Mayor de Blasio is happy to force private employers to give new perks to their workers, but it’s another story entirely when it comes to the city’s own employees.
De Blasio last Thursday embraced a mandate of two weeks’ paid vacation for all businesses with as few as five employees. The next day, he got called out for his refusal to give all city workers the same paid family leave that the private sector must provide.
A pregnant FDNY trauma specialist called into the mayor’s weekly WNYC show to complain.
“How is the state and the city government implementing an act that requires private employers to provide something for the city and the government that the city and the government refuses to provide for their own workers?” she asked.
De Blasio blamed her union. He explained that teachers and some other city employees get paid parental leave because they gave up other benefits in exchange. “If your union wants to, right now, negotiate that with us, we’re ready,” the mayor told the caller.
Got that? He thinks private-sector workers shouldn’t have to “pay for” a new benefit, but public-sector ones should.
And never mind that the businesses that would get hit by his vacation mandate aren’t big corporations, which overwhelmingly already offer the time, but much smaller and low-profit-margin shops — particularly in the ailing retail sector.
He’s absolutely right, of course, that taxpayers can’t afford to simply grant new benefits to city workers (although he has violated that principle in practice quite a few times). But he won’t consider the possibility that his headline-winning policy could drive some people out of business entirely.
That’s the twisted understanding of “fairness” behind his talk of making New York “the fairest big city in America.”