Ribbon-cutting and more ahead (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
It'd be foolish to bet against New York City, but a full and robust comeback from the COVID-19 crisis is not guaranteed without bold action. It’s increasingly clear that the city’s recovery isn’t like any other. Companies are delaying return to work plans, the 10.2% unemployment rate is among the highest of any major city in the country, and the rates of joblessness among New Yorkers of color and young adults are particularly alarming.
Meanwhile, no other city is coping with as many structural economic challenges brought on by the pandemic. The rise of remote work and the slow recovery of tourism to the ongoing disruption in retail and the severe blow dealt to the arts disproportionately threaten essential parts of New York’s economy.
Putting New York on course for a lasting and equitable recovery will not only require bold action, but also solutions that are new, innovative, and creative. Fortunately, the massive turnover in city government taking place in less than four months—as well as new leadership in Albany—presents an incredible opportunity to take critical steps toward recovery. We’ve already seen many primary election winners proposing big new ideas for building a stronger and fairer city.
The Center for an Urban Future recently published a blueprint for an equitable recovery that features concrete policy ideas from a diverse mix of 175 engaged New Yorkers. Some of the nearly 250 ideas we received would help create jobs right now or support the New Yorkers hardest hit by the pandemic, while others would lay the foundation for a stronger and more inclusive economy over the long run.
While each idea is worthy of consideration, we think the following eight warrant swift action from current and soon-to-be elected city leaders.
1. Pair tech-savvy CUNY students with small businesses that need help adopting technology (S. David Wu, President, Baruch College)
Many small businesses are still hanging on by a thread and need urgent help modernizing their operations with e-commerce, digital marketing, and better financial planning. The city can help make them more competitive in the long-run by creating a matching service that pairs businesses with talented, digitally-savvy CUNY students who are rooted in the communities facing the greatest ongoing needs.
2. Make NYC a global capital of public health (Seth Pinsky, CEO, 92nd Street Y)
As a result of the pandemic, millions of dollars in new public and private investment are poised to flow into the public health sector, resulting in thousands of new, well-paying jobs. This means investing in hospitals and the healthcare system and finally making good on the promise of New York becoming a leading hub in commercial bioscience. And unlike many other parts of the city’s economy, most of these jobs can’t easily be done remotely.
3. Spur the return to offices by supporting public programming that reinvigorates business districts (Larisa Ortiz, Managing Director, Streetsense)
To lure office workers back, the city should support new public amenities and programming in these districts—including new options that aren’t found in most residential neighborhoods. For example, New York should take a page from Vancouver, which has turned alleys into brightly painted spaces with basketball courts and foosball tables, and Montreal, which created interactive, musical swing sets.
4. Spur economic development in underserved communities by making long-overdue public realm improvements (Purnima Kapur, Chief of University Planning and Design, Harvard University)
Economic development officials can spark economic investment, small business growth, and job creation in low-income communities across the five boroughs by making public realm investments like upgrading sidewalks, creating new pocket parks, and improving lighting. Streetscape improvements like these often serve as catalysts for economic development, but too many of the city’s hard-hit neighborhoods have historically been left out of these local place-making projects.
5. Break the logjam around housing development in NYC with a grand bargain around housing and jobs (Rafael Cestero, President, Community Preservation Corp)
The pandemic has only amplified the need for more affordable housing. It’s time to forge a grand bargain by creating a citywide structure that eliminates the power of individual groups or local representatives to scuttle projects because of micro-issues, reallocates housing vouchers to create deeply affordable housing at a mass scale in the communities that need it most, and mandates local hiring on all major projects involving city land or capital.
6. Provide new income supports for NYC’s fast-growing (but low-wage) direct care workforce (Jodi M. Sturgeon, President, PHI)
The industry already employs more than 320,000 New Yorkers, and the aging city population makes it near certain that the number of jobs will grow significantly in the decade ahead. But the sector also pays among the lowest wages of any industry. The city should establish a Home Care Jobs Innovation Fund, providing workers with transportation funds, scholarship programs, and retention bonuses, while also making new investments in career training for direct care workers to improve their job quality and economic prospects.
7. Create an NYC Climate Corps (Tonya Gayle, Executive Director, Green City Force)
Teens and young adults across the city have been far more likely to lose work during the pandemic than other New Yorkers. The city can help thousands of these young adults get on track by leveraging federal infrastructure funds to create an NYC Climate Corps, which would also crucially help the city prepare for the impacts of climate change.
