S.1227 (Spano) / A.8017

---

The Business Council of New York State, whose membership includes almost 4,000 member firms as well as hundreds of chambers of commerce and professional trade associations, has reviewed the above mentioned legislation and opposes its enactment.

This bill would amend the Labor Law and expand whistleblower protections beyond the already existing protections available for pharmacy employees in Section 740 of the Labor Law.

This bill is not necessary or appropriate because:

• it expands protection from employees who report actual employer violations to employees who report what they reasonably believe is improper quality of patient care. This would subject employers to potential legal action every time an employee wants the courts to judge whether their report about the employer was based on a reasonable belief. This would put a substantial and unnecessary burden on our court system.
• it adds new provisions allowing employees to refuse to participate in activities, policies or practices which, again, the employee believes are improper quality of patient care. This means that employees could refuse to perform their job duties until after a court decided that their refusal was or was not based on a reasonable belief. Needless to say, this suspension of work activity pending a court action would be extremely disruptive to the employer's efforts to provide goods and services to their customers and patients.
• it expands the scope of an alleged employer violation from the current limit within the labor law to any action that the employee "...reasonably believes constitutes improper quality of patient care." It would appear that there would not be any area not covered by this bill. Now, the only limit to what could be alleged would rest in the imagination of the person making the allegation of what they reasonably believe is improper quality of patient care.
• the bill generally introduces very vague language which would be open to broad interpretation which, rather than clarifying an issue, would instead introduce significant confusion.

For these reasons, The Business Council opposes this legislation and respectfully urges that it not be enacted by the Senate.