Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg filed suit last week in state court against the New York City Council to strike down a living wage law passed by the council in 2012.
The mayor, due to depart office two weeks from now, is following in a long political tradition of business-friendly oligarchs who use their last moments in power to change laws. In the case of Bloomberg, a socially-liberal Republican with conservative fiscal views, critics say his opposition to the living wage law is because he believes it would overburden existing and potential new developers.
But the law, which Bloomberg has thus far refused to implement, applies only to private business developers receiving $1 million or more in aid from the city – and in those instances would be required to pay $10 an hour to their workers, with benefits, or $11.50 an hour with no benefits.
Bloomberg’s argument boils down to two things: one, the law is invalid because federal and state minimum wage laws trump the New York City Council measure; and, two, the law gives too much power to the city comptroller’s office.
He’s done this before on a similar measure called a “prevailing wage” law that the city enacted in 2012, but the city council and mayor’s office have battled back and forth since then. He won the fight previously when the prevailing wage law was struck down in August. This is the second of the two laws he has been fighting since 2012 meant to help employees working for companies who do business with the city.
Bloomberg’s office has argued this time around that the law is “materially indistinguishable from the prevailing wage law.”
Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, ran on a platform touting reform on the city’s living wage laws, among other issues, which are a primary concern among non-salary earning New York residents because of the increasing disparity in income among the rich and poor. Last summer new city statistics stated the average monthly rent in four of the five boroughs (excluding Staten Island) exceeded $3,000. And even at $10-$11.50 an hour, it’s tough to pay rent at those prices, often forcing wage-level residents of the Big Apple to live in two- and three-roommate scenarios.
An hourly rate of $10 equates to weekly pay of $400, monthly pay of $1,733, and an annual salary of $20,800. An hourly rate of $11.50 equates to weekly pay of $460, monthly pay of $1,993, and an annual salary of $23,920.
It would be difficult for Bloomberg himself to relate to those kind of figures. Although he has never accepted the $220,00 salary he’s entitled to — he accepts $1 a year as a token — his total net worth is said to be somewhere around $27 billion. Let’s forget about that figure and break down what his mayoral salary would equate to in hourly wage terms, if he did accept it. If so, he would garner $18,332 per month before taxes and an astonishing $4,583 a week. And hourly? — about $115.
Writing in The New Yorker in August, George Packer described de Blasio’s aim to rid the city of the broadening inequality gap, which ballooned under Bloomberg’s tenure, this way: “De Blasio described New York’s rising inequality in terms that were not only personal but also analytical: the number of luxury apartments being built, soaring CEO pay, declining middle-class incomes (the city’s middle class isn’t just shrinking, he said; it’s ‘in danger of disappearing’), and the stark fact that almost half the city’s residents live in poverty, or very nearly in it.”
And according to another New Yorker article in late October, “during Bloomberg’s 12 years the number of homeless families went up by 73 percent.”
So if Bloomberg wins this second legal battle, it is unclear if de Blasio can overturn the decision. It remains up to the courts at this point.
Bloomberg’s press office did not respond to a request for comment on the mayor’s controversial stance on blocking the living wage law.