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UNIONS INFLICTING LABOR PAIN ON GOV

ALBANY – Little more than a month into his first legislative session, Gov. Paterson has come under a ferocious attack from organized labor – earlier, bigger and more personal than those that buckled his predecessors.

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Enraged at Paterson’s refusal to discuss an income-tax hike as an alternative to $9.5 billion in budget cuts, unions have opened both barrels on their longtime ally. In television campaigns, mass mailings and grass-roots rallies, they’re firing directly at the Democratic governor.

“Obviously, the stakes are a lot higher. The intensity is a lot greater,” said Stephen Madarasz, spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association. “This is the most intense since the first two years of the Pataki administration.”

The governor’s $121 billion budget has come under assault from all corners of organized labor.

The CSEA has already spent “several hundred thousand dollars” on an advertising and lobbying campaign to turn back Paterson’s calls for wage freezes, deferred paychecks and a new, bare-bones pension tier.

The Public Employee Federation, which represents mostly white-collar government workers, has spent another $250,000. United University Professions, which represents SUNY workers, has splurged $400,000.

The 600,000-member New York State United Teachers bankrolled a $775,000 campaign last summer against Paterson’s unsuccessful effort to cap school property taxes.

The union expects to launch a new advertising campaign this week, slamming Paterson’s plans to cut school aid by $698 million and delay further funding increases promised by his predecessor, Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

The unions’ campaigns are also noteworthy for unusually blunt criticism of the governor himself.

“I can’t believe Governor Paterson is the one making this proposal,” says a hospital worker in the $1 million-a-week ad campaign backed by the SEIU 1199.

Paterson has called the ads “misleading and factually inaccurate.” But the governor, who has $4.9 million in his campaign war chest, says he doesn’t plan a similar effort to defend plans to cut health-care spending by $3.5 billion.

“The governor has called on all New Yorkers to join him in fixing our budget problems, but instead of working to find solutions, some groups have chosen to lobby for their own narrow self-interests by using the same old playbook,” said Paterson spokesman Errol Cockfield.

bill.sanderson@nypost.com