one knew what those subjects would be.” Another “old-timer” who started with the agency in 1980 recalled that one of her first experiences with the agency was delivering some paperwork to the 11th floor of Agency Building 2, and opening the door to find a wall of cardboard boxes, stacked from floor to ceiling, all marked “1979 Corrections Strike.”
All of the actions undertaken by the agency can be traced back to GOER’s responsibility, stated in the legislation, “... to protect the public by assuring, at all times, the orderly and uninterrupted operations and functions of state government ...” When labor trouble arose in the State’s correctional system, GOER directed each agency to develop written contingency plans on what they planned to do in emergency situations. Now, agencies submit their contingency plans for possible disruptions due to Year 2000 issues.
Some of the more indelible memories of GOER’s
early days included:
Witnessing Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald’s visibly emotional reactions to incoming news during the September, 1971 Attica prison uprising;
Working around the clock, bringing cots, refrigerators and other essentials into the office during the April-May 1979 correction officers’ strike;
The agency’s involvement in the 1980 Olympics, where GOER served as on-site employee relations consultants for the Olympic Organizing Committee, and building on that experience to assist the Olympic Regional Development Authority implement collective bargaining;
Establishment of Joint Labor/Management Committees to focus on issues of common interest in a less confrontational arena;
The evolution of the National Association of State Directors of Employee Relations (NASDER) from the original IPA grant for the Northeast Directors of Employee Relations (NEDER);
The evolution of the Statewide Grievance Tracking System (GTS) from an IPA grant program to the first electronic application selected by the State Archives and Records Administration for collection; and
The CSEA secretaries went on strike and took the elements out of their IBM Selectric typewriters.
Another area in which the agency’s evolution was apparent was in its technology. When GOER first started, the state-of-the-art in technology was a Magnetic Card Selectric Typewriter. One of the early staffers used to come in early to try and find a parking space (yes, Albany had parking problems even before the Empire State Plaza was built), and with her extra time, taught herself how to use this device. For the most part, though, the typewriter was the standard equipment in use for document processing, and the term “cut and paste” meant literally cutting a piece of one document and pasting it over part of another document, then covering the seams with “sno-pake” so that the surgery was invisible when the final product was photocopied. That same staffer now has a Pentium II PC in her office, connected to an agency-wide network and the Internet. She prepares her documents by word processing software, integrates spreadsheet and data files into them and prints them on a laser printer. Unfortunately, however, the photocopier still won’t collate correctly without human intervention...
As lunch progressed, one of the women noted, “This isn’t painting a pretty picture of GOER’s early years.” “Well,” another agreed, “treating support staff like fixtures was the way it was back then. Things have changed tremendously in this agency. Now, support staff are treated as part of the team, and their contributions are respected.”
Some of GOER’s past directors were mentioned, and one of the common themes was that each of these people left their own unique mark on State policy. Each seemed to have a specific area of interest that was focused upon in their era. The bargaining process itself has changed over time as well, but another part of GOER’s lasting legacy are the proactive policies, programs and procedures that GOER helped to put in place, such as onsite child care centers for State employees, incorporating support for the concepts of comparable worth and pay equity in the State’s method of compensation, and adoption of policies to tie what were previously longevity increases to evaluation of an employee’s performance.
Now that GOER has amassed a large body of knowledge and expertise in public sector employee relations matters, our next thirty years will be ushered in by a focus on ways to disseminate that knowledge and expertise to those who have need of it. GOER is in the forefront of State agencies using new technology to deliver our services to our constituency, and tackling those workplace issues that use of that new technology has brought to the fore. The next thirty years will undoubtedly continue GOER’s benchmark of “service through excellence and integrity.”