8. Invest in quality childcare for New Yorkers in workforce training programs (Plinio Ayala, President and CEO, Per Scholas)
With 400,000 New Yorkers unemployed and many industries facing a slow road to recovery, the city should help out-of-work New Yorkers acquire new skills so they can transition into industries that are growing. But this will require addressing a barrier that has long prevented many low-income New Yorkers from enrolling in workforce training programs: a lack of affordable childcare.
The next mayor and new leaders across city government will need a lot of good ideas in the year ahead to ensure that the city’s nascent recovery takes hold and accelerates. To build a stronger and more equitable economy over the long run, city leaders should tap into the ingenuity and experience of our fellow New Yorkers who understand how to best support the city’s diverse communities and economy.
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Jonathan Bowles is the Executive Director of Center for an Urban Future. Winston Fisher is a Partner at Fisher Brothers. On Twitter @jbowlesnyc & @nycfuture & @Winston_Fisher1.
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New York workers (photo: Governor Cuomo's office)
To The Editor:
It is no surprise that the trial lawyers’ chief lobbyist and a labor advocate who curiously finds time to push the plaintiff bar’s agenda view litigation as the best way to promote worker safety (“This Labor Day, Celebrate Workers by Ensuring Their Safety,” by Halina Radchenko & Charlene Obernauer).
It’s not.
Over the past century, increased regulations and advancements in workplace safety have saved lives and livelihoods across industries in the United States. Unfortunately, New York’s civil justice system has not caught up. Instead of ensuring that enforcement is left in the hands of accountable public agencies, the Empire State’s regulatory environment often seeks to enforce worker protections through lawsuits, saddling businesses with massive legal costs and enriching trial attorneys without truly increasing safety for workers.
The NY HERO Act, passed earlier this year, is one such example of a misguided attempt to litigate worker safety. In addition to workplace regulations, the law creates a private right of action for exposure to infectious diseases. This means that employers can be sued for alleged COVID-19 exposure after the fact. This hindsight litigation will not make any workers safer, but could instead lead to lawyers shaking down businesses for payouts.
Worker safety should not be about trial lawyer profits. We need regulators, who serve the public interest, to regulate. Deputizing trial lawyers looking to boost their bottom lines will lead to profit-seeking litigation, rather than improving worker safety.
Radchenko and Obernauer also tout New York’s unique Scaffold Law as an example of the state’s support for workers. This outdated statute has long-plagued construction projects in the state by imposing absolute liability on property owners and contractors for height-related worksite injuries, driving up costs for liability insurance and discouraging investment in infrastructure and development. Despite drastic improvements in safety measures on construction sites, this century-old law continues to punish employers, even if a plaintiff is 99% at fault. Most alarmingly, the law has been shown to do nothing to keep workers safe – a study peer reviewed by the Transportation Research Board found that the Scaffold Law may actually increase construction accidents.
For plaintiffs attorneys, civil litigation is an extractive industry. The abundance of advertisements for personal injury attorneys in media, on billboards, and at bus stops across the state, particularly in low-income communities, is further evidence that the plaintiffs’ bar uses New York’s civil litigation system to grow rich off the backs of the economically disadvantaged. And with the latest digital ad technology their advertisements are targeted at construction sites, intersections, and healthcare facilities. A study published in the Vanderbilt Law Review found that “places with many claims per capita...tend to be places with low per capita income.” The same study also finds that attorneys’ fees almost always amount to the maximum allowed by law.
Another bill, awaiting the Governor’s veto or signature, would force companies from other states or countries that do business in New York to accept the general jurisdiction of the state’s courts. This would not, as Radchenko and Obernauer suggest, “strengthen the civil justice system” – on the contrary, if signed into law this bill would promote venue shopping and abusive litigation by enticing out of state attorneys to take advantage of New York’s plaintiff-friendly legal environment. The bill also likely runs afoul of Supreme Court precedent; in 2014, Justice Ginsburg delivered the majority opinion in Daimler v. Bauman, which ruled that general jurisdiction can only be applied in an entity’s home country or state.
Honoring and protecting our essential workers is critical, but in doing so we must be careful not to recklessly promote excessive litigation. Lawsuits have a place in our legal system, but using them to retroactively sue for COVID-19 exposure is at best misguided, and at worst a giveaway to the plaintiffs’ bar, overburdening our courts and harming the businesses that drive our economy.
