Testimony: NY City Council Hearing on COVID-19 Relief Package
Irene Lew
Testimony by Irene Lew, Community Service Society Policy Analyst
Before the NY City Council Committee on Civil Service and Labor
Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Irene Lew and I am a policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit that works to advance the upward mobility of low-income New Yorkers. We have been leaders in the fight to expand protections and benefits for low-wage workers, including efforts to pass the paid sick days law in New York City and more recently, the passage of paid sick days statewide as part of the FY 2021 state budget.
My testimony will be focused on two of the measures the City Council is considering today: Intro 1918 and Intro 1926. Intro 1926 would require large essential businesses with at least 100 employees to provide fair hazard pay to the hourly workers who are putting their own lives on the line to ensure that all New Yorkers get health care, that we are fed and that we have the basic necessities to ride out this pandemic. Intro 1926 would extend urgently needed paid sick days to gig workers and other workers misclassified as independent contractors who have been left out of recently enacted city and state paid sick leave laws. We are focusing our testimony today on support of Intro 1918 and Intro 1926.
Essential hourly-wage workers such as healthcare workers, grocery store clerks, delivery drivers and warehouse workers are at the frontlines of this pandemic. Frequent interaction with the public puts them at heightened risk for contracting COVID-19. At a time when essential workers are putting their own health and the health of their families at risk, we should be doing more than applauding them; we should be helping them economically through measures like additional hazard pay. Recent reports from Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office and the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) have shown that essential workers are disproportionately low income, women, people of color and immigrants, many of the same groups that have also been hit hard by the coronavirus outbreak. Of an estimated one million frontline workers in New York City, nearly a quarter are low income, about two thirds are women, a third are black, and over half are immigrants, according to FPI. Furthermore, according to our own independent analysis of Census data[1], many of these essential workers aren’t earning enough to survive in the city, let alone justify the hazards they face on the job. For example, a full-time supermarket worker in New York City has median earnings of only $26,000 a year. The proposed premium pay amounts help ensure that essential workers are fairly compensated for the risk they face of being exposed to COVID-19 and the danger that this poses to their own families.
The pandemic has also highlighted the absence of a safety net for nontraditional workers such as Uber drivers and Grubhub food delivery cyclists who have few job protections despite their increased risk for contracting COVID-19. Applying the ABC test to the city’s paid sick leave law is a good first step for providing more protections to this workforce because it would explicitly cover app-based gig workers who have been misclassified as independent contractors. According to data from our 2019 Unheard Third survey, more than two-thirds (67 percent) of workers dependent on app-based gig work as their main source of income said that they did not receive any paid sick time, compared to only 36 percent of those in conventional employee arrangements who said they lacked this benefit.
Increasing awareness of new labor standards is an important part of employer compliance. We were pleased to see that Intro 1918 included some language on posting notices of hazard pay at workplace sites and specific enforcement tactics to be carried out by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s (DCWP) Office of Labor Policy and Standards. However, even more robust outreach to workers and worker intermediary groups is necessary so that workers are aware of their new rights. Most enforcement is driven by complaints. But workers cannot assert rights they don’t know they have. We need to ensure that DCWP has adequate financial resources for outreach and enforcement of any new labor standards.
As part of the coronavirus relief package, we also urge the City Council to pass Intro 1797, which would require DCWP to create posters for display in pharmacies and health care locations throughout the city informing New Yorkers about their right to paid sick leave. Our analysis of Unheard Third data found this information is sorely needed: most low-income workers covered by the city’s paid sick days law—60 percent—have heard little or nothing about it. If the majority of low-income employees know little about the city’s basic sick leave law in effect since 2014, they probably know even less about the new federal Families First Coronavirus Response Act that provides many workers with 80 hours of COVID-19 related leave, or the new state COVID-19 paid sick leave that provides 14 days of job protection and pay to employees subject to an order of quarantine and covers many of the workers left out of the federal law. As the city starts to reopen the economy and move to more testing, contact tracing and self-quarantine, these benefits will become increasingly important, especially for essential workers. Intro 1797 could easily be amended to include information on temporary federal and state COVID-19 sick leave in addition to NYC’s law. With stay at home orders limiting our usual means of getting information—through transit ads, workplaces, word-of-mouth, at family and religious gatherings—pharmacies remain one place we are still going to and can get information. Moreover, pharmacies will now have a role in Covid-19 testing.
The COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted the gaping holes in our government safety net and has laid bare the financial instability of our city’s low-wage essential and gig workforce, at a time when the demand for their services has never been higher. There is an urgent need to provide these workers with higher pay and critical protections like paid sick leave that many white-collar workers already receive. We applaud the City Council for taking important steps to address these disparities.
[1] Based on CSS analysis of 2014-2018 5-year American Community Survey data from the US Census Bureau