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Opinion

Prevailing Wage Extension Would Kill Jobs and Limit Housing for New Yorkers


gov cuomo moynihan

(photo: governor's office)


If there’s one thing that New Yorkers can agree on, it’s that we should always strive to create new jobs, not take them away. Amazon’s recent decision to withdraw its planned “HQ2” from Long Island City is an example of us failing on this front. However, public officials still have an opportunity to redeem themselves by protecting local workers from a proposed prevailing wage expansion.

Discussions are currently underway in Albany to extend prevailing wage requirements to private construction projects and could cost New York City thousands of jobs. Elected officials should heed the warnings of community leaders and push back against powerful unions that are advancing their own agenda at the expense of New York’s working class.

The dangers of expanding the prevailing wage to private work projects are numerous. First, advancing this initiative neglects to consider the negative consequences it will have on the city’s working families. In the past, Governor Cuomo has said, “Construction with public subsidies should be subject to the prevailing wage so they’re built right, they’re built fairly, they’re built union.” However, there’s no guarantee that this requirement will result in projects being built right and fairly—instead, the only thing it assures is that non-union workers are forced out of the hiring pool as developers are forced to hire union.  

As a result, any efforts to extend the prevailing wage to private projects directly impacts workers of color, who make up the majority of the non-union workforce. Per industry data, roughly three quarters of non-union workers are either black or Latino and live in one of the city’s five boroughs. This is in part due to the fact that unions have historically imposed barriers to entry for people of color, which persist to this day. Just two months ago, for example, six African-American engineers at the LaGuardia Airport renovation project filed a lawsuit against the Operating Engineers Local 15 chapter for alleged discriminatory hiring practices and treatment by union supervisors.

Beyond the detrimental effects it would have on minority workers, instituting a prevailing wage requirement at private projects would actually diverge from the dominant trend in the city’s construction industry. According to our analysis of building permit numbers provided by the city, approximately 80 percent of private construction work is now being done by non-union workers.  

Additionally, these workers have secured benefits on par with those of union members. On average, they earn $20 per hour, competitive health care packages, and 401(k) packages that allow them to secure their futures. Therefore, contrary to some misconceptions, opposition to prevailing wage does not equate disregard for workers’ rights.

Expanding the prevailing wage would also have a harmful effect on housing opportunities for many of these non-union workers. New York has an affordable housing shortage, and a prevailing wage will only make this housing crisis worse. The Independent Budget Office found that a prevailing wage requirement would increase construction costs by 23 percent. Additionally, such an increase would significantly alter Mayor de Blasio’s plan to create 80,000 desperately needed new affordable housing units, or simply cost an additional $4.2 billion.   

Ultimately, those same hard-working New Yorkers who are being left out of prevailing wage discussions are the ones who stand to be affected most by it. Our elected leaders should stand up to powerful union interests and their agenda by securing the economic well-being of the construction industry and the workers that build it up.

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Clark Peña is Director of Advocacy at the Construction Workforce Project. On Twitter @CWPNYC.

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Addressing the Crisis of Family Separation Here in New York


reunion hug prison visit


It is time to address the crisis of family separation. This time, it’s not about the humanitarian emergency on our nation’s southern border, but our own homegrown crisis that affects New York’s approximately 80,000 children with a parent in prison. Most of these children deeply miss and want to visit their mothers or fathers, yet distance is a barrier, and many of New York’s 54 prisons are not accessible by public transportation.

Time and again, constituents from across the state have asked us for help. Grandmothers like Mrs. Coleman who was unable to take her grandchildren in Brooklyn to see their mother when she was incarcerated near the Canadian border. She once drove through the night so as not to miss school and work, her grandchildren asleep in the back, and scarily, almost fell asleep at the wheel. Children like Jeremiah and Jonathan, who used to see their father monthly when he was an hour away by MetroNorth, but now have no affordable way to travel 10 hours to see him. And Brianna and Isaiah, from Buffalo, who have seen their mother only once since she was moved to Taconic Correctional Facility, almost 400 miles away.

There are four bills before the New York Senate and Assembly that would address these issues: the Visiting Bus, Proximity, Restoring 7 Day Visiting, and Codifying Visiting bills will improve children’s access to their parents, strengthen family connections, and promote the correctional and public safety goals of rehabilitation and successful reentry. Many prison officials—including former Corrections Commissioner Brian Fischer—report that visiting improves the prison environment, promotes program participation and rehabilitation, and increases the likelihood of successful reentry.

The Visiting Bus bill restores free transportation for families visiting a New York State Prison. In 1973, in the aftermath of the Attica Uprising, New York State undertook a series of reforms that included these free visiting buses. The buses operated for 38 years until their funding was eliminated from the state budget in 2011.

