April 5, 2024

Mayor introduces city jobs initiative, revamps hiring halls

BY CRYSTAL LEWIS

The Adams administration announced last week that the city will be relaunching its hiring halls – which paused last fall following a hiring freeze – as part of its plan to connect New Yorkers to work opportunities.

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams unveiled Jobs NYC, a threepronged initiative to help New Yorkers, particularly those in neighborhoods with high rates of unemployment, find jobs. The city has revamped the hiring halls to include opportunities with private employers. The events will be held monthly.

“We did hiring halls for city jobs, now we’re adding hiring halls for private sector jobs as well. We’re going to connect New Yorkers to well-paying public- and private-sector jobs,” Adams said during the March 27 hiring hall in Brownsville where city officials unveiled the initiative.  City agencies including the Administration for Children’s Services, the Fire Department and the Department of Transportation were among those recruiting. Private employers such as NYU Langone and Goodwill NY/NJ were also there.

To address widespread municipal vacancies, the city last year hosted more than a dozen hiring events, where nearly 2,200 prospective city workers were offered jobs. But they came to a stop after Adams announced his administration’s “Program to Eliminate the Gap” budget cuts along with a hiring freeze for nearly all departments. Positions supporting public health, public safety and revenue generation were excluded from the freeze.

As of last December, the Administration for Children’s Services counted 809 fewer employees than in January 2020, while the Law Department had 285 fewer workers, according to data from the state comptroller’s office. A February report from the city Independent Budget Office found that the hiring freeze did not have “an appreciable effect on active city headcount.”

Looking to close the gap

In late February, City Hall suspended the hiring freeze and agencies instead adopted a two-for-one hiring model, according to which one employee can be hired for every two departures.  District Council 37, which represents many of the titles facing staffing shortages, celebrated the return of the hiring halls. “We applaud any effort the City makes to fill more than 22,000 vacancies facing our public workforce,” a union spokesperson said.

Although New York City has recovered the jobs lost during the pandemic — there are currently nearly 28,000 more jobs in the city than there were in February 2020, according to the Center for New York City Affairs — the unemployment rate for Black New Yorkers is three times larger than that of white residents. As of the last quarter of 2023, the unemployment rate was 9.3 percent for Black city residents, compared to 3 percent for white New Yorkers. “We’ve got to interact and find out, what’s the hurdle? What’s the barrier? Why aren’t you employed?” Adams said. “We have

See HIRING, page 2

Challengers fall short in lifeguard local’s leadership election

BY DUNCAN FREEMAN clewis@thechiefleader.com

The president of a District Council 37 local representing the city’s lifeguards was re-elected on March 29 but reformers pushing for union democracy made inroads into the union’s executive board.

Reform slate claims union’s constitution is arbitrarily applied

about how many lifeguards voted in the election or how many votes each candidate received.

According to the results released to candidates by Local 461’s election committee on Saturday, Alma Diamond was reelected president, beating back a challenge from lifeguard David Lucena despite what members of the reform slate said was a coalescing around the challenger’s candidacy in the days preceding the election.

But Stephanie Reiter, a lifeguard supported by the reformers, won the union’s secretary-treasurer position and Bryant Colon, another reformer, won a seat on the union’s executive board.

In an email announcing election results, Local 461’s election committee did not include information

Lifeguards intent on ousting the union’s current leadership had initially supported Kristoff Borrel for president, but he and others on an insurgent slate were barred by the local’s election committee from running because they were not in good standing for the entire preceding year, forcing the lifeguards to regroup and find other candidates to support. Another insurgent lifeguard, Jose Polanco, tied with lifeguard Gavin Erickson in the vote for an executive board seat, necessitating a runoff.

“I want to thank everyone who came out to vote, we had a great turn out,” Carlos Adames, the head of the committee, wrote in the email. The results were sent out late Saturday night, and only members who ran in the election received the results, several lifeguards told The Chief. The election was held at two different polling sites, one in Queens and one in Manhattan, throughout the day Friday.

‘The corruption keeps going’

Edwin Agramonte, who organized the original reform slate, was barred from running in the election because he worked as a chief lifeguard in 2023 — a supervisory role — and his union dues were sent to a different lifeguard union, Local

See LIFEGUARDS, page 3

BY RICHARD KHAVKINE richardk@thechiefleader.com

On a windy and cool Holy Saturday morning on Long Island’s South Shore, family, friends and thousands of fellow cops bid goodbye to NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller, the married father of a 1-year-old boy, who was shot and killed in Queens March 25 by a career criminal.

During funeral services for the 31-year-old officer at St. Rose of Lima R.C. Church in Massapequa, not far from where he, his wife and young son Ryan were building a life, mourners spoke of their gratitude for having known Diller as a friend and as a cop, as a husband and as a father.

They spoke of his passion for hockey and lacrosse, of his dedication to the department and its mission, of the respect he engendered and of his love for his wife and son.

Noting that Diller was in his late 20s when he joined the NYPD, Commissioner Edward Caban said Diller “had done some living by that point.”  “And he brought both his life experience and his big personality to his 50,000 new brothers and sisters,” Caban continued. “When you talk to

the cops who work with Jon, they’ll tell you there was a time in their career before they’d worked with him, and then there was everything that came after. He was special. He left a lasting impression. And after you met him, everything was different. Everything was better…. He loved this work and he was darned good at it.”

But they also spoke about resolve and responsibility, Stephanie Diller most of all. Recalling the January 2022 killings of NYPD Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora in a West Harlem apartment by a heavily armed ex-con, the officer’s widow implored city officials.

“It’s been two years and two months since Detective Rivera and Detective Mora made the ultimate sacrifice — just like my husband, Jonathan Diller. Dominique Rivera stood in front of all the elected officials present today pleading for change. That change never came,” she told the hundreds of mourners inside the church, her 14-month old son in the arms of an officer standing just behind her. “How many more police officers and how many more families need to make the ultimate sacrifice before we start protecting them?”

