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“I can’t go to Flushing, which is where I need to go to get Korean groceries and Korean food. I have to have my own bike or I have to take public transportation,” she said.

Neighborhoods like Flushing and Jackson Heights in Queens, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, and Soundview and East Bronx in the Bronx are among the many neighborhoods across New York City without access to bike share programs like Citi Bike.

It’s what Bretillon calls “unfair placement.”

“The placement of Citi Bike docks and the whole map is very unfair,” she said. “It favors Western Queens, for example, which are neighborhoods that skew wealthier, more educated, more white,” she said.

Bretillon started out using Citi Bikes to commute to and from work, crossing over a railyard in Sunnyside and over the Queensboro Bridge to CUNY where she works as a professor. 

But peddling the 45-pound bike over the bridge every day to an inconvenient docking station soon grew “unwieldy,” and Bretillon, 41, decided to buy her own bike.

“I wanted a zippier ride, to be able to lock it up anywhere. A lot of times, Citi Bike docks are not located conveniently, they’re not located where I want to go a lot of the time. So I needed my own bike,” she said.

A 2019 study by Urban Politics and Governance, a research group at McGill University, showed that Citi Bike “serves the wealthiest, most privileged part of New York City.”

Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of neighborhoods with a median household income under $20,000 lack access to bike sharing. 

Disparities for New Yorkers of color are even greater. 83.5 percent of New Yorkers of color don’t have access to Citi Bikes, and only 94,000 of the 2.5 million New Yorkers that live further than half a mile from a subway (3.8%) have Citi Bike stations.

Citi Bike was launched in 2013 as a public-private partnership between several companies, and doesn’t receive any subsidies from the city, despite pressure from council members to do so.

Marketa Mala, a graduate student, resident of Crown Heights, and bicyclist filled out a Department of Transportation questionnaire on Facebook in September of 2021 about where residents of Brooklyn’s community boards 3 (Bedford Stuyvesant), 5 (East New York), 8 (Crown Heights), 9 (Crown Heights), and 16 (Brownsville) wanted to see Citi Bike next. 

She was excited when she saw the questionnaire because she doesn’t have a Citi Bike dock near her, even though there are docks on the western border of her neighborhood.

“Around Prospect Park there are all the stations, so it’s unfortunate that we are just a few stops from that, but unfortunately, we still don’t have it,” she said.

Mala commutes to and from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering in Downtown Brooklyn with a bike she bought on Facebook Marketplace for $150, just $35 shy of the $185 annual Citi Bike membership price, which she said she would not have purchased had she had access to Citi Bikes.

“If Citi Bike was here I would probably rather have the membership because of the advantage that anywhere in the city I can go and I wouldn’t need to plan so much, like, where do I take my bike?” she said.

Expansion efforts have been slow to reach the neighborhoods addressed in the expansion plan, in part because Citi Bike does not receive subsidies from the city, and therefore, is not included in the annual budget that would ramp up expansion.

According to Cory Epstein, the Director of Communications at Transportation Alternatives, a non-profit for safer streets that worked to bring Citi Bike to New York City, public funding wasn’t initially available at the time of Citi Bike’s launch because ride share programs were a fairly new concept and New York City was still recovering from the recession.

“Bike Share was really new and no one knew how it would work,” he said. “But considering we know how much it works now, considering our different financial position, and considering that so many cities across the country have added public funding to expand their systems, we think it just makes sense for to expand it and use more public money to get it to expand quickly, make it more affordable and more accessible.”

A poll from Siena College published last year found that 63 percent of New York City voters support public funding for bike share, a sentiment Bretillon shares, especially because it could mean more access to bike share for low-income New Yorkers.

“If we had municipal bike share that was owned and operated and maintained by the city, they’d be able to make it practically free. I mean, it should be free,” she said.

Lyft, Citi Bike’s parent company, did not respond for comment.

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“I’m afraid of taking the trains, and I have to take them 10 times a week. It’s straight up dangerous” said a station agent at the Times Square-42nd Street station. He didn’t want to give his name for fear of retribution.

