At the beginning of the 2005 legislative session, The Business Council wrote to all members of the state Senate and Assembly, listing what our member businesses had identified as the critical jobs issues facing the state. As the legislative session unfolded, we monitored action on specific legislation linked to those priorities — some of them bills we believe would have helped New York's job growth, and some of which we believe would have hurt us. (For a list of 2005 bills and a description of each, click here.)

The Vote for Jobs Index is based on each legislator's action (or non-action) on each of those issues. Voting for a bill The Business Council favors (or against one The Business Council opposes) yields a score of +1 on that issue; a score of -1 results if a legislator votes against a bill the Council favors, or for a bill the Council opposes. Additional points (both + and -) may be assigned for legislators who take a leadership role for, or against, pro-jobs priorities. An overall 2005 score was developed for each legislator on the issues, and a letter grade was assigned to each legislator's record, distributed in line with the quintiles of possible scores from +22 to -22. (For more details on exactly how the rating system works, click here.)

Importantly, the Vote for Jobs Index includes non-action in the rating system. Many pro-business bills are simply never allowed to come to a vote in one or both houses of the Legislature — so no votes on them are ever recorded. For anybody who wants to track the action of individual legislators, this presents a dilemma: How do you rate votes, when there are no votes? Whether by accident or by design, this system of non-action has for years enabled legislators to avoid personal accountability on many issues.

The Vote for Jobs Index brings accountability to the system by taking the position that non-action is an action, and will be rated. If a legislator has not voted on an issue, she or he is rated a "0" on that issue — regardless of whether the reason for the non-vote was absence, or that the leadership bottled the bill up in committee and refused to bring it to the floor. One of the consequences of this in the 2005 ratings is that most members of the Assembly have lower ratings than their counterparts in the Senate — simply because this year, fewer pro-jobs bills were allowed to the floor in the Assembly at all.

Some may say this is unfair. But the unfairness lies in a system for which the members themselves are ultimately responsible. Individual members elect their leadership, and vote on the rules for their house. Assembly members are free to bring a "motion to discharge" to force a floor vote on a bill (indeed, the 2004 Index included one such motion in the Assembly in the rating system). In future years, simply bringing more pro-business bills to the floor will enable many legislators to earn higher ratings.

One final point: Vote for Jobs New York is not intended to endorse, or oppose, individual legislators for re-election. Individual voters, as well as interested organizations, will have a range of criteria they consider in weighing the question of whether an individual lawmaker should, or should not, be returned to Albany. We believe the legislator's voting record on issues with an impact on jobs should be one of those criteria — but there may be others of equal, or greater, importance to you. Our purpose is simply to give you one more tool to use in holding your elected representatives accountable.