Report Documents Proof of Low-wage Employment at NYC Subsidized Projects

This week, Good Jobs New York, along with the Fiscal Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project, released a report highlighting how New York City economic development policies often support low-wage jobs. The policy brief

An Overview of Job Quality and Discretionary Economic Development Subsidies in New York City

, describes the variety of subsidies and jobs at three well-known projects: Yankee Stadium, Gateway Mall in the Bronx and the Queens warehouse of Fresh Direct, an on-line grocery store. Yesterday, the findings of the report were discussed at

a forum

at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center for Worker Education. Data to estimate the wages at firms came from various sources including public records, government wage data and field interviews. Together, the projects analyzed in the brief won tens of millions of dollars in benefits from the City, but because there are no job quality standards attached to employment at the projects, many jobs pay remarkably low wages.  Of the 4,909 jobs studied (concession food and beverage workers, warehouse workers, retail salespersons, security guards, and cashiers) the estimated annual median pay ranged from $17,534 to $26,395 for a full-time worker. Ironically this is only 58 percent to 87 percent, respectively, of the Bloomberg administration’s own 2008 poverty threshold for a four-person family in New York City. Security guards, representing about 563 of the jobs nearly 5,000 jobs studied, earned the highest wages at $12.69 an hour. Cashiers working full-time in the retail industry (a rarity as a business that depends on part-timers) earn approximately $17,500 a year. The prevalence of low wage employment continues at the controversial, heavily subsidized new Yankee Stadium where seasonal jobs are the norm; starting wages there are estimated to be $9.19 an hour. Of the over 1,200 employees working in a Queens warehouse for Fresh Direct, the starting wage was typically the legal minimum. Obtaining the data for the report (originally released last May and updated with new data) was a daunting task. Transparency about how discretionary subsidies are allocated has improved greatly over the years. But as the report states, the city falls flat on providing data enabling New Yorkers to determine the quality of jobs at subsidized projects.