Last week, the same day the City Council started the ball rolling on giving itself a raise, workers packed the steps of City Hall demanding a $30 minimum wage. It was just last month, faced with the need to get hundreds of able bodied New Yorkers to shovel snow, Mayor Mamdani boosted per diem shoveler's from $19 to $30 an hour.
Meanwhile, FDNY EMTs, Department of Educations para-professionals, who help special needs students, as well as thousands of social service workers, make well below $30 an hour in the world's wealthiest city that's home to 123 billionaires.
That's the highest concentration of oligarchs in the world in a city where the number of homeless seeking shelter every night has reached a high not seen since the Great Depression and 18 people died on city streets during last month's polar vortex.
There's a tension here just a few blocks west from the site of the 9/11 WTC attack now with President Trump having lit the fuse to a reckless global conflagration. Just a few blocks up town at 26 Federal Plaza masked federal ICE agents are abducting New Yorkers looking for due process who get violence instead.
Protest is very much in the air.
In the debate over the affordability crisis curated by the corporate news media it's all about consumers upset over prices. Yet, as evidenced recently in New York City, there is also a deepening resentment over low wages in a city where a quarter of the population lives in poverty and close to half struggle week to week to get by.
Meanwhile, nationally the federal minimum wage has sat at a shocking $7.25 an hour since 2009 which has prompted dozens of states and local governments to set their own minimum wage to better reflect the economic reality that the DC beltway has ignored for a generation.
"Workers are worthy-give us thirty-workers are worthy-give us thirty," chanted the large crowd on the City Hall steps on Tuesday.
"There are over one million New Yorkers earning $17--a full-time worker making $17 an hour brings home after taxes about $2,000 a month. So, if you break that down, minimum wage workers are surviving on $500 a week. That's not right. We are in one of the most expensive cities on the planet," Council Member Sandy Nurse, sponsor of the bill to raise the minimum wage, told the energized crowd.
Nurse, who represents Brooklyn and chairs the Committee on Civil and Human Rights, listed the average monthly cost for basic necessities like rent in a shared apartment, food, transportation and utilities which easily surpassed what the $17 minimum wage earner brings home.
"The wages are too damn low and the cost of living is too damn high," Nurse proclaimed.
In the crowd were dozens of Teamsters with their signature black jackets from the Amazon Labor Union, which won a 2023 election to represent several thousand Amazon workers at the mulitinational's JFK warehouse on Staten Island.
"This is our city. This is the city where we live, work--we dream. It is also the wealthiest city in the world but for some reason, despite the fact that this city is created by working people, like the people behind me....half the wealth in this city is owned by one percent of its population and that trend is only getting worse with poverty wages forcing parents to work two or three jobs to make ends meet," Connor Spence, president of the Amazon Labor Union told the crowd.
He continued. "We are demanding $30 for our families and our future...We have the corporate elite that is trying to convince us that somehow it is ok that we are struggling and starving to live in the city that we make run. The gears of this city are moved by working people every single day."
ALU trustee Joelle Jean described how she struggled to find a landlord who would "rent an apartment to an Amazon associate because I was not making enough....then I noticed it wasn't just me living in the shelters, living in their cars or cramped up in one bedroom."
"We need to be able to start dreaming again," Joelle added. "For me it would be a ticket out of the shelter. It would be the ability to pay my bills every month."
"I want to give just some basic facts about living in New York City--the average rent in Brooklyn is about $4,000 for a one bedroom---it would take five Amazon workers bunking up in one bedroom...that is not right," Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso told the City Hall crowd. "So, while they have to live with five people in a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn the folks at Amazon are making $80 billion dollars. The wealth transfer for the top one percent in New York City over the last five years is the largest wealth transfer in our history while people that are working every single day for that company have to bunk in a one bedroom in Brooklyn five deep."
The crowd on the steps of City Hall continued to grow while inside City Council members gathered for their regular scheduled stated meeting. Reporters convened in the Red Room to cover City Council Speaker Julie Menin's press conference previewing the day's agenda. That to-do list included voting to establish "a quadrennial commission in 2026 to review the compensation levels of the Mayor, Public Advocate, City Comptroller, Borough Presidents, Council Members, and District Attorneys in New York City."
The push to increase the salaries of the city's elected officials comes as the City of New York faces a $5.4 billion dollar budget gap and a federal government that's targeted both the city and state for billions of dollars in cuts.
Currently, New York City's Council Member base pay is $148,500. The last raise was in 2016, when the City Council's pay went from $112,500 to the current level. That bump also came with a controversial restriction on how much outside income members could earn while serving on the City Council.
Published reports have indicated the Council salary would jump to $172,500. WBAI asked Speaker Menin to reconcile the Council's push for a raise while so many New Yorkers were struggling with poverty level wages including the city's para-professional teachers and FDNY EMTs.
"You have a bit of a plantation here Speaker--you didn't create this. You have spoken about wealth inequality--but shouldn't the City Council be guided by the reality that para-professionals and FDNY EMS are making poverty level wages?" WBAI asked.
Menin said she welcomed the question and described both the paraprofessional and FDNY EMT pay scales as "completely unacceptable."
"We have been speaking about that and these are issues and we are 100 percent going to be dealing with them in the budget. I talked to the Mayor directly about both these issues. We think these are real concerns for us."
