New York has a $237 billion state budget, three weeks late.
Lawmakers added $4 billion in spending above the $233 billion Gov. Hochul proposed in January, and everyone packed the budget with all sorts of non-budgetary stuff, as usual.
But at the last minute, lawmakers ditched one Hochul proposal critical to small businesses: change a long-dormant state law that’s suddenly forcing companies to pay years’ worth of extra back wages to workers.
It may be obscure, but it’s an apt illustration of Albany’s dysfunction.
In 1890, lawmakers decreed that mining, manufacturing, “mercantile” and other companies should pay manual laborers every week.
The purpose, as the Legislature reiterated nearly a half-century later, was to protect workers from companies that would disappear before paying out any wages.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the New York Post
______________________
Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by HANS PENNINK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images