New York City ended 2021 with the highest numbers of subway crime seen in 25 years, according to New York Daily News. Transit crime has gone up 88.5 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to CompStat 2.0, the crime statistics portal from the New York City Police Department.

There were more than double the number of murders and rapes in 2021 than there were in 1997, and underground assaults reached their highest count since 1997 at 461.

“Crime has been really high. The subways have just become a free for all,” said a 2nd Ave station agent who did not give their name because of fear of retribution. “It pisses me off.”

In early January Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams announced they would add more police officers to patrol the subway, and last Monday, the New York Police Department’s new Transit Bureau Chief, Jason Wilcox, said more police officers will be stationed in trains and on platforms to combat crime.

But some transit employees, like Jonluke Rodriguez, a train operator and Transit Workers Union representative, said adding more police might make the situation worse.

“Throwing more bodies at a problem without understanding the problem is just compounding the problem,” said Rodriguez.

Rodriguez said riders and employees have reported seeing more police officers in stations, but that, “They are congregating. They need to be on the train, they need to be on the platform.” 

Even with police in trains and on platforms, crime manages to persist. There were two police officers on the southbound side of the R train at the Times Square station when Michelle Go was pushed to her death on Jan. 15. 

Go’s death sent shock waves throughout the city, as riders, transit employees, and city officials grappled with the tragedy and the grim reality of transit crime in New York City.

In his four years as a train conductor, Rodriguez has never experienced a “12-9” which is the radio code for someone hit by a train, but has come close on a few occasions. 

“You never know what your day is gonna entail, when you come and you sign in on payroll. We hope it ends the same way we came in,” he said.

The trauma that comes with experiencing a 12-9 leaves many transit workers “mentally distraught for months,” said Rodriguez.

Fortunately, therapy and grief counseling are provided for transit workers through their health insurance. Security guards, however, are not so fortunate. 

A security guard at the Delancey-Essex station said he gets assaulted daily and doesn’t receive counseling to deal with his daily stressors because he’s not an MTA employee. Security guards are hired privately by the MTA and don’t have the same benefits as MTA employees. 

“We’re putting our lives on the line. We don’t get treated correctly by nobody. We get talked bad to. We’re just trying to make it home,” he said. 

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After her miscarriage, Kristen Moore struggled with post-partum depression, grief, and anger. She had planned to come out of the pregnancy with a baby girl, Evangeline, but what she got instead was a bill for $1,200 not including the $75 copay. 

“I was mad. It’s so much trauma and so much money on the other end of something that it’s surreal,” said Moore.

She didn’t expect a miscarriage to be this expensive.

Even with insurance, treatments can carry expensive copays and out of pocket expenses. For the 26% of pregnancies that end in miscarriage, this means sometimes paying thousands of dollars.

Depending on the kind of insurance and the site of service, miscarriage treatments like a  dilation and curettage comonly known as D&C, a procedure in which the contents of the uterus are surgically removed, can range from $2,900 upwards of $9,100 before insurance according to Healthcare Bluebook.

While D&C’s are covered by insurance and are not considered an elective procedure, the site of service can bring the price point up “significantly,” said Dr. Michael Nimaroff, the senior vice president for OB-GYN at Northwell Health.

It’s the site of service that makes “the biggest difference [in cost],” said Nimaroff.

The high cost of miscarriage treatments is not the only burden people who give birth face.

As abortion rights across the country, especially in the South, face restrictions, and Roe v. Wade faces a potential overturn, access to miscarriage treatments is also in limbo.

Pro-life, anti-abortion Conservative legislators are actively trying to tighten restrictions on access to medications like misoprostol and mifepristone which are both used for abortion and sometimes called “the abortion pill.”But this means  people miscarrying and in need of these medications will likely have a harder time getting access to them.

And without these medications, people might have to turn to hospitals, surgicenters, or clinics for expensive D&C’s. 