Visiting buses are more cost-effective and less onerous on families if people need not travel great distances to visit a loved one. The Proximity bill will place parents in the prison as close to their children as possible if the parent, the child, and the child’s caregiver also agree, and only after the state corrections department’s existing assignment criteria of security, health, and programming needs are satisfied.  

When prison visit rooms are open every day, families have more flexibility to visit as well as to visit two days in a row, making the most of their time and resources they spent to travel to the facility. Only maximum security prisons currently offer visiting every day. The Restore 7 Day Visits bill would remedy this. New York State has long been a national leader in offering in-person visiting. The Codifying Visiting bill ensures in-person, contact visits are a right throughout New York that cannot be replaced by video visiting.

Taken together, these bills strengthen a lifeline between parents and children who often grapple with their parent’s incarceration in isolation, fearing someone will find out and treat them differently as a result. Visiting lessens this isolation and stigma, maintains the parent-child relationship, and allows children to see others in the visiting room and realize they are not alone.

This is not simply a downstate issue. Today, 60% of incarcerated women and 50% of incarcerated men in state prisons come from areas outside of New York City. It affects all of us, and it is up to all of us to ensure that no family will have to choose between bringing a child to see his or her parent or putting groceries on the table.

Just as Mrs. Coleman and her grandchildren have asked us for help, we urge our colleagues in the Legislature and Governor’s office to pass these bills, fund the visiting buses, and strengthen this lifeline for thousands of children and families.

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Assemblymembers Carmen De La Rosa and David Weprin are a member and the chair, respectively, of the New York Assembly Committee on Correction. On Twitter @CnDelarosa & @DavidWeprin.

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Lobby Laws Should Empower the Grassroots, Not Big Money


alb gov cuomo

(photo: Governor's Office)


Imagine two New Yorkers heading to Albany for a day of advocacy.

One is a lobbyist with multiple clients, traveling to the Capitol in Amtrak business class for the third time that week. She’s spent a career working behind the scenes with elected officials trying to influence legislation and get favorable treatment for her clients. The other is an entry-level employee at a homeless shelter, sitting in a coach bus filled with clients and nonprofit service providers. It will be his first-ever meeting with an elected official.

The average New Yorker understands that these two New Yorkers— a lobbyist and a nonprofit employee—have very different roles in our political system. Why is Governor Cuomo trying to treat them as the same?

Currently, professional lobbyists must report who is paying them, which government officials they speak with, and which laws or regulations they are trying to influence. This ensures government officials know who they are talking to and taxpayers know who is spending large amounts of money to influence the government.

To follow these regulations, most lobbyists have compliance staff who attend mandatory trainings, read and follow the 92-page lobbyist regulations, track everyone’s lobbying time and expenses, file at least 6 reports a year, and administer “reportable business questionnaires” to the lobbying firm’s partners and managers. Other firms pay upwards of $500 per month to outside compliance experts who perform these services.

But the governor's budget plan would impose a stringent regulatory regime on any organization spending $500 or more to reach out to lawmakers. The likely result: grassroots organizations will be unable to meet with lawmakers, leaving the legislative corridors clear for big spending lobbyists to wield their influence and set the agenda.

Nonprofits often rely on their own staff or volunteers to communicate with elected officials. Current regulations require nonprofits to file the same reports as lobbyists if they spend $5,000 or more in a single year. At the $5,000 threshold, this reporting requirement for nonprofits is already a bit over the top: because no money changes hands, there is less chance of influence peddling. And mandatory disclosure for nonprofits seems duplicative, as a legislator already knows the employee of a local social services organization speaks on behalf of that organization. Already, this $5,000 threshold covers more than 99% of all lobbying expenses—this part of the system works.

The governor’s proposal would reduce this registration trigger to a mere $500 per year. A nonprofit that pays $1,000 to rent a bus to take volunteers from New York City to Albany for one lobby day would be treated like a professional lobbyist. So would a nonprofit whose executive director has a few meetings with her local City Council members to advocate for criminal justice reform that would affect local teens.

Why does it matter when nonprofits are being treated like lobbyists? It’s because the cost of compliance is too high. Thinly staffed grassroots organizations do not have compliance staff. If they file a single report late, they can be fined $2,000. Faced with the steep cost of compliance, many will go silent. They will not take community members to Albany, or explain to elected officials how proposed laws will play out in the real world.

If Governor Cuomo gets his way, pretty soon we won’t be able to imagine two different types of advocates heading to the State Capitol. His regulations would ensure that only well-off special interests have access to their legislators for years to come. This proposal should not pass.

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Laura Abel is Senior Policy Counsel at Lawyers Alliance for New York. Sharon Stapel is President and CEO of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York. Michelle Jackson is Deputy Director of the Human Services Council of New York.

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