Diller, a member of the 105th Precinct’s Community Response Team, was shot and killed after he and other officers approached an illegally parked car in Far Rockaway, Queens. Police said Diller was shot once in the stomach by a man with 21 prior arrests. Officials said Diller, mortally wounded, was still able to wrestle the gun away from the shooter before the man was shot by police.

Diller was taken to Jamaica Hospital where he was pronounced dead. The suspected killer, Guy Rivera, 34, has since been arraigned on charges of murder of a police officer, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

‘He saved lives’

Mayor Eric Adams saluted the young officer, calling him a bulwark against chaos and disorder, “a hero to all New Yorkers and all Americans.”

“He ran towards danger, taking risks, making arrests and undoubtedly saving lives,” the mayor, a former 22-year New York City cop,

Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office

NYPD pallbearers carried Officer Jonathan Diller’s casket into St. Rose of Lima R.C. Church in Massapequa for his funeral.

Agreement averts strike by Staten Island nurses

BY

Nurses at Staten Island University Hospital have reached a tentative contract agreement with Northwell Health, preventing a strike that was set to start April 2.

The New York State Nurses Association announced Saturday that it settled the provisional deal with Northwell, which runs the hospital, earlier that morning. If approved by the rank and file, the three-year agreement would provide nurses with wages that total 22.12 percent and experience pay.

The union stated that the raises provided in the pact would bring the nurses’ starting salary on par with other nurses at private-sector hospitals across the city. The new starting salary would be $107,411.

“For too long, Staten Island University Hospital nurses have struggled to stay on our island because our pay was so much lower than what we could make for doing the same work in Brooklyn or Manhattan,” said John Vuolo, a nurse at the hospital and mem-

ber of the bargaining committee. “Now that we’ve won pay parity, we can afford to stay here in our community where we want to be, caring for our neighbors. That’s a victory for all of Staten Island.”

18 units will add nurses

The pact, running from April 1 through March 31, 2027, also provides improvements to safe staffing, particularly by adding nurses to the units that most need additional staffing. NYSNA said that 18 units will see additional nurses, including the emergency department holding area, the burn unit ICU and the labor and delivery unit.

The union estimated that the hospital will need to hire about 100 nurses to meet the new staffing requirements. The pact also creates an expedited process for creating staffing standards in new units and adds safe staffing enforcements. “The safe staffing improvements we won in our tentative agreement make Staten Island a better place

to live, work, and receive care,” said Elaine Minew, a nurse at the hospital and a member of NYSNA’s bargaining committee. “Our goal is always to make sure that we have enough nurses at the bedside to provide safe patient care, and our tentative agreement helps us do exactly that by guaranteeing better staffing and more nurses hired where we need them the most.”

The agreement was reached days before 1,300 nurses at the hospital were set to go on strike. Their pact expired Sunday.

On March 13, more than 97 percent of nurses at Staten Island University Hospital who participated in a vote authorized going on strike.

The union began negotiations with Northwell in December, but the hospital’s management initially rejected their demands for fair raises and safe-staffing.  Nurses rallied outside of the Ocean Breeze hospital the same day the strike vote results were announced.

Last week, 26 unions signed a letter calling on Northwell to reach an agreement meeting the nurses’ demands. The unions included District Council 37, Communication Workers of America and the District Council of Carpenters.

The nurses will begin voting on whether to ratify the pact April 3. Voting is expected to be finished Friday.

“Staten Island nurses and patients deserve the same high standards as the rest of New York City. Congratulations to SIUH NYSNA nurses for their fierce patient advocacy,” said Nancy Hagans, NYSNA’s president.

In a statement, Northwell Health said that the hospital “is pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with NYSNA.”

It continued, “The agreement provides our valued nurses with market competitive compensation and benefits and ensures a safe, supportive working environment that enables them to provide exceptional care that our patients and community have come to trust.”

UAW lawyers’ local fights congressional subpoena

House committee seeks details on Gaza cease-fire vote

BY DUNCAN FREEMAN dfreeman@thechiefleader.com

A United Auto Workers local representing public defenders in New York declined to comply with a congressional subpoena last week, arguing in a letter to a House of Representatives committee that its demands exceed its jurisdiction and threaten workers’ free speech rights.

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, subpoenaed the Association of Legal Aid Attorney’s Local 2325 on March 11 for information regarding a vote that ALAA members took in December on a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. Foxx initially requested a bevy of information on matters related to the resolution in a January letter to ALAA’s president, Lisa Ohta. When the union failed to respond to the request, Foxx subpoenaed the union.

In conjunction with lawyers from the New York Civil Liberties Union, the union on March 25 responded to Foxx, writing in a letter that it objects to the subpoena and that Foxx’s requests for information were “vague and overbroad.”

“The ALAA and Ms. Ohta object to the subpoena on the ground it exceeds the lawful and legitimate jurisdiction of the Committee,” the response reads. “The Committee’s true interest in this matter arises out of the Committee’s hostility to the content of the ALAA resolution, which not only renders the subpoena beyond the Committee’s legitimate authority but also violates the United States Constitution.”

In a statement, Leah Duncan, the ALAA’s financial secretary-treasurer, wrote that the union stands behind its resolution and the process that led to its passage.

“We are proud to be part of the growing movement of unions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” Duncan said in a statement. “We continue to condemn all forms of antisemitism and Islamophobia and reject the harmful rhetoric that conflates anti-zionism with antisemitism. Our membership will not be intimidated into abandoning our core principles, in-

cluding advancing the interests of working people worldwide, by this blatant attack on organized labor.”

The ALAA represents more than 2,700 workers at The Legal Aid Society, Neighborhood Defender Service and other legal service providers.

Instead of providing the detailed information, including the minutes of internal union meetings, Foxx requested, the ALAA will furnish the congressional committee only with publicly available documents, the union said in a press release.

