Mayor de Blasio vowed to create new protections for workers and tenants in his sixth annual State of the City address, a sweeping speech focused on the difficulty of city living — and which seemed to offer his plans for New York City as a framework for the nation.
“Millions of people in this city, tens of millions across this country, are boxed into lives that just aren’t working for them. You haven’t been paid what you deserve for all the hard work. You haven’t been given the time you deserve. You’re not living the life you deserve,” de Blasio, in the second year of his second term, said.
That, de Blasio said, is “no accident” — he blamed Reaganomics and President Trump’s tax cuts for putting the wealth is in the wrong hands, even as “working people have gotten more and more productive.”
“Brothers and sisters, there’s plenty of money in the world. There’s plenty of money in this city. It’s just in the wrong hands!” Hizzoner preached. “You deserve a city that gives you the share of prosperity that you have earned.”
De Blasio’s call to take from the rich and give to the poor is likely to perk up ears in progressive presidential circles, in a week when the mayor rolled out two policy proposals — mandatory paid vacation for workers and an expansion of health care programs — in national media outlets, and a day after he said he intended to travel around, spreading New York’s message.
He also touted his efforts to push back against Trump, pointing to legal fights over federal funding for sanctuary cities.
“We didn’t just sit still and watch what Donald Trump was doing to our city and to the rest of this country,” de Blasio said. “We took him on.”
But some local issues were noticeably scarce, or absent, from the speech. The mayor had little to say about homelessness, his affordable housing plans or the state of disrepair at the New York City Housing Authority.
“He wants to be very much part of the national stage, and I don’t begrudge that, I never have,” Controller Scott Stringer, a fellow Democrat, said after the remarks. “He can go to Iowa, and he can go to New Hampshire, but at the end of the day he’s got to take care of business here — and you have to put the homeless crisis on the table, NYCHA on the table, you have to start thinking about what a fairer city actually is.”
Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., also a Democrat, said he agreed with many of the mayor’s proposals — but found the mayor’s decision to devote only a sentence to NYCHA “disappointing.”
“It certainly had a lot of national overtones, and perhaps that’s the reason why more specific-nuance, New York City-based issues, like NYCHA, were given less of a thought,” he said.
De Blasio also declined to tout the jobs that are slated to arrive in New York City with Amazon’s hub here — perhaps because of the backlash against subsidies the company will receive.
The mayor did roll out a slew of other proposals aimed at helping the working man and woman — including a revamp of the Department of Consumer Affairs, which will become the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
The agency will take up the cause of the city’s freelance and contract workers — a growing sector and one to which the new paid vacation law won’t apply.
“In this city, nannies, home health aides, housekeepers, drivers, freelancers — more than 200,000 New Yorkers — receive no benefits at all, and have no security. These are the people who keep this city running, and in return, they get the short end of the stick. It’s not OK with them. It’s not OK, is it? It’s not OK with me either,” de Blasio said.
The new Department of Consumer and Worker Protection will have a mandate to protect those workers, de Blasio said — and will do things like intervening when a home health care aide’s pay is withheld.
“Whether you’re an employee or a temp, whether you’re paid by check or cash, whether you’re documented or not, if you work in New York City then we will work for you,” he said.
De Blasio also announced plans to create a universal retirement plan workers in the city who may not have one — allowing people to set aside part of their paycheck and carry the plan from job to job.
“If you’ve spent your lifetime working, you’ve already paid your dues,” he said. “Retirement should be something you can actually look forward to.”
Like the mayor’s paid vacation plan, this idea, too, has already been proposed — then-Public Advocate Letitia James and Councilman Ben Kallos have suggested such a program.
He also announced a new effort to protect renters — going so far as seizing buildings from bad landlords — dubbed the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
De Blasio created the office mid-speech, pulling out an executive order from beneath his lectern with flourish.
“When a landlord tries to push out a tenant by making their home unlivable, a team of inspectors and law enforcement agents will be on the ground to stop it in time,” he said. “If the fines and the penalties don’t cut it, we will seize their buildings and we will put them in the hands of a community nonprofit that will treat tenants with the respect they deserve.”
But that, too, is an endeavor others have tried — the City Council last year created an Office of Tenant Advocate with similar goals, but the mayor’s office has so far refused to fund it.
De Blasio also pledged to shave down commutes — at least on buses and city ferries, areas where he has more control than subways.
NYC Ferry will launch new routes from Staten Island to Manhattan’s West Side, and from Coney Island to Bay Ridge. The city will also make significant bus upgrades, increasing the number of intersections where buses get a longer green light and adding more bus lanes.
“This country has spent decades taking from working people and giving to the 1 %,” de Blasio said. “This city has spent the last five years doing it the other way around. We give back to working people the prosperity they have earned. And we are just getting started.”
