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As City Minimum Wage Hits $15, Much to Celebrate and More To Do


de Blasio business visit

(photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


They may not know, but the million-plus people who crowd into Times Square on New Year’s Eve have reason to cheer the dropping of the ball because it will also signal rising wages. Beginning December 31, 2018, New Yorkers working minimum wage jobs in the city for companies with 11-plus employees will see their hourly compensation rise to $15.

But like all events in New York City, coordination and planning are needed to make this a celebration and not a disaster. Serious questions and profound possibilities surround this policy shift. The nearly 1.5 million people making a minimum wage in New York City will see their lives change markedly for the better. Workers already making slightly over $15, meanwhile, will have the opportunity to pressure their employers to better their own interests, yielding opportunity but also potentially conflict.

These changes mean big adjustments for all players in the New York economy. However, there are some relatively simple ways that government, both municipal and state, can help the New York City workforce and its servicers stay secure and effective through the transition.
One: help businesses adapt. Businesses have little in the way of resources, tools, FAQs, and how-to sheets for adapting to the minimum wage increase, and job-seekers lack access to public materials on searching for work in the changing market, with new expectations and barriers as well as earning opportunities. There also isn’t anyone outside of Albany, and specifically not in New York City Hall, charged with monitoring how businesses and workers fare during this transition: who is struggling and in what ways, and which decisions businesses and workers are making in the short- and long-term. But, administrative changes and public synthesizing of information can go a long way towards ensuring that the $15 minimum wage is as much of a victory as it should be — for everyone.

Two: secure the funds. City and state government bureaus must provide enough funding in their contracts with social service agencies to ensure agencies can afford to pay workforce professionals a living wage. The average human service professional in New York City made only $29,600 annually (in 2015 dollars), and advocates have pushed the city and state governments for contracts that meet cost of living needs to mixed success. To make this wage raise work, the people servicing employment relationships on the ground must be able to keep up.

Three: shine more light. New York City can do better compiling and sharing information, which would make this transition feel less like a shot in the dark. Workforce agencies don't currently have data that can shed light on who is being served, in what ways, by whom, to what effect and at what cost. Moving forward with the city's common metrics initiative could illuminate who is going through workforce programs and successfully attaching to certain jobs, better equipping professionals to match job opportunities with candidates in a new market.

Finally, this wage increase is promising but poses new questions for New Yorkers. Will the availability of internship opportunities, now more expensive, decline? Will higher compensation levels create a bigger barrier to entry for those who’ve been unemployed and want to get back to work? Will firms invest more in automation?

In order to make the most of this incredible sea change for working families, it’s on us as a city to deal with these questions and broaden the horizon of these possibilities to the best of our abilities. By taking the right steps, New York City can show the world once more what it can do.

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Stacy Woodruff is the director of The Workforce Field Building Hub.

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A Dog-Friendly City Must Adapt to the Times


chelsea winston house edit

photo via DogSpot


There you are, walking your dog in the neighborhood and you pass a new coffee shop that just opened in a long-vacant storefront. You really want to check out their lattes and support a local entrepreneur, but instead you keep walking because there’s no way you are leaving your dog tied up and vulnerable on the sidewalk just so you can get a caffeine fix. Sadly, this scenario – in which small business owner and responsible dog owners all get shorted – isn’t so hypothetical. It happens every day in New York City, where more than half a million dogs live and where nearly two-thirds of stores do not allow them inside.

That’s why we started DogSpot in a garage in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2014. Our communities needed a solution to this problem that no one was solving, so we designed a secure and comfortable spot for dogs to wait while dog owners briefly run into a store or restaurant. For more than two years, we operated a network of these secure, climate-controlled, smart dog houses on Brooklyn sidewalks, keeping dogs safe and driving business to local retailers. It wasn’t until we unexpectedly got a cease-and-desist letter from the Department of Transportation (DOT) – ironically sent while we were exhibiting at a Smart Cities Expo in Spain by invitation from New York City Hall – that we learned the city’s regulatory enforcement didn’t allow for this type innovative solution to this common problem.

So now, while pet owners and shop owners across the U.S. are enjoying the benefits of DogSpot, our hometown of New York City is out of luck, casualty of an antiquated regulatory approach.

Fortunately, unfortunate headlines like “She Had a Genius Idea, Then the City Showed Up” could soon be replaced by “New York City at Forefront of Urban Innovation” and “Dog-Friendliness Proves a Boon for Small Business Owners” thanks to the New York City Council. Last month, the City Council held a public hearing on a new bill from Council Member Rafael Espinal, Jr. (Intro. 886) that would clear the path for pet harbors like DogSpot to operate outside commercial businesses on city sidewalks.

The bill thoughtfully addresses concerns raised by DOT about obstructions by only allowing pet harbors in locations with very wide sidewalks and within a limited clearance from the building, making pet harbors no different than the sidewalk furniture and children’s rides that are currently permitted across the boroughs. Simultaneously, it would update regulations that understandably did not anticipate new technologies or urban design.