A spokesperson for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce did not respond to a request for comment on the union’s defiance.

‘Clear government overreach’

The resolution, “Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza, an End to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, and Support for Workers’ Political Speech,” passed in a 1,067-570 vote by members of the ALAA. It calls for an end to “Israeli apartheid and the occupation and blockade of Palestinian land, sea, and air by Israeli military forces,” and refers several times to Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip as genocide. The resolution was discussed by ALAA members in the months before its passage, but an earlier vote was blocked when four union members at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued the local. A federal judge threw out that suit on Dec 15 and the vote proceeded soon after.

The UAW International has also called for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and officials in the union have labeled the congressional investigation into the ALAA “McCarthyism” and a “witch hunt.” Lawyers advocating for the ALAA said the subpoena would chill the constitutionally protected free speech of union members.

“This inquiry is a McCarthyite silencing tactic meant to chastise lawyers and legal services workers for their protected political speech and intimidate other unions from speaking out,” a senior staff attorney with the NYCLU, Lupe Aguirre, said in a statement. “The Committee’s attempt to stifle workers’ speech because it doesn’t agree with their viewpoints is a clear government overreach. Union members have the constitutional right to take political stances and express themselves through voting.”

“Our people are our city’s greatest asset, because we put talent and workforce development at center,”

Duncan Freeman /The Chief

Members of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, Local 2325, at the Legal Aid Society picketed outside of their downtown Manhattan offices in April 2023.

Last week, the ALAA refused to comply with a congressional subpoena related to members’ vote on a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip.

Courtesy NYSNA

The New York State Nurses Association announced March 30 that it had settled a tentative contract agreement with Northwell Health on behalf of nurses at Staten Island University Hospital. The deal includes raises that bring their salaries on par with other private-sector nurses in the city and improves staffing levels. The nurses were set to go on strike starting April 2.

Ex-NYPD cop gets 70 months for helping gang

BY RICHARD KHAVKINE richardk@thechiefleader.com

A former NYPD cop who conspired for months with a violent Bronx street gang, including by helping her gangbanger boyfriend elude capture after he killed a rival, was sentenced March 29 to a 70-month prison term.   Gina Mestre, a city cop from July 2013 to May 2022, had pleaded guilty in December to federal charges of accessory after the fact to murder in aid of racketeering. She had faced a possible 15-year sentence.

She was arrested last August on numerous charges after federal authorities determined she had alerted her boyfriend, the leader of the violent Shooting Boys gang, that he was being sought for the killing of a gang foe. Mestre, 33, was assigned to the 52nd Precinct’s Public Safety Unit, whose main focus was to quell a rampage of gun violence in the north Bronx, much of it attributed to the Shooting Boys, an offshoot of the Trinitarios founded in 2017. The gang distributed heroin, cocaine, crack, fentanyl, oxycodone and marijuana and killed, assaulted and robbed as part of their enterprise, officials said.

Its members were a major target of police in the summer of 2020, about the time Mestre started covertly communicating with Andrew Done, aka “Caballo,” the leader of the University Heights crew, including by alerting him to a grand jury investigation into the gang.

She let Done know that “things were ‘hot’ and that [Done] needed to ‘slow down,’” according to the indictment. Mestre several times warned Done when law enforcement were closing in, which allowed the Shooting Boys to hide their guns and other contraband and “enabled the Enterprise to continue operating,” according to the indictment.

On Nov. 5 that year, Done shot and killed a 20-year-old rival gang member in the borough’s Highbridge neighborhood. Mestre on the same day sent him security camera footage of the killing, even as she was among officers who identified

him as the perpetrator. As law enforcement officials — including Mestre — searched for Done, she communicated with him by cellphone, warning him not to stay in one place too long. He fled to the Dominican Republic soon afterward.

“Gina Mestre betrayed and abused the trust placed in her by the NYPD and the people of New York,” the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, said following the sentencing. “She swore to protect the public from criminal activity, but instead participated in significant crimes of her own by passing confidential information to a gang leader and helping him evade capture for the murder of a rival gang member.”

Done was captured by federal marshals in April 2022 and later pleaded guilty to killing the rival gang member. He was sentenced last year to 35 years in prison. Done and nine other members of the Shooting Boys were earlier charged with racketeering conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, firearms offenses, and narcotics conspiracy.

In addition to the nearly six-year prison term, U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote sentenced Mestre, of Mohegan Lakes, New York, to two years of supervised release.

Former IBEW members’ suit against their local will move forward

Union could be on the hook for millions

BY DUNCAN FREEMAN dfreeman@thechiefleader.com

A federal judge has given the goahead to a suit brought by three former members of Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers against their former union, ruling on March 31 that one of the workers’ claims that the union had breached its duty of fair representation could proceed.

U.S. District Judge Rachel Kovner found that the union’s distribution of funds from a settlement with Charter Communications raises “a sufficient inference of arbitrary, discriminatory or bad faith action to survive a motion to dismiss,” which the union had sought.

The three current plaintiffs on the case were among the 1,800 technicians at Charter who walked out on strike in 2017. The strike lasted five years and ended when the IBEW reached a settlement with the company in April 2022 that removed the union as the bargaining representative for workers — stripping Charter Communications employees of union wages, benefits and a pension plan — while dismissing all unfair labor practice charges.

As part of the settlement, the IBEW also received an undisclosed sum from Charter Communications but the workers allege that instead of directing that money to employees who had essentially been out of work for five years, the union used the money to replenish its pension fund and give its retirees a bonus.

The lawyer representing the workers, Arthur Schwartz, said the amount of the settlement was unclear — some reports have estimated it could be as high as $100 million — or how and to whom the money was disbursed. But one of the suit’s plaintiffs, Anthony Gagliano, retired during the strike and received a $1,500 bonus in his pen-

sion plan soon after the settlement.

It was that bonus that signaled to workers that they may not be getting their fair share of the settlement sum, which led to the suit that the workers filed in November 2022.