Clinics are less expensive than hospitals, but with the increased closure of clinics across the country as anti-abortion legislation is passed, that option is also likely to become less accessible and more detrimental to low income and people of color, who are disproportionately affected by clinic closures, according to research from University of California at San Francisco. 

As a result, people might have to travel to different states to receive care if they cannot access clinics in their home state, adding to the already high financial burden of miscarriage.

The journey to pregnancy

Moore, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, and her husband had been trying to have a baby since 2013, but were told by a fertility specialist in 2016 that natural birth wasn’t possible. They successfully had a son through in vitro fertilization (IVF) after moving to Buffalo in 2018, and were shocked when they found out they became pregnant naturally in May of 2021. Kristen was 40 years old. 

“We were excited. We were scared. We were like, what the f–k just happened?” said Moore.

After Moore started spotting at 12 weeks, she booked an ultrasound to check on the status of her pregnancy.

 On her way to the appointment, she listened to Brandi Carlile’s memoir, which has songs interspersed between chapters. The song “The Mother” came up, a song Carlile had written about being a mother to her daughter, Evangeline. Moore took it as a sign that the baby would be okay.

“I was like, no, this baby is going to be okay. This is going to be fine. We’ll call her Evangeline and it’ll be perfect because this is sort of a sign,” she said.

But when the ultrasound technician went quiet, Moore knew something was wrong.

“She was like, ‘Hey, I’m not getting a heartbeat.’ This is normally where we’ll let you listen to the heartbeat. We can skip that?” said Moore.

After listening to silence with the ultrasound technician, and getting confirmation from the doctor that there was no heartbeat, Moore knew her pregnancy had ended.

A pharmacy’s refusal, a medication’s failure

Moore’s midwife presented her with three treatment options to remove the fetus: wait for the pregnancy to pass naturally, take misoprostol, a medication that induces the passing of the pregnancy, or get a D&C. 

Moore opted for misoprostol, something “less invasive, but more control,” she said. Her midwife instructed her on how to use the medication, and her husband picked it up for her from the pharmacy without trouble.

Misoprostol, along with mifepristone, is is a safe and effective way to end early pregnancies and is used to aid in a miscarriage. At less than $10 on average, misoprostol is the most affordable option, but it does require a prescription.

Trouble began when the instructions on the medication pamphlet didn’t match up with what Moore’s midwife said, so she called the pharmacy to ask for clarification. But the pharmacist refused to give Moore instructions on how to use the medication.

“She was basically like, I’m not authorized to give you directions tied to that kind of use” said Moore. “It felt like she was like, Oh, you’re trying to abort your own child, no, I’m not going to tell you how to do that. I said, I’m told that this can be used to support miscarriage and she was just like, I can’t give you any of that information.”

Pharmacists are supposed to provide counseling to patients on the proper use of misoprostol, according to the Pharmacy Times. And when it comes to emergency contraception, New York State law prohibits pharmacists from “obstructing patient access to medication without a medical justification” or because of religious, moral, or ethical reasoning.

Frustrated and confused by the pharmacist’s refusal to help, Moore called her midwife who walked her through the process, which turned out to be grueling and unsuccessful.

“It’s basically like giving birth. I waited and I waited and I waited and it was really painful. And I still didn’t pass anything that I thought was a baby,” said Moore.

She took a second dose of the medication on the recommendation of her midwife and said goodbye to her husband and son, who were leaving for Michigan to visit family. 

Misoprostol has an 87 percent success rate for people who are 10-11 weeks pregnant. And if you’re given an extra dose, as Moore was, it works 98 percent of the time. But when the second dose didn’t work, Moore was left with only one other option: get a D&C.

The most obvious place to get the D&C done was in New York State, but without her husband she had no one to pick her up after the procedure. She considered asking a friend to drive her, but hesitated.

“We moved to Buffalo in 2018. And while I have friends here, I don’t have the kind of friends who you’d be like, Hey, I might bleed all over your car, can you pick me up? I don’t have those,” she said.

She was able to find a doctor in Michigan who took her insurance, and she flew to Michigan for her miscarriage, where she had family support and someone to watch her son.

