In recent years, activists and city officials have successfully linked wage standards to city subsidies in large individual development initiatives, including the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning and the Willets Point, Coney Island and Hudson Yards redevelopment plans. In December the City Council rejected a city-subsidized redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, after the mall project’s developer, Related Companies, refused to guarantee a minimum pay rate of $10 for all jobs there.
In the wake of the debates over those projects, Mark-Viverito said, “We have to look at this citywide. It can’t just be project-by-project, piecemeal.” The bill is New York's effort to exert control over how companies doing business with the government pay their employees.
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In New York, Sonn’s organization helped create a law—signed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002—that mandates a living wage for employees of companies doing contract work for the City of New York. Sonn has also consulted on the current prevailing wage effort, and on a related bill proposed in the last Council session but not yet reintroduced. That law would require recipients of economic development subsidies to pay a living wage to employees in addition to building service workers.
“I think the principle is, if we’re investing taxpayer subsidies, we should be asking developers in return to create quality jobs for low-income workers,” Sonn said.
Similar efforts, though, have met with stiff opposition from business and development groups nationwide. In Pittsburgh, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl vetoed an early version the council’s bill, and then refused to sign a revised version. Even as he allowed it to pass into law, he objected that imposing wage restrictions would drive new business and development money away to lower-wage cities.
In New York, Mark-Viverito said her office is planning to push the finance committee to schedule a public hearing on the issue. Although she's heard only rumblings so far, she’s expecting opposition to her bill.
In a statement released on March 29, Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said the industry group opposes mandated wages. “It will ... lead to higher office rents for city agencies because it would restrict the options for the city,” Spinola said, among several objections.
Despite the local bill’s many co-sponsors, however, it does not have the support of a veto-proof majority and the mayor. Bloomberg's take on the bill is unpredictable, but he expressed strong opposition to wage demands in the Kingsbridge Armory plan, calling that project’s defeat “disappointing and irrational”.
A few weeks ago, David Lombino, a spokesman for the city’s Economic Development Corporation, confirmed a report, first published in Crain's New York Business, that the EDC is commissioning a study of wage- and subsidy-related issues to determine the feasibility of government regulations.
Lombino declined to offer details, but he said an outside consultant would be chosen to talk with “stakeholders” including organized labor and developers. But selecting that consultant, conducting a study and issuing a report could take until early 2011.