“It’s our understanding that they took that money and put it into the union’s pension fund,” Schwartz said. “If [the IBEW] got paid money to drop the group and not represent them anymore, to give up their fight, why didn’t any of the money go to the workers?”

The IBEW provided workers with $150 of weekly strike pay for eight weeks during the strike and helped some of the workers apply for unemployment insurance or find jobs at other IBEW shops. But the suit alleges that union officials barely communicated with the workers about the strike’s progress, and held its last open meeting for the striking workers in 2019.

The suit argues that the lack of communication also amounted to a breach of the union’s duties of fair representation, but Kovner rejected that argument. But with her finding that the workers’ claim had merit, the case now moves for-

508 of DC 37, effectively precluding him from the election. Local 461’s constitution requires that candidates for leadership positions be dues-paying members in good standing with the union for a year before the election.

But, Rosa Peña, who prevailed in the contest for Local 461’s vice president position, also worked as a chief lifeguard in 2023, according to publicly available payroll data. And Luis Martinez, who won the election for union delegate, the same post Agramonte sought, is also listed as having been a chief lifeguard in 2023. Step-up promotions to supervisor positions for year-round lifeguards are common in the Parks Department, and often the lifeguards will still pay dues to Local 461 while they are in those roles. But Agramonte’s dues, and the dues of other reform candidates who got step-up promotions in 2023, were redirected to Local 508 last year. The reform slate’s members argue that if Martinez’s and Peña’s dues were directed to Local 508 last summer, they too should have been barred from running in last week’s election. Local 461’s election committee

did not respond to emails requesting the full vote count, to an inquiry as to why Peña and Martinez were able to run while Agramonte was barred and also to why the election was held in March if the local’s constitution mandates it be conducted in February. Agramonte said that even if Martinez’s and Peña’s dues went towards Local 461 during the period they worked as chief lifeguards, the local’s barring of some candidates while it supported the candidacy of incumbents in similar standing is evidence of a double standard and the targeting of lifeguards pushing for union reforms. “The corruption keeps going,” he said. “If I’m not able to run because I’m a supervisor in the summer, why is she able to?,” he added, referring to Peña.  Agramonte sued Local 461 after the 2021 leadership elections because a slate of seasonal lifeguards he was hoping to run alongside was barred from participating in the election. That suit was eventually dismissed but Agramonte feels he’s been targeted by the union’s leadership since then and seasonal lifeguards, who make up the vast majority of Local 461’s nearly 1,200 members, weren’t allowed to vote in the 2021 election or this year’s contest.

Gina Mestre, who was assigned to the 52nd Precinct in the Bronx until she left the department in 2022, pleaded guilty helping a Bronx gang leader elude capture on a murder charge.

Rebecca

COMMENTARY COMMENTARY COMMENTARY

Some history might help. In 2008, then-Mayor Bloomberg decided to use the financial crash as an excuse to deny the United Federation of Teachers the pattern raises (two years, 4+4 percent) he had given everyone else. In 2009, Bloomberg stole an illegal third term and refused raises to all for the next four years. When the lord of the manor departed, Bloomberg left his heir (Bill de Blasio) the unpaid tab. Also short on cash, de Blasio asked the manor’s servants (aka the Municipal Labor Committee) if they had money in the pantry piggy bank (the Joint Health Insurance Premium Stabilization Fund). After some discussion, the MLC and de Blasio’s people agreed to break the bank and refill it later. The “refill” agreed upon was an illegal switch to Medicare Advantage. The story has three villains, listed in order of culpability: Bloomberg, the MLC and de Blasio.

You might notice that migrants, immigrants and asylum seekers aren’t included, with good reason — this dirty deal was hatched and agreed to years before anyone arrived in the current wave of immigration. Linking the two is unfair, untrue and can only be described as scapegoating.

Joseph Cannisi

Medicare’s heartbeat

To The ediTor: I cannot wait until all the city’s and the state’s budget cuts are restored in their respective budgets. The fiscal cliff that was coming is nowhere in sight. This union town is supposed to protect the elderly, children, disabled, veterans, women, and marginalized groups irrespective of protected status. Government’s role is to protect the vulnerable. Government also has to regulate and make sure business gets done in a fair and orderly manner.

The truth on the ground is far different than the theory and ideology. Groups such as the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees and the Transport Workers Union Local 100 Retirees Organization rightly feel as if they have been shortchanged or even neglected by their unions and their former employers, the city.

People’s health should not be dependent on profit-driven enterprise. Municipal retirees never thought they would be fighting the unions, the government and insurance companies all at once. What happened to the government being for the people by the people? There are no gatekeepers, just those ready to bury these retirees in their graves when they are denied health benefits.

I hope the courts checks and balances the government by obliging it to retain the traditional Medicare the city’s were all promised. We await the decision with our hands on democracy’s pulse. We will see if democracy is dying or allowed to live at least a little longer.

Celso Garcia

Failing Rikers

To The ediTor: Mayor Eric Adams should have more doubts than convictions about his policies for the scandal-ridden, violent Rikers Island jail complex. First, the city is legally required to shut Rikers by August 2027, re-

placing it with four borough facilities designed in a more humane way. Aligned with the correction officers’ union, Adams has not only been critical of the plan, arguing that legislators must create an alternative, but also has shown little interest in reducing the jail population of 6,200 to meet inmate capacity in the replacement jails.

He has also tried to keep under the radar his refusal and/or inability to close Rikers. A public notice last year was only published in an administration publication. It revealed that the new Brooklyn jail would not be completed until 2029. This year, the administration finally decided to announce that the other three jails are even further behind schedule. The Legal Aid Society and Freedom Agenda both said that the administration cannot be allowed to violate the law for the 2027 deadline.

Second, when Adams took office he removed the reform-minded corrections commissioner, replacing him with Louis Molina, a decision widely supported by the correction officers. As conditions continued to deteriorate at Rikers, with more than 25 people dying, Molina avoided attending court hearings about a possible federal takeover. He also refused to share necessary data.