Moore felt scared that she would miscarry while on the plane, as she had already been slowly miscarrying over the past week and a half because of the two doses of misoprostol.

“There was a real chance that I would have passed the baby [on the plane],” said Moore.

The surgery, copay, and travel expenses were financially unexpected, but, she said, she’s lucky to be able to pay for the surgery without going into debt.

“We keep a really good savings and a really good sort of cushion for emergencies. But if it had been a decade ago, I don’t know what I would have done,” said Moore.

After putting off paying the bill because “paying the bill was saying, well, this [pregnancy] is over,” Moore took to Twitter where she shared her experience in a thread that would gain over 100,000 likes, over 20,000 retweets, and over 1,500 quote tweets from people who had also experienced the unexpected financial and emotional cost of miscarriage.

Today, I paid over $1000 out of pocket for my miscarriage. They didn’t tell me it would cost so much to lose a baby. Here are other things they don’t tell you about miscarriages. A thread based on my experience. CW: miscarriage & infertility.

— Kristen R. Moore (@kristen4moore) November 1, 2021

“I wasn’t trying to go viral. I just felt like there needed to be someplace for someone to say the thing that happens to women and other birthing people,” she said.

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Holding handmade signs with the names of four contestants Matt James, Peter Weber, Tyler Cameron, and Tayisha Adams,the friends from Long Island City, Bridget Betances, 28, Sam Urban, 24, Bridie Devereaux, 24, and Jessika Zachary, 27, screamed words of encouragement and eagerly awaited the arrival of the reality TV stars.

“You look hot!” “Make this bridge your bitch!” and “We love you!” were just some of the many chants the group screamed at the runners, causing many runners and spectators alike to turn their heads, smile, and thank the group for their energy. A marathoner, Lorenzo Maria Dell’Uva from Italy, even stopped in his tracks to take a picture of the enthusiastic bunch.

Lorenzo Maria Dell’Uva, a marathoner from Italy, stops before the entrance to the Queensboro Bridge to take a picture of the enthusiastic friend group at the New York City Marathon on Sunday, November 7, 2021.

Betances kept the TCSNYC2021 app open on her phone and frequently checked on the progress of the celebrity runners. As the celebrities approached the bridge, Bridget and her friends could barely contain their excitement.

Bridget Betances shows her friend, Sam Urban, 24, where Bachelor celebrities Tyler Cameron and Matt James are located in the marathon using the TCSNYC2021 app. Photo by Annie Jonas

The four celebrities arrived just before 11:30 a.m. Betances and Zachary waved their posters furiously in the air, screaming out their names. In the frenzy, Zachary dropped her poster beyond the police barricade and had to ask an officer to retrieve it for her. Tyler Cameron and Matt James turned to point and smile at the friend group before turning left onto the Queensboro Bridge to continue the marathon.

Bachelor celebrities Matt James (white shorts) and Tyler Cameron (blue shirt) smile and point at the friend group as they call out to them, before turning left onto the Queensboro Bridge. Photo by Annie Jonas

Betances hoped Cameron would stop and meet the friend group like he did in 2019, the first time Betances saw the “Bachelor” contestant at the New York City Marathon.

“We made cookies and we were like ‘Tyler! Tyler! Do you want cookies?’ and he came and took a photo with us. It was great, the energy” said Betances.

Urban, on the other hand, was indifferent about the “Bachelor” contestants being at the marathon. 

“I don’t personally care,” said Urban, who is waiting for her coworker to arrive. “We have some coworkers running, it’s really exciting. Our friend, Riley Wolfe, is like an amazing runner. He has been running these things for a long time.”

The friend group moved to Long Island City in Queens, from Indiana, where they went to college together. They said they live just across the street from the bridge and enjoy being cheerleaders to the marathoners.

“We live in Long Island City, so it’s nice to cheer on from our community,” said Betances.

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“There obviously is a significant chunk of people who would not be able to use a QR code,” he said. “I think it does cut out a certain group of people.”

