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Cuomo Won't Let City Set Its Own Minimum Wage
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 12, 2014
Modified Feb 12, 2014
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Courtesy nycmayorsoffice's flickr
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 12, 2014
Modified Feb 12, 2014
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Not that New Yorkers necessarily believed Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo would spend their respective terms together skipping hand in hand through a field of legislative widlflowers, but things seem to be getting super testy between those two these days. First, Cuomo threw shade at de Blasio's plan to pay for universal pre-Kindergarten by taxing the rich; now, the governor says he's not down with the city raising its minimum wage on its own. Sorry kid, but Dad's just never going to take off the training wheels.
De Blasio pledged to petition Albany for a higher minimum wage for city workers in his State of the City speech on Monday, arguing that "we want to ensure that New Yorkers aren’t relegated to the ranks of the poor when putting in a full week’s work." Fair enough! But Cuomo's not into it. "We don’t want to cannibalize ourselves,” he said on an Albany radio show yesterday, claiming that raising the city's minimum alone would cause a "chaotic situation". “We don’t want to have different cities with different tax rates competing amongst themselves."
Though the state has set a gradual minimum wage increase in motion, the cost of living in the city is more than twice what it is in, say, Buffalo or Rochester. A statewide minimum wage doesn't factor that in, according to de Blasio's camp. "Just as the federal government allows states to set their own minimum wage — with surprisingly little chaos — we'd like to believe that there is a path forward here that recognizes the unique crisis working families are facing in New York," de Blasio spokeswoman Marti Adams told reporters. Break out the WTC ice daggers: this is war.
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Albany
bill de blasio
Cuomo
minimum wage
Rebecca Fishbein
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