At the end of the day, the positive impacts of this common sense regulatory fix will be significant. One in seven households in our city have at least one dog and there are approximately 600,000 dogs across the five boroughs. This bill would give DogSpot members in Brooklyn access to a humane alternative to leaving dogs unattended, and provide dog owners in the other boroughs the same access to a safe option. And what’s more, local retail businesses – many of which struggle to make it in New York City – would no longer need to turn away customers with pets.

What the City Council has an opportunity to do with Intro. 886 is to simultaneously support small businesses, keep pets and sidewalks safe, and send the message that as technology evolves, New York City’s regulations actually can evolve along with it. Those innovators working to solve today’s urban challenges are watching and waiting to see if New York City is welcoming to modern problem solving and passing this bill now would be a clear signal that the answer is yes.

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Chelsea Brownridge is the CEO & Founder of DogSpot.

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Bans on Shackling Pregnant Women Don't Work; New York Must Do Something Else


criminal justice building


A federal lawsuit filed this month alleges police in the Bronx kept a pregnant woman shackled while she gave birth in February. Allegedly, doctors at Montefiore Medical Center warned that shackling a woman in labor poses high danger to a fetus, but the cops cited a manual that they said allowed them to do it.

If you’re thinking shackling pregnant women during childbirth should just be banned to prevent this barbaric practice, you’re wrong. Shackling pregnant inmates is already prohibited in New York.  

Securing metal clasps around a pregnant woman’s ankles has been illegal in the state for almost ten years.

In 2009, New York became the sixth state to ban restraints during birth when then-Governor David Paterson signed the Anti-Shackling Law, which prohibits shackling during labor, delivery, and recovery. When it was amended in 2015, the law prohibited shackling of women eight weeks post-partum and while being transported in custody.

The problem is that few police or corrections officers appear to obey this law. The Corrections Association of New York, a reform and advocacy organization, interviewed 27 women who gave birth while in custody of the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision after the 2009 shackling ban went into effect. A full 85% of them said they had been shackled while pregnant in flagrant violation of state statute.

Aside from the fact that the practice is inhumane and impedes normal labor and delivery - women need to move around for pain management and cervical dilation for vaginal deliveries -  the health effects of shackling women are harmful for both mother and child. Shackles all but destroy prompt and uninhibited diagnosis of vaginal bleeding, and being able to discern preterm labor pain from other treatable conditions.

Some may call it fortuitous that such a lawsuit was filed right now, when shackling of pregnant women is getting increased scrutiny. A ban on shackling is a provision of the federal FIRST STEP Act, the contentious prison and sentencing reform bill passed by the House of Representatives and pending before the Senate.

Back in September, when the Senate version of the FIRST STEP Act remained unknown, three female Representatives (Karen Bass (D-CA), Mia Love (R-UT) and Katherine Clark (D-MA)) introduced the Pregnant Women in Custody Act of 2018, which would have created a national standard of care for pregnant women in all federal prisons and required the Department of Justice to collect health data on that population. Last year, an anti-shackling plank was included in the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act (sponsored by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Durbin). The Pregnant Women in Custody Act and the Dignity Act were never voted on in committee, much less in the larger chamber.

But even if these bills had been made law and applied to all incarcerated women, not just federal prisoners, officers probably would have ignored them. What’s happened in New York proves that even codified prohibitions of this conduct don’t prevent it.

The risk of litigation -- other women suing like Jane Doe is -- has little hope of curbing these abuses. For one, Jane Doe isn’t incarcerated now so she doesn’t have to clear those monumental hurdles to file a lawsuit in federal court imposed on inmates by Prison Litigation Reform Act. Women who are shackled during pregnancy must exhaust internal remedies before their claims of civil and human rights violations can be presented in federal court. Those tasks, on top of nursing (if in a facility that has a nursery) or wrestling with the separation from their children, are often insurmountable for new mothers. Besides, officers are often indemnified by their employers - and your tax dollars.

Since bans alone won’t cut it to stop officers from shackling women, more needs to be done, like amending the Anti-Shackling Law by criminalizing this conduct so that individual guards face some accountability.

Dangers hide in the criminalization of any activity, namely the chance of unjust prosecution and conviction. That risk might be higher in paramilitary systems like law enforcement, where officers of lower rank must follow the orders of supervisors or risk discipline or termination.

But those risks are minor enough that they can’t be fairly weighed against the prospect of physical harm and death for a mother and her newborn from shackling.

As long as there is little to no consequence for officers who break this law, we will continue to put women and children in harm’s way. A ban on shackling women needs to be more than symbolism or a moral stance. When it’s still happening despite the fact that it’s unlawful, we need legal force to create practical effect.

Next month, Democrats will control both houses of the New York State Legislature; Republicans won’t be able to block meaningful criminal justice reform. Amending the Anti-Shackling Law to include accountability for officers who continue these human rights violations is essential to any positive change in New York correctional culture.

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Chandra Bozelko is the Vice President of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and member of the junior board of the Women’s Prison Association. On Twitter @aprisondiary.

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