QR codes, square-shaped barcodes that take customers to a website or document, were first implemented in restaurants with the onset of the pandemic as a way to replace high-touch traditional print menus with a contactless, digital alternative. By scanning the code with their smartphone’s camera, customers can look at a PDF of the menu or the restaurant’s website. 

But QR codes are not as simple, or accessible, as they might seem.

Erin Taylor, 25, grew up in a Mennonite household where no one in her family had or needed a cell phone. Taylor didn’t own a smartphone until 2017, and said her current phone, an older Android, doesn’t have the capability to scan a QR code menu.

“People with newer phones or with iPhones just open their camera and then it senses the QR code, but my phone doesn’t have the capability to do that,” said Taylor.

Taylor said QR code menus at restaurants are “frustrating and inconvenient” and present barriers for homeless, low-income, or elderly people who might not have a smartphone or who are unfamiliar with QR codes.

“It’s just classist to assume that everyone’s going to have a smartphone that is functional,” said Taylor.

Twenty-four  percent of low-income Americans don’t own a smartphone, according to Pew Research Center. Moreover, 17.9 %of the New York City population lives in poverty, compared with the 11.4 % national average, according to the United States Census Bureau. 

In New York, older adults are the fastest-growing age-group of the population, according to the Center for an Urban Future, with a 26 % increase of New Yorkers over the age of 65 in the past 10 years. By comparison, the state’s overall population grew by just  3 % for the same period.

Rosa Bandera, 58, is a resident of the Lower East Side in Manhattan and works in a restaurant in the West Village. The first time she encountered a QR code menu at a restaurant, she was daunted by the technology, which she had not known how to use before.

“I was first intimidated by them because it was sort of like, what is this? How do you do this?” she said.

Bandera said she had to ask the waiter for assistance the first few times she encountered QR code menus.

“There were a few situations where the actual waiter has taken their time and come up to me and been like, ‘No, no, no, this is how you do it,’ and given me more of a positive vibe that I’m not being so stupid,” she said.

Many restaurants turned to the QR code not only as an alternative to high-touch print menus, but also as a way to navigate the massive labor shortage that left restaurants 5.9 million jobs short.

Guszkowski said the QR code menu was especially beneficial to restaurants who had to deal with the loss of wait staff to serve customers.

“Labor is such an issue right now. If you can eliminate the need for someone having to be visiting that table multiple times throughout the meal, that’s a win for restaurants,” said Guszkowski.“But I’m not sure it’s great for the customer unless the customer is just looking for that convenience factor.”

Guszkowski said QR codes are ideal for restaurants who have in part replaced their wait staff with QR codes, but not as ideal for customers who might miss or require a print menu.

“I have heard some restaurants saying that consumers are coming in and asking for a regular menu, they don’t want the QR code anymore” he said.” I think that it’s a really good solution for restaurants, but ‘m not completely sold on the fact that consumers are going to accept this long term.” 

Since the onset of the pandemic, QR codes have experienced massive growth. QR code downloads have seen a 750 percent increase in the last 18 months, according to Bitly, a URL shortening service.

There will be no end in sight for the QR code, Guszkowski predicts.

“I don’t really see restaurants giving up on this too soon,” he said. “I do think there are mixed feelings among consumers, whereas restaurants I think are probably pretty much on board with this, at this point. It may just be a matter of customers having to just get used to it.”

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“It’s really cruel to be deporting these women, children, and families knowing that you’re sending some people to be killed,” said the Executive Director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees Ninaj Raoul. 

The deportation of migrants under Title 42 is not new. More than 104,000 people have been deported under Title 42 since March 2021.

On June 30, Physicians for Human Rights wrote a letter to President Biden demanding he stop using Title 42 to deport families, citing the 3,250 documented cases of kidnappings, rapes, and other attacks against people deported or detained at the U.S.-Mexico border since taking office.

Despite efforts like PHR’s letter and the injunction against Title 42 by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, deportations of families will continue.