In March, the Legal Aid Society said, “Our clients in the jails continue to suffer and the city continues to fail them.” Adams’ response: “We want the challenge…. Rikers can be fixed.” Two years ago, the mayor said he and Molina could “fix the problems at Rikers.” We’re still waiting.

Howard Elterman

SandersCare

To The ediTor:

Thankfully for NewYork-Presbyterian patients, the hospital reached an agreement that will allow patients with Aetna coverage to continue to be covered when treated by that hospital’s physicians.

But this is something that those covered by Medicare don’t have to worry about.

That is one reason why Medicare Advantage is not a good idea. It’s also why Senator Bernie Sanders’ long-ignored proposal of Medicare-for-all is a good idea.

Richard Warren

Trial muzzle

To The ediTor: What effect will State Supreme Judge Juan M. Merchan’s gag order have on Donald J. Trump if Trump is treated like any other defendant in a criminal trial? It may mean he will be found in contempt of court and do some jail time. Trump’s true believers may consider jail time to be a badge of honor for America’s leading traitor.

Merchan’s order prohibits Trump from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and jurors, and it also forbids him from commenting on prosecutors, court staff and their relatives. But the gag order does not prohibit him from verbally attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or even Merchan himself.

Does anyone believe that Donald Trump can sit through a five or six-week trial without losing control, or trying to sabotage the trial in any of the malicious ways he attacks any adversary?

If Trump is treated like any other defendant with regard to the gag order, it would lend a great deal of respect to our criminal courts. If Trump behaves himself in court, most of us will believe he is taking a very powerful sedative.

Michael J. Gorman

City must do more to rein in anti-union non-profits

BY ROBERT OVETZ

This week, a toddler named Elio had his birthday a month after he lost his health insurance. Hospitalized with leukemia, Elio’s parents lost their health insurance when their employer, the nonprofit Mobilization For Justice (MFJ), canceled it in retaliation for striking for, among other issues, better health insurance.

The 110 members of the Legal Services Staff Association (LSSA) UAW Local 2320 at the nonprofit legal services organization have been on an open-ended strike since February 26th. They struck for one day Feb. 2 after filing multiple unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. This may now be one of the longest strikes in nonprofit history, not including hospitals.

MFJ is now actively trying to break the strike. “To add insult to injury, we recently learned that MFJ has hired scab labor to try to replace us,” Ella Abeo, a bargaining team member and paralegal in the association’s Housing Project, said in an email interview.

The strike is about not only inadequate health insurance coverage for families like Elio’s, but also raising pay for their lowest paid support staff, who are primarily women of color. Because the organization has a vacancy rate of about 20 percent, staff workloads to provide legal services for the poorest New Yorkers facing eviction have risen dramatically.

The workers are simply asking the boss to live up to the principles in their mission statement. MFJ claims that it “envisions a society in which there is equal justice for all” and “prioritizes the needs of people who are low income … as they struggle to overcome the effects of social injustice and systemic racism.”

Apparently, these principles don’t apply to MFJ workers who serve New York’s poorest. The organization’s mission is to mobilize for justice for everyone but its workers.

Some of the staff are paid so little they are forced to work second jobs. By failing to live up to this promise, MFJ ensures justice for no one, even those it is funded to serve.

Those working top jobs at the nonprofit are “doing well by doing good,” mistaking justice for just us. Its executive director, Tiffany Liston, earned $279,419 in total compensation in 2023, according to the organization’s IRS Form 990. That’s more than four times the starting staff salary of $51,000 to $53,000. Montel Cherry, the organization’s deputy director of diversity, received a total of $204,870, which is also four times the low pay for the staff of mostly female and people of color. The top 11 executives all have a total compensation package of no less than $167,000.

Meanwhile, those actually doing the heavy work are woefully underpaid. Starting and maximum pay for staff attorneys, who have an average of 3,000 cases per year, is below pay at Legal Aid. The low salaries, lack of flexible work schedules and inadequate health benefits have resulted in high staff turnover that disrupts services to clients and threatens the organization’s mission.

MFJ can certainly meet the union’s modest economic demands because it receives large grants from the City of New York. The organization’s huge budget rose nearly 25 percent to $24.5 million from 2022 to 2023. Its total assets rose by $12 million or 45 percent. Net assets and funds rose by 18 percent in that same year and it currently has about $6 million in cash alone.

The organization is funded by the city’s Universal Access to Counsel funding program, which provides no-cost legal services for those threatened with eviction, one of the first of its kind in the country. In 2023, MFJ received $9.3 million in funding for this program. The organization stands to receive a large share of the city’s projected $408.5 million in funding for the right to an attorney over the next three years.  MFJ’s mistreatment of its own

workers is a classic hypocrisy of the nonprofit sector. I say this as a former longtime nonprofit worker myself. Nonprofits serve the public by exploiting the labor of workers who are most often just as poor and disenfranchised as those they serve. They exploit workers who believe in the mission and are pressured to work long days with poor pay, terrible working conditions and little control over their work.

When they unionize to address these issues their bosses shame them for supposedly abandoning the people they are already struggling to serve. This story was perfectly portrayed in the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s 2023 musical production, “Breakdown.”

As Nikita Salehi, a union delegate and staff attorney in MFJ’s Housing Project, explained in an email interview, nonprofit organizations “exploit their employees in nearly the exact same way that for-profit businesses exploit theirs — by trying to squeeze as much labor from us while cutting down on as much costs and benefits as possible.”

The City Council is complicit in this exploitation by increasingly contracting with nonprofits to privatize the jobs of public sector workers. As I have previously written, there are now twice as many nonprofit workers than there are in the public sector in New York City, nearly all of them in education, health care and social services.   The union has widespread support from the New Yorkers they serve, local politicians and other unions.