Sincerely,
Tom Stebbins
Executive Director at the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York
On Twitter @LawsuitReformNY.
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Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right before our very eyes on Rikers Island. The conditions that incarcerated individuals and staff are subjected to at the city’s jail complex — conditions that have been reported and documented by news accounts and the personal observations of many of my colleagues in government — are on par with, perhaps even worse than, what we expect to read about in countries without a commitment to human rights.
As my colleague Assembly Member Emily Gallagher recently witnessed, “there's garbage everywhere, rotting food with maggots, cockroaches, worms in the showers, human feces and piss. Most of the toilets are broken so men are given plastic bags to relieve themselves in…Because of the lack of security, everyone's scared they're going to be injured or killed. Most people have fashioned some kind of homemade weapon to defend themselves.”
So far this year, ten incarcerated individuals have been killed, including four by suicide.
Exacerbating this crisis is the toll the pandemic has taken on the personnel who work at Rikers Island. To date, more than 2,200 corrections officers have been affected by the coronavirus, resulting in a massive staffing shortage that has continued to spiral, forcing officers to work double, triple, and in some cases, even quadruple shifts without any relief. Many officers resort to sleeping in their cars between shifts, not wanting to drive home for fear of falling asleep at the wheel. Absenteeism is also on the rise, with an estimated 2,000 officers calling in sick on a daily basis. In some cases, prison units have even gone 24 hours without guards.
In addition to the consequences for the workers, the majority of whom are people of color, these conditions inhibit our officers’ ability to conduct important services, such as protecting incarcerated individuals from assault and taking them to their court appearances. As the crisis continues to worsen, officers are less and less able to fully perform their jobs safely. The family of deceased inmate Robert Jackson believes that his death was caused, in part, by the fact that a guard in his 20th consecutive hour of work stepped away from his post. This was an utter tragedy that could have been prevented.
This is the reality currently playing out inside Rikers. Incarcerated individuals and personnel fear for their lives and have been left to fend for themselves by the Mayor and Department of Correction. As one officer I spoke with told me, "Inmate, officer, at this point we’re all on the same side. We all just want to get the hell out of here. People don’t see us so we don’t exist.”
Just this week Mayor de Blasio announced a widely panned five-part plan to address the staffing crisis plaguing the jail facility, but did so without even talking to the union and staff who work there currently about what they need to do their job safely and humanely. Notably, the mayor did not commit to ending triple and quadruple shifts for officers, and instead, the heart of the plan is to punish public workers who call out sick. Placing the blame solely on officers, who did not start this fire, is a poor excuse for a solution.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for New York City. We need a comprehensive solution that will take into account the full scope of the atrocities that are happening to workers and incarcerated individuals on Rikers.
There needs to be a substantive dialogue between the Department of Correction and the correction officers union to address ongoing safety and staffing concerns. In addition to that substantive dialogue, there are two key pieces of legislation that could help abate this crisis.
The “Less is More” bill helps facilitate the release of people currently incarcerated on Rikers merely for technical, and not criminal, parole violations by putting them in front of a judge to determine whether they should continue to be in jail, thereby lessening the burden on the rest of the overburdened system. It currently awaits Governor Hochul’s signature.
Additionally, Senator Jessica Ramos has proposed legislation, S6688, that would cap the number of consecutive hours any city employee can work at 17. Frankly, even that number may be too high, but it’s better than 25. I urge all of my colleagues who care about what is happening at Rikers, and care about all workers, to co-sponsor this important bill.
The truth is this: if these workplace conditions existed in any other workplace, and for any other workers, we’d all be out in the streets protesting in outrage. If it’s not OK to work sweatshop hours as an Amazon warehouse employee, why is it OK to work multiple 25-plus-hour days in a week if you are a public servant of color with a uniform and a badge?
It’s time for us to solve this crisis. It’s to engage with everyone with the common purpose to save the lives of everyone on Rikers Island. It’s time for the City of New York to make a clear and unequivocal statement that these public servants and incarcerated individuals should not be subjected to work or live in inhumane and brutal conditions.
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State Senator Andrew Gounardes represents parts of Brooklyn and chairs the Senate’s civil service and pension committee. On Twitter @Sen_Gounardes.
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