Outrage ensued after the image of a border patrol agent on horseback allegedly whipping a Haitian migrant at an encampment near the Del Rio International bridge was released, and coverage of the 14,000 migrants who gathered under the bridge situated at the Texas-Mexico border in September began. 

Since Sunday, Sept. 19, over 6,000 migrants have been deported from the U.S. to Haiti, said Laurent Duvillier, the Regional Chief of Communication for Latin America and the Caribbean at UNICEF.

“Haiti is not just facing one crisis, it’s a combination of crises from political instability, but also increased gang violence over the past few months,” said Duvillier.

Various United Nations agencies have warned against deporting migrants to Haiti given the country’s instability in the wake of the assassination of President Jovenal Moisie and “dire” circumstances as a result of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, according to a report by CNBC.

Duvillier has been on the ground in Haiti providing humanitarian aid to the deportees. According to recent data Duvillier received, 49 percent of migrants expelled to Haiti are women and children.

These women and children, Duvillier said, are “extremely vulnerable” to the uptick in violence in recent months.

According to the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti, between January and August 31, there have been “944 intentional homicides, 124 abductions, and 78 cases of sexual and gender-based violence…with at least 159 people killed as a result of gang violence, including a four-month-old infant.”

Raoul said the situation in Haiti is especially dangerous for women, who are at risk of gender-based violence.

“There’s a lot of kidnapping and rapes going on right now,” said Raoul. “It’s like a rape epidemic.”

Raoul has been working at HWHR for 29 years, and in her time at the organization, she said she has never seen the kinds of numbers of deportations that have occurred over the past two weeks.

“We’re at record numbers of deportations here, including women and children, small children in particular,” said Raoul.

Over 40 children with non-Haitian passports have been deported to Haiti. These children do not have Haitian passports because many of the Haitian migrants at the Texas-Mexican border came from countries in South and Central America, where they had lived, worked and raised their families for years prior.

“Many of the children below the age of 10 were born either in Chile or in Brazil,” said Duvillier. “And they don’t speak Creole, they speak Spanish or Portuguese because their parents wanted them to get integrated in Chile or Brazil. So, we have a situation where we have many kids arriving in Haiti, in a country that they don’t know, not speaking the language, which makes them increasingly vulnerable to gang violence, but also to smuggling and human trafficking.”

Raoul said she was not surprised that there were thousands of Haitian migrants at the border, as “it’s basically what’s been going on for the past five years.”

She  explained that many Haitians left the country after the 2010 earthquake and were welcomed by countries like Brazil who offered humanitarian assistance and jobs. 

In 2015, however, Brazil faced an economic and political crisis and “started pushing the Haitians out, we don’t need them anymore,” said Raoul. “And people started heading north. They walked through nine or 10 countries, mostly by land and sea to get to the Mexican border and started coming up here in 2016. So that’s when we started seeing a large surge.”

The journey to the border was arduous for all migrants, but especially for women, many of whom were raped along the way. 

“These people are survivors,” said Duvillier.“They’ve witnessed extortion, smuggling, violence, rape and then reaching the U.S., they were expelled.”

Raoul said migrants are often deported because they are denied credible fear interviews which would determine if they are eligible for asylum. She worked as a translator with the Department of Justice at Guantanamo Bay during the Haitian refugee crisis in the 1990s where she conducted credible fear interviews with Haitian refugees. 

In her office, Ninaj Raoul holds a copy of Newsweek magazine from February 1, 1982 that depicts a Haitian refugee at Krome detention center. Photo by Annie Jonas.

“The credible fear interviews that we were translating for are pretty much identical to the same credible fear interviews that are supposed to be given at the border right now,” said Raoul. “I feel like we’ve gone full circle with the situations 29 years ago today.”

The road to asylum and resettlement in the U.S. is not an easy one, even for migrants who are granted asylum based on their credible fear interviews.

Raoul said the court systems that review migrants for asylum is just deporting them.

“So that means they’re going to go before a judge,” she said. “They’re going to be given a date to go before a judge, and the judge is going to say ‘why should I not deport you?’”

