NEWSBYLAUREN KELLEY

After a year of delays, false starts, and toe-tapping from the city's labor community, the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act finally got its much-anticipated initial City Council hearing last week. Wondering what went down? We've got you covered.

For one thing, living wage supporters were out in full force. Hundreds of people, including faith and community leaders and City Councilmembers, turned up at a rally organized by Living Wage NYC. "We are not here just to survive. We want to live," said Brooklyn Councilmember Charles Barron, addressing the cheering crowd. "New York City is too expensive to be paying us some cheap wages."

According to NY1, the hearing itself was "packed" and featured some "testy exchanges" between Councilmembers on either side of the issue. Perhaps the best soundbite of the hearing came from Councilmember Jumaane Williams, who noted, "the [Bloomberg] administration is so full of it, you might want to consider a high-fiber diet." Snap.

The administration was clearly hoping that the biased study for which it paid $1 million to known anti-living wage researchers would dull interest in the living wage bill. But that didn't work at all. If anything, the rigged report -- which purported that the bill would lead to mass job loss -- just added fuel to the fire for pro-living wage advocates. A counter-report published by the National Employment Law Project and other groups on Thursday further stole the administration's thunder; it found that "errors in methodology and analysis" in the city-funded report "render the study fundamentally flawed." (No surprise there, but it's good to have it in writing!)

As for a decision from the City Council, that will be harder to come by, it seems. Despite popular support for the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act, only 30 Councilmembers have come out in support of the bill -- not enough to override an assured veto from Mayor Bloomberg. Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the "wild card" in this debate and the target of our petition, remains undecided. "When I've made a decision, I'll have made a decision," she said on Wednesday, unhelpfully.

Sign our petition urging Quinn to take a stand for hard-working New Yorkers.

Photo credit: Living Wage NYC

No one expected a glowing assessment of a New York City living wage bill in the report funded by the NYC Economic Development Corporation -- after all, there have been concerns about the outcome of this report since the study's research team was announced last August. As Crain's New York reported on August 12:

"[T]he very administration commissioning the study has repeatedly argued that living and prevailing wage provisions would hinder development and kill jobs, creating the perception that the outcome is already determined.

And the selection of Charles River [Associates] added fuel to the fire because two of its leading consultants—David Neumark and David Macpherson—are outspoken critics of wage mandates, though Macpherson is not on the living wage study team."

OK, well that was fast. Just a few days after I questioned the City Council's foot-dragging on a hearing for the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act, Council Speaker Christine Quinn finally set a date. So mark your calendars -- the New York City living wage bill will get its initial hearing on Thursday, May 12. Crain's New York reports:

"The hearing is likely to draw a throng of union and clergy members, who have argued the bill is needed to help plug a widening income gap in the city. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is mobilizing proponents of the bill to attend. And it's likely to attract a crowd from the city's business community as well, which is beginning to muster an opposition campaign, led by an alliance of the city's five chambers of commerce."

The good news about the hearing being pushed to May (it had been tentatively slated for April) is that we now have some extra time to mobilize support for the bill and convince Speaker Quinn that she should endorse it. (Maybe we can leverage some of the awesome pro-worker energy we saw at the recent New York City Walmart hearing.)

Quinn has still not taken a stance on the measure, which remains five votes short of the two-thirds majority that will be needed to override an all-but-assured veto from Mayor Bloomberg. Her endorsement is critical to getting those last few votes. You can sign our petition urging Quinn to support the measure here.

Something else to note is that New York's Economic Development Corporation is expected to release a report on the potential economic impact of the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act shortly before the May 12 hearing. You'll recall that a recent study by UC Berkeley Labor Center Chair Ken Jacobs concluded that a similar law enacted ten years ago in San Francisco had a positive effect on the city. As Jacobs writes, "San Francisco's labor standards laws do not appear to be deterring retailers who want to locate in the city or developers looking for tenants or project financing." Hopefully the New York researchers look at that data.