Its City Council allies can and must do much more than express solidarity with the MFJ workers. The city can require that contracted nonprofits provide the same wages, benefits and working conditions public employees receive doing the same work. Nonprofits engaging in excessive unfair labor practices and anti-union tactics such as hiring scabs, as MFJ is doing right now, should be automatically put on probation or have their contract canceled.

These policies would begin to rein in nonprofits’ exploitation of their workers. The city would be going on record that it is not outsourcing public sector work to nonprofits to slash labor costs.   Until that happens it’s clear that the non-profitization of the public sector is just another privatization strategy that dismantles public sector unions in order to cover the costs of tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

of the forthcoming

is

BY RON ISAAC

The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory would be proud of those opposed to Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a 32-hour work week.

Back in 1911, those entrepreneurs locked the exits so that their immigrant female employees, who in the springtime of their lives were logging 52-hour weeks, couldn’t sneak a toilet break while on the company’s (almost literal) dime.

Mission accomplished.

The bosses were consumed by greed and that same greed consumed 146 workers. When fire broke out in the late afternoon of March 25, 1911, they had the freedom to choose death by incineration or by having their bodies crushed when they jumped out a window to the street below.

The fair market value of each life lost was $75, as determined by a civil court. The bosses settled it, reckoning it was part of the cost of doing business. Inflation was high then.

Today, executives take five-hour liquid lunches and do deals on the golf course. Many are horrified at the specter of a shrinking work week for their serfs, even if their workload is unreduced and completed.

It’s the principle of the thing. They see dignity in wage slavery.  They swear that American exceptionalism is forged on the anvil of hard labor, proving the lesson that to earn a subsistence-enabling paycheck, a worker’s reach must exceed their grasp. That entails their enduring without complaint, sacrificing without self-pity, being resigned to stultifying immobility, and yielding to management in all matters and sparing natural envy. And spewing naked gratitude for their electronically generated paycheck.  Management would whole-heartedly approve, if covered by insurance, a lobotomization of that portion of the brain from which the worker’s spirit of self-determination may arise. Bosses must wear, with equal measure of risk and glory, their inherent, leadlined mantle of accountability and that’s why they get the big bucks and an untimed duty schedule, they would have us believe.

That makes me laugh more than an Ali G interview.

for their wealth, because their material stability depends on it. Pride and dignity are relegated to the junior varsity lineup, because many workers cannot underwrite them.

Whenever there’s a proposal to raise the minimum wage or compress the workweek, the business lobbyists and lackeys prophesize the collapse of civilization. Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy called Sanders’ 32-hour week “napalm.”

Cassidy has a future as a contractor and specialist in lyrical military poet. Technology and artificial intelligence have mercifully slashed the time needed to meet essential productivity goals. That’s long been evident in agriculture and manufacturing. Around the world, both among private sectors and governments, the results of pilot projects in workweek reduction have confirmed that productivity is enhanced, because workers take fewer sick days and time off for childcare.

When CEOs bankrupt a company, they bail out with diamond-encrusted parachutes, sometimes even after a few months at the helm. Workers take the fall. Accountability is indeed asymmetrical. It is lopsided to favor management.

Auto workers often log more hours in a week than their top management does in a month. Teachers typically commit double their official duty hours to fulfill their responsibility and “psychic wage” but can be written up for theft of service if closed circuit cameras show them cutting out a minute early.

Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers, noted in Senate testimony last month that there are indeed people “who don’t want to work.”

“But those aren’t the blue-collar people. Those aren’t the working-class people. It’s a group of people who are never talked about for how little they actually work and produce, and how little they actually contribute to humanity,” People’s World quoted the union president as saying. “The people I’m talking about are the Wall Street freeloaders, the masters of passive income.” Still, breadwinners must tremble

Nations with the longest workweeks tend to heavily rely on foreign aid or have economies with accelerated transitioning from agriculture to manufacturing.

Nothing in Sanders’ bill prevents or penalizes additional hours willingly worked. His bill is neither radical nor anti-business. “What’s radical is that over $50 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent over the past 50 years. It’s time that the financial gains from technology benefit workers, not the 1 percent,” he says, sounding a bit preachy but impeccably logical.

“Dead on arrival,” quoth the raven Kevin O’Leary,  founder of his namesake private venture capital investment company.

Most European nations plus countries like Israel and Canada, have shorter workweeks than we do, and their industrial output, standard of living and health care ranks on the global “happiness index” are equal to ours here or higher.

We still beat out Gambia, Myanmar and some other competitors.

Rich Lowry of the National Review calls Sanders’ practical dream a “scheme … a prescription for poverty” and sniffs the odor of Marxism. Apologists of unrestricted free-market cutthroat economic theory deem such an unburdening of workers millstones a deep-down practicum in national legacy betrayal.

Sanders claims that more than half the workforce works over 50

hours weekly, yet the average worker makes nearly $50 a week less, adjusted for inflation, than a half-century ago, during which time productivity soared 400 percent.

Relaxing rigidity in work schedules has improved job performance, no matter where or in what form it is has been implemented. “Flexitime,” which involves a third day off from work each week, with its hours being distributed among the remaining days, has been widespread in the UK for ages.

The Fair Labor Standards Act should be amended to reflect a shorter work week, as envisioned by Sanders and U.S. Representative Mark Takano, a California Democrat and a senior member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, who observes that bosses would also benefit because “shorter workweeks have been shown to further reduce health care premiums for employers, lower operational costs for businesses and have a positive environmental impact.”

South Africa, Belgium and Australia are among the lengthening list of nations boldly experimenting with abbreviated work weeks.

The 18th century emperor, who chastised Mozart because his music had “too many notes,” may have been the subliminal inspiration for the latter-day boardroom kings who imagine a similar erroneous connection between the quality of a total body of work and the mere tally of minutes squandered by its producer in their cubby or at their lathe.

“Eternal recurrence,” according to Wikipedia, is “a philosophical concept which states that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over, for eternity.”