To ensure asylum seekers show up to their court dates, courts require seekers to wear electronic ankle monitors similar to those used on people who are incarcerated or on probation.

The monitors are known to negatively impact asylum seekers physically and emotionally. 

“For us Black people, it reminds us of slavery,” Raoul said. “We call them ‘electronic shackles.’”

She  said the use of electronic ankle monitors is part of the criminalization of Black immigrants, who are more likely to be deported than other immigrants, according to a report by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

Both Haitian migrants deported back to Haiti and those granted asylum in the U.S. face an uncertain future.

“These families, children, and individuals are basically looking for life, they are migrating for survival,” said Raoul.

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The bill was one of four pieces of legislation signed by Hochul aimed at improving workplace safety and tackling wage inequity. The new law will increase wage rates for building service workers from $15/hour to $26.45/hour or more––the rate that SEIU 32BJ union members currently receive––along with healthcare benefits.

“You are the ones who make this city happen,” said Hochul. “We’re gonna let people know that the most unionized state in America is proud of that. We’re going to increase our ranks and increase the influence of labor unions under my watch.”

A group of around 25 union members, all clad in purple t-shirts with the union logo, stood around Hochul as she spoke. Cheers swept the group, flags with the union symbol were waved with excitement, and signs declaring “Victory for co-op and condo workers” were held overhead.

A 32BJ Union Member holds a sign with the union logo at an event highlighting the passing of prevailing wage legislation in Columbus Circle on Friday, Sept. 17, 2021. Photo by Annie Jonas

This is Hochul’s first piece of legislation signed into law since taking office replacing former Governor Andrew Cuomo and becoming the first female governor in the state’s history.

But despite the fanfare, many of the workers were just grateful for the wages the law brings.

Edil Martes, a Brooklyn resident, has worked as a porter at a Manhattan condominium for the past eight years. He said he loves his job but as the only porter in the building he is “constantly overworked and overwhelmed and making just above minimum wage.”

Martes has faced many challenges in the past year and recent months. His mother died of COVID-19 complications and although he was able to afford her cremation, he cannot afford to bury her. His basement apartment was flooded by Hurricane Ida and he has had to relocate to his partner’s family’s house while he figures out his next steps.

“These are the challenges when you’re living paycheck to paycheck and can’t save for a financial emergency,” said Martes. “I’m happy to know that New York state legislators passed a bill that requires our employers to pay the prevailing wages to support us…[and] to put an end to this injustice.”

Renzo Ramirez, a Brooklyn resident who has been a 32BJ member for two years, said workers doing the same jobs as their unionized counterparts “are barely making minimum wage,” but with the passing of the prevailing wages bill, they can finally “g[e]t paid what they deserve.”

“Workers have a real voice in the union,” he said, “and the more we grow, the stronger we are when we have to stand up to our employers for disrespecting us.” 

The law specifically applies to workers in buildings that receive Cooperative and Condominium Tax Abatements, according to a press release from SEIU 32BJ.

Lieutenant Governor of New York Brian Benjamin speaks to 32BJ union members about the recent passing of legislation that provides prevailing wages to condo and co-op building service workers, in Columbus Circle. Photo by Annie Jonas

“If the state gives tax abatements to luxury co-ops and condos, the least we should expect is that there are prevailing wages and benefits for those who work in those buildings to keep everybody safe. That is the kind of New York state that I want to be a part of,” said Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin.

Benjamin served as senate sponsor to the bill when planning began two years ago and worked alongside New York Assemblywoman Carmen de la Rosa to see the bill’s passage.

Benjamin’s father is a retired member of 32BJ and worked as a building service worker in Manhattan. Benjamin said unions had a profound effect on his family and success.

Hochul signed the bills in the neighborhood of her immigrant grandparents in Buffalo, N.Y., both of whom were members of unions.

“I will never forget what labor unions did for my family, lifting them out of extreme poverty and living in trailer parks,” Hochul said. “And like so many others who come to this country in search of a better life, the labor union movement helped elevate all of us in the entire family for generations. I’ll never forget what that did for me personally.”

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