Although the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act would not do nearly enough to boost the paychecks of hard-working New Yorkers  -- it would merely ensure a $10-$11.50 hourly wage for a small percentage of workers -- it would be a critical step in the fight for labor rights in New York City. Let's hope Quinn comes to see it that way.

Photo credit: 2bsquared designs

Back on March 11, I posted this:

"NYC's Living Wage Bill to Get Hearing in April."

Well that didn't take long... Two weeks after a sprawling City Limits article asked if a living wage law could be the next New York City council 'battleground,' and one week after the launch of a petition urging Council Speaker Christine Quinn to support such legislation, Quinn has said that the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act will get a City Council hearing in April!

"We are looking at April for a hearing, though no specific date has been set," Quinn spokesperson Maria Alvarado told the Daily News.

Flash forward to mid-April, and the council has yet to set a date for a hearing.

A lot of New Yorkers are upset at the prospect of a Walmart opening within the five boroughs, which could destroy jobs and drive down wages.

Earlier this week, some of those citizens gathered at the corporate headquarters of the Related Companies, a developer that is reportedly in talks with Walmart to become its first New York City landlord, to voice their their concerns through song and dance.

Organized by Walmart Free NYC, the group put on a cute anti-Walmart flash mob to both target Related Companies executives and increase awareness among other New Yorkers of Walmart's potentially deleterious effects on the city.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is best known as a civil rights crusader who bravely fought against racial injustice in the 1950s and '60s. A perhaps lesser known fact about King is that he was also a tireless supporter of the American labor movement as a whole, and was in fact fighting for a living wage on the day he was assassinated in 1968.

That's what King's son, Martin Luther King III, told a crowd gathered in New York City on Monday to mark the 43rd anniversary of his father's death.

"In his view, it was both a moral necessity and a civil right that every working American should earn enough to live a decent life and not worry about basic survival," King III said at the event.

Friday marked the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 New York City workers, the majority of them young, immigrant women, died an unnecessary death.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory managers had locked the building's exits and stairwells -- at the time, a common practice ostensibly intended to keep workers from stealing. But the locked stairwells also made it impossible for workers to escape when a fire broke out in a pile of scrap fabric. Many women jumped from the upper floors of the building to their deaths, while others perished inside. The youngest victims were just 14 years old.

A poll conducted recently by Quinnipiac University has found that most New York City residents (68 percent) believe Walmart's lower prices would hurt smaller nearby businesses.

So that's... a bad thing for Walmart, right? Well you wouldn't know it from some of last week's headlines about the poll, declaring that "New York voters want Walmart."

There is an element of truth to that claim. It stems from one of the poll's other findings -- that 74 percent of New Yorkers think Walmart's lower prices would benefit New York shoppers.

But here's the problem with pronouncing New Yorkers pro-Walmart based on that information: just because New Yorkers think the retailer would bring lower prices to the city doesn't mean they think Walmart would be good for New York City overall.

Here at the Poverty in America blog, we've recently drawn comparisons between the paid sick leave bill that was sadly defeated in the New York City Council last year and the living wage law that's being floated in the council right now. Namely, we've been noting that Council Speaker Christine Quinn declined to endorse the paid sick leave bill, and has now similarly refused to throw her support behind the living wage bill.

Quinn's silence isn't random; she's declined to take a position on either bill because of pressure from the city's business interests. One of the main business groups that spoke out against paid sick leave was the 5 Boro Chamber Alliance, a group of chambers of congress from around the city. And guess who's fighting the living wage bill now?

With a hearing on New York City's proposed living wage legislation coming up in a matter of weeks, it's time to seriously ratchet up our efforts to convince the New York City Council that living wage laws are a good thing. And what better way to do that than to look at cities that have implemented similar laws, to positive effect.

First, a re-cap of what this legislation is all about. The Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act will require businesses that rent space in large developments receiving city subsidies to pay their workers at least $10 per hour, which is considered the living wage for single New York City residents with no dependents. That's not much money, considering that New York City is the most expensive city in the country, but it is at least higher than the $7.25 minimum wage. The argument against the bill, being tossed around by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others, is that the legislation will put a damper on development and job growth in the city.