Ditto labor relations. Although the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is defunct.

A 32-hour workweek was first proposed many years ago. Why no traction? Do the powers that be fear the economic system will be rabies?

The almost universal corporate mentality seeks to stimulate productivity and generate wealth by disenthraling the energy of the workers it owns. They are on a fool’s errand if they presume to be able to unleash prosperity while tightening the tether and choke-collars with which they have fitted those same workers who alone are capable of delivering it.

Tammany’s echoes

somehow managed to stay in power and keep the one-party system for all intents and purposes, alive and well to this day.

Ironically, once the police were no longer available to do their bidding, these same politicians started to turn on them until it snowballed into the current situation police officers on the street face today.

Back then, Tammany Hall, a powerful Democratic political club ruled the roost in New York City. “The Tiger,” as the organization was often referred to, controlled all aspects of everyday life for residents throughout the five boroughs, mainly from behind the scenes.

For over 100 years, reformers had little success reigning in Tammany Hall. Despite their best efforts, Tammany-nominated candidates routinely won City Hall. In return, newly elected mayors allowed party leaders to dole out important patronage jobs in the new administrations. Qualifications for the positions were seldom given much thought. The primary objective was to keep the Tammany coffers full. To these politicians, the police department was considered more important as a funding mechanism than as a law enforcement organization.  Corrupt politicians got rich working hand in hand with the criminal underworld. They passed on small amounts of their proceeds to police officers to either look the other way or go out of their way to enforce the law. For example, the owner of a gambling hall bribed a politician to keep his place from being raided or paid money to have a rival establishment shuttered. These arrangements periodically came to light and resulted in embarrassing scandals for the police department, two of which led directly to the resignations of two popular mayors, Jimmy Walker and William O’Dwyer.   It took reformers Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and his longtime police commissioner, Lewis Valentine, who let his patrolmen know right from the onset that he would be quicker to punish a thief in uniform than an ordinary thief, three terms in office to tame the Tiger. Tammany Hall had a brief resurgence in the 1950s before finally succumbing. But even without the backing of a political machine, the Democrats

The politicians began by enacting laws that hampered the ability of police to protect law-abiding citizens under the guise of police reform which is now referred to as “Reimagining Policing.”  Police officers acting under direct orders from superiors are now left to fend for themselves when things go south.

Suddenly, baseball bats and machetes are not considered dangerous enough against which to use deadly physical force. Legislation to take away qualified immunity from police officers for conduct directly related to the performance of their sworn duty was passed without regard as to how it would impact public safety.

Meanwhile, the Civilian Complaint Review Board has been granted powers way beyond their original charter. CCRB treats minor violations by police officers as serious offenses, but for criminals, new laws forbid bail even for repeat offenders. Not that it seems to matter since district attorneys refuse to prosecute dangerous felons anyway.

It begs the question, who is their tiger? Who is pulling the strings behind the scenes to get these politicians to dance like puppets? How are they getting rich beyond their means? What is their political end game? If they are seeking total anarchy in this city, it’s obvious they are on their way to achieving it unless the public revolts, and it better be sooner rather than later.

The thin blue line has never been thinner. Morale has never been lower. Thankfully, the politicians who love to have their pictures taken at police funerals are being told to stay away by the rank and file of the NYPD.

Bernard Whalen is a former NYPD lieutenant and co-author of “The NYPD’s First Fifty Years” and “Case Files of the NYPD.”

New York Mayor Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine at Valentine’s swearing-in on Sept. 25, 1934.

Senator Bernie Sanders

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders last month introduced legislation that would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours.

Tennessee workers deserve better from NYC corporation

BY LEE HARRIS and HANNA MCCARTHY

Across our country, workers are demanding changes following years of pandemic uncertainty and unprecedented cost of living increases. According to the Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker, labor stoppages have steadily risen in the past few years.

Many employers are responding by delivering higher pay, more favorable health-care benefits and safer working conditions for their employees. But this has not been the case everywhere. In Shelby County, Tennessee, one of our major employers has not kept up with the trend, and now more than 200 of my constituents and their families are suffering the consequences.

They work for International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), a billion-dollar corporation headquartered in New York City. Last June, employees at IFF’s Memphis plant began striking after more than a year of working under an expired contract. This plant employs skilled workers who help to process a soy protein commonly used in a wide range of everyday products from medicines to baby formula to pet food. The company has since settled other labor disputes across the nation. However, unlike their peers in Oklahoma and Illinois, Memphis workers are still waiting for a fair and acceptable contract nearly a year into their work stoppage.

Memphis is a city with a long history of poverty, but it’s also a community of nearly one million residents who stand united for the dignity of their neighbors. It has a vibrant history of successful labor movements, such as the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike that drew Martin Luther King Jr. to the city.

At the core of this current labor dispute is a call for respect. According to union representatives, IFF, which reported $11.5 billion in net sales in 2023, is trying to eliminate paid breaks and require employees

to work more hours a day to earn overtime. After a global health crisis that exposed the cracks in our health-care system, IFF workers are also demanding protections to maintain their current health insurance benefits. It’s disheartening to see these workers’ dedication met with resistance from management, as I have witnessed firsthand. On Oct. 18, supporters from labor unions and other advocacy groups gathered for a rally in New York City in front of IFF Headquarters and, on the same day, I stood with workers on the picket line here in Memphis. I have continued to reach across the table, but negotiations have seen little movement, and often feel like hitting a brick wall.

In January, I wrote a letter to IFF’s CEO at the time, Frank Clyburn — Erik Fyrwald joined IFF as CEO in February 2024. In his response, he encouraged me to

contact the IFF’s director of government affairs, but my request for a meeting with her was swiftly denied. IFF management must come to the table and present workers with a contract that reflects a fair approach to their demands. Their proposed changes to break times, overtime pay and benefits are more than numbers on a ledger — they directly impact the livelihoods of hardworking individuals and their families. It’s time for management to show a firm commitment to resolving this dispute, sharing in the spirit of the times, and honoring their employees’ contributions. I believe a fair resolution can be reached, but the time to act is now.

