City Council Member Crowley Rallies With Unions to Protect Workers' Rights

 L/R: Tom Sullivan, President of the Lieutenants' Benevolent Association; Council Member Elizabeth Crowley (speaking at podium); Norman Seabrook, President of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association; Owen O'Hara, the Honorable Elizabeth Crowley's son; Harry Nespoli, President of the Sanitation Workers' Union; Sidney Schwartzbaum, President of the Assistant Deputy Wardens Association.

Remarks by Council Member Elizabeth S. Crowley

City Council Fire & Criminal Justice Services Committee, Chair

“Right now worker’s rights are under attack. The war on labors is not limited to Wisconsin or Ohio or Indiana, it is happening here in New York.

“Everyday we hear government officials threatening pensions and we can see these threats in proposals that cut our uniform services and our teachers. There are forces that are not trying to balance budgets—they are trying to break unions. This is not democracy—this is union busting.

“One of government’s most important responsibilities is to keep people safe. Our uniform services risk their lives to protect us and it’s up to us and the city to protect them. Our construction workers risk their lives and do dangerous jobs for our city’s benefit and we need to treat them like human beings—not like slaves.

“Our uniform services and laborers have a tough job and let’s face it: if we take pensions away, if we take away health care benefits, if we take away our bargaining rights, we will drive away qualified men and women to take on these dangerous and sometimes deadly jobs.

“This year, we remember the 10th anniversary of the attacks on September 11th in which 343 firefighters and 27 police officers died and more continue to die as a result of their heroism on that day. This tragedy should serve as a reminder of what the dangerous and sometimes deadly job our city workers face; and it should motivate us to speak out to protect the rights that so many people have died for.

“In solidarity – and only in solidarity – we will fight this war and we will win.”

Editorial Notebook - The Cheap Cost of Cheating the Lowest Paid by Francis X. Clines- NYTimes.com

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Her baby will soon be due, so Modesta Toribio has to grudgingly admit she may not soon make her current career goal — New York’s supposedly mandatory $7.25 minimum wage — that she has been routinely denied for the past five years. She inched her salary up to $6.60 an hour from the starting $5 at a cut-rate Brooklyn clothing store mainly by pestering her bosses. Ms. Toribio has a brassy knack for that, but she has learned it takes a lot to best scheming employers.

Academic studies estimate that unscrupulous employers in New York City keep an extra billion dollars a year by defying New York State’s weak labor law and cheating timorous and ill-informed immigrant workers.

Ms. Toribio was both when she arrived from the Dominican Republic 10 years ago. But she evolved into a word-of-mouth investigator and organizer for the Make the Road New York community group. The organization has successfully worked with committed state inspectors to wring wage-theft judgments against scores of employers — $28,000 for a gouged fruit-stand peddler, $70,000 for 99-cent store workers, $400,000 from moguls squeezing the payroll at a sneaker chain.

New York needs a strong labor law like Arizona’s. Arizona is rightly notorious for its abusive anti-immigrant law. But its labor law seriously penalizes employers who retaliate against outspoken workers, and it provides confidentiality for whistle-blowers and faster, bigger damages for employers who ignore wage-theft judgments. A bill to toughen New York’s law awaits action by the Legislature, which is in its closing days, when the good and the ugly elbow for attention.

“Albany could stop an awful lot of injustice,” Ms. Toribio says prayerfully. Her voice had a steely lilt on Friday when she talked other wage-cheated workers into going with her to Manhattan to picket a grocery store. She knows a “scared guy” there, a Mexican immigrant who earns $5 an hour with no vacation or overtime allowed in his 70-hour week. “The boss,” she says, “has to understand a worker is not alone.”