Mayor Bloomberg Sues To Kill New York’s Living Wage Law Before He Leaves Office
After failing to stop the New York City Council from passing a living wage bill last year, outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg is winding down his term by suing to kill the law. The City Council overrode Bloomberg’s veto in 2012 to require developers and businesses who receive at least $1 million in city aid to pay workers either $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without. But Bloomberg’s office has refused to implement the law, claiming it violates New York’s state minimum wage law. This argument successfully derailed the city’s similar prevailing wage law, which was reluctantly struck down by State Supreme Court Justice Geoffrey Wright over the summer.
https://thinkprogress.org/mayor-bloomberg-sues-to-kill-new-yorks-living-wage-law-before-he-leaves-office-57f1126c2ead/“The first thing to do is to get rid of some of these impediments to job creation,” he told Lagarde. “For example, in the United States we have two things, one of which is brilliant, and one of which is used all the time but is dysfunctional, [though] we just don’t think of it this way. We have minimum wages. And a minimum wage means that the employer has to pay up to that level for their employees.”
Bloomberg continued:
So, what would go through an employer’s mind if they have to raise the amount of money they have to pay one of their employees? It is ‘Ah, can I do with fewer employees?’ But we don’t want companies to cut back the number of people they employ. What we really should be trying to do is convince them to employ more people. And in the interest of giving people a living wage, we are getting them to lose their jobs. Not everybody, but some.
Bloomberg didn’t just criticize the minimum wage in his IMF talk. During the same Q&A session, he claimed that as mayor, he discovered that some New Yorkers were fraudulently signing up for food stamps. (Most experts agree that food-stamp fraud is uncommon, as is true of welfare fraud in general.) As mayor, Bloomberg kept in place a policy of fingerprinting food-stamp applicants, ostensibly to cut down on fraud. By 2012, New York City was one of only two places to fingerprint food-stamp applicants. Governor Andrew Cuomo eventually ended the practice.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/in-an-imf-talk-bloomberg-criticized-notion-of-minimum-wage.html
