Helpless victims of hardhearted bosses? Just more casualties of corporate greed?
Hardly. These workers and more than 100,000 others all work for human service nonprofits, and the money in their paychecks comes from the city of New York. Their employers hold more than $3 billion in city contracts that pay them to care for many of the city's poorest, most powerless residents--mentally retarded children, the homebound elderly, teens in foster care group homes, parents with AIDS.
The fundamental mission of these employers--the city's biggest charities and social service nonprofits--is to help the most unfortunate, to extend a hand to the needy. But they are caught in the grip of a cruel dilemma. Their mandate may be to help the poor. But with tight contracts and huge payroll costs, they can't even keep their own employees out of poverty.
It's an inequity that a band of labor and community activist groups is determined to stamp out. Smack in the middle of a election season guaranteed to be the most chaotic in recent history, a coalition of mutually suspicious activist and labor groups have banded together to make living wage the litmus test of the 2001 municipal elections.
They've crafted a groundbreaking bill that goes far beyond the moderate measures that many cities have instituted. This living wage ordinance would force any business that gets contracts, subsidies or tax breaks from the city government to pay their workers at least $10 an hour--a proposal that would cover everyone from the janitors at Columbia University to child care workers in Bed-Stuy to the hot dog salesmen at Yankee Stadium. But it doesn't stop there. The bill would also require the city to pay contractors enough to offer their workers a decent salary, a "pass-through" increase in contracts that could hike the city budget by hundreds of millions of dollars. Already, the bill has the backing of some of the most powerful progressive interests in town--ACORN, the Central Labor Council, the Working Families Party, health care workers Local 1199, and the hard-bargaining janitors union Local 32B-J. They are putting together a campaign that is savvy, intricate and quite possibly doomed. In order to get a law passed this year, the fledgling Living Wage Coalition will have to pull off something close to a political miracle. And that's exactly what they are preparing to do.
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Before this year's Living Wage Coalition can make progress, it first has considerable damage to undo. To this day, nonprofits resent the 1995 living wage campaign, which forced them to take a public stand against their own workers.
The 1995 push was the brainchild of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national network of church-based grassroots groups led in New York by the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood. By all accounts, the Reverend was never one to ask for favors where a little public humiliation would do. Youngblood pressured unions, religious leaders and community organizations and politicians to declare whether they were for the bill or against it. "Reverend Youngblood ruffled a lot of feathers," recalls former City Councilman Sal Albanese, the first bill's sponsor.
