Christine Quinn (Landov)
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In a stunning rebuke to the City Council and Speaker Christine Quinn, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday vetoed a bill to boost wages for building workers — and accused lawmakers of trying to return the city to “an era when the government viewed the private sector as a cash cow.”
Bloomberg vetoed the prevailing-wage bill, which would raise pay for maintenance workers in privately owned buildings doing business with the city, and he vowed to do the same with a living-wage bill that’s expected to clear the council as well.
“Government cannot bend the laws of the labor market without breaking the bank — and destroying job prospects for people who most need work,” Bloomberg said in an unusual, 20-minute veto message at City Hall.
Council leaders say they have the votes to override Bloomberg’s vetoes.
Spurred by the powerful building-workers union, the council has enacted prevailing-wage legislation that forces large property owners receiving at least $1 million in government subsidies to pay their workers union-level wages. Landlords who rent to the city would also have to pay the so-called prevailing wage.
Next week, the council is expected to pass an even more contentious “living wage” bill, which would impose a minimum $11.50-an-hour wage-and-benefit requirement on businesses accepting $1 million or more in city subsidies.
“Those bills — the so-called living- and prevailing-wage bills — are a throwback to an era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked, rather than a garden to be cultivated,” the mayor said, suggesting the council just doesn’t get it when it comes to encouraging economic development.
“In those days, the government took the private sector for granted. We cannot afford to go back to those days.”
He cited the Bronx Kingsbridge Armory as a “great example” of a development project that “remains empty to this day” because of a protracted fight over the living wage.
Bloomberg said he could understand union leaders trying to push up wages at every opportunity. What he can’t understand, he said, is legislators who do their bidding.
“It’s government’s job to stand up for taxpayers,” the mayor added in an indirect slap at Quinn, his government partner for more than 10 years and a candidate for mayor in 2013.
Stu Loeser, the mayor’s spokesman, insisted Bloomberg’s relationship with the council speaker remains unchanged.
“This is about policy, nothing else,” Loeser said.
But Quinn hit back hard.
She pointed out that the administration has doled out nearly $250 million in incentives to lure or keep businesses here, and that Bloomberg had no problem supporting prevailing- and living-wage requirements for home health aides, day-care workers and even some building- service workers in 2002.
“This law covered 60,000 workers, making it the largest living-wage law in the nation,” she said of the earlier law Bloomberg approved. “Not only did it fail to undermine the free market, it helped tens of thousands of New Yorkers raise their families out of poverty to join the middle class.”
Quinn further reminded the mayor that his aides negotiated wage agreements at city-subsidized Citi Field, Yankee Stadium and Atlantic Yards without any problems.