Judges of New York, unite!
Frustrated over salaries that have been frozen for almost 10 years, a group of state Supreme Court justices are talking about starting their own union, The Post has learned.
In an e-mail dated April 7 that was obtained by The Post, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Wayne Saitta wrote to his colleagues that “a few of us in Brooklyn have been trying to put together an organizing effort,” but that to date, it had not gone anywhere.
Judge William Erlbaum expressed his support for the idea in much coarser language in an April 5 e-mail.
“There is some s- – – we should not eat,” he wrote. “It could prove to be a bad mistake for anyone to confuse the dignity and kindness of judges with weakness.”
Neither judge returned a call for comment yesterday.
“Dignity demands that we pursue our interests, wrote Judge Arthur Cooperman in an April 2 e-mail. “This is a crisis.”
Cooperman is currently presiding over the Sean Bell murder trial.
The e-mails were dated before the state’s chief judge, Judith Kaye, filed suit last week seeking a court-ordered raise for judges, who haven’t had a pay hike since 1999.
Saitta said he and some unidentified colleagues had even gone so far as to huddle with two unions about the possibility of joining their ranks.
“We did meet with representatives from [Local] 1199 and DC 37, but they were not interested,” he wrote. “It appears that there is much doubt that judges would organize.”
“We came to the conclusion that we would have to organize independently and then seek affiliation once we had an actual bargaining organization for a union to affiliate with.”
Saitta said they had tried to propose the idea at the last meeting of the statewide Association of Supreme Court Justices this past September, but “we were unceremoniously blown off by the leadership.”
Unionizing “would be a bad idea,” said a lawyer, who asked not to be identified because of the subject matter.
He said having a union would make the judges appear less independent, because then members could be beholden to the union’s wishes.
“It would be very unfortunate,” the lawyer said.
Hofstra University professor Monroe Freedman, an expert in judicial ethics, didn’t see any issues with judges organizing.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I don’t necessarily see any problem with it,” he said.
He called the odds of a union affecting a judge’s independence “pretty remote” and said the union could be an effective tool in combating a much bigger threat to the judiciary: “the inadequacy of their compensation.”
The $136,000 salary for the New York’s 1,250 state-level judges now ranks 49th in the country.