Lee Harris is the mayor of Shelby County in Tennessee and Hanna McCarthy is outreach and engagement coordinator for the Mayor’s Office of Innovation.

Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris Shelby, Tennessee, County Mayor Lee Harris, third from left, with striking International Flavors & Fragrances workers in Southeast Memphis.

Comptroller Brad Lander found that the company, based in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and Irvine, California, owed nearly $30,000 to each of the employees. Allied Universal agreed to pay $229,718.48 to the AG’s office within 45 days, which will split the amount evenly among the seven workers.

“Every New Yorker deserves to be compensated fairly and fully for their hard work,” said James. “For years, Allied Universal swindled their workers out of their hardearned wages while the owners of the building where they worked benefited from a lucrative tax break. Now, these workers will finally be paid what they are owed. I want to thank Comptroller Lander for his partnership in this investigation, and we will continue to hold employers accountable for wage theft to ensure all New Yorkers are paid fairly.” Allied did not return a request for comment.

The company, which currently has contracts to provide security services at four other buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn that may require the payment of prevailing wages, must also provide proof to the AG’s office within 60 days that it has conducted internal audits of its payment practices. Allied Universal must continue to provide the AG’s office with information showing that it is in compliance with the prevailing wage law on an annual basis.

“We take our responsibility to enforce prevailing wage laws seriously, to protect workers from companies that try to cheat them out of the wages they have earned,” Lander said in a statement. “Today’s settlement proves that companies cannot escape accountability for exploiting their workers. I’m proud that our Bureau of Labor Law worked in partnership with Attorney General Letitia James’ team on this case to ensure the security guards at Allied Universal get the pay they deserved.”

Former New Jersey CO admits to defrauding cops, firefighters

BY RICHARD KHAVKINE richardk@thechiefleader.com

A former New Jersey corrections officer faces the possibility of 20 years behind bars after admitting to hustling police officers, firefighters and other first responders out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a

into investing their hard-earned savings in a sham token he dubbed ‘the crypto pension,’ which he then stole for his personal use,” U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said in a statement. “My office will relentlessly pursue these kinds of scammers so that we can work with our partners to bring fraudsters to justice.”

Starting in late 2021, DeSalvo promoted the bogus coin on social media platforms, soliciting investments through what authorities said was a series of misrepresentations, including that Blazar was or soon would be a securitized token approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission that could be purchased through payroll deductions and ACH transactions.

The former CO also falsely advertised that Blazar had been accepted on popular cryptocurrency exchanges. The complaint shows that in early 2022, he posted on social media that Blazar “guaranteed” returns of more than 30 percent “with ZERO Risk.”

token known as “Blazar’ he marketed to first responders as a “crypto pension” they could use to supplement their pension plans, the U.S. Attorney’s office said.  More than 200 people would eventually invest over $620,000 in the coin, federal officials said. While he used some of the investor funds to purchase tokens on behalf of the investors, “[m]ore often, however, DeSalvo used investor funds for various illicit purposes, including, but not limited to: (1) personal expenses; (2) unauthorized day trading in volatile cryptocurrencies; and (3) payments made to prior investors in the manner of a Ponzi scheme,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s complaint.

“This defendant preyed on unwitting public servants to trick them

In a white paper, DeSalvo criticized government-run pension systems and assured investors that Blazar offered “more stability than any other token.” Its value would “continue to rise over time similar to any investment fund, only at a much higher rate of success,” his white paper said.

In May 2022, he sold more than 41 billion of the tokens leading to what federal authorities called “a seismic impact” on Blazar’s value.

“Specifically, a Blazar investment worth $1,000 prior to DeSalvo’s liquidation was worth $1.15 after the event,” according to the complaint. The token’s value never recovered, and most investors lost everything they had bankrolled in DeSalvo’s enterprise.

Comptroller Brad Lander, Attorney General Letitia James, and then-32BJ

President Kyle Bragg at an October 2022 press conference announcing that they had recovered $3 million in stolen wages from a real estate developer.

‘Historic’ contract for City Hall staffers

BY DUNCAN FREEMAN dfreeman@thechiefleader.com

The nascent, independent union representing employees at the New York City Council and the legislative body’s leadership have reached a tentative agreement for a first contract that includes pattern raises and protections from firings without cause. It also establishes disciplinary procedures and provides for overtime pay scales, among other elements.

Pending approval by union members, the retroactive six-year pact, running from Jan. 4, 2021, through Jan. 17, 2027, will cover the 382 employees currently represented by the Association of Legislative Employees who work as aides, legislative financial analysts and in other titles within the Council’s finance division. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams signed the provisional deal Tuesday, while the ratification vote is scheduled for April 9 through April 12. Daniel Kroop, the ALE’s president, called the agreement “historic.” The contract is believed to be among the nation’s largest and strongest for legislative workers.

“We are overjoyed to deliver to our members a first contract with wins on wages, benefits, and job protections,” Kroop, also a senior financial analyst in the Council’s fi-

nance division, said in a statement. “We thank the Speaker and the whole body for working with us to start this new chapter. ALE members overcame enormous obstacles and achieved an industry-leading contract following almost a decade of organizing. Incredibly, we did it as a new, independent union, led and powered by volunteers. This contract asserts the dignity and value of every employee and recognizes the enormous contribution we make to this body.”

The contract’s wage increases would hew closely to the pattern established by other civilian public-sector unions, with annual raises of 3 percent through the first five years and of 3.15 percent the final year. The members would get a $3,000 bonus upon ratification while the salary floor for Council member aides, the lowest-paid workers in the union, would immediately increase from $30,000 to $50,000.

The deal includes long-sought “just cause” protections that prevents members — except for chiefs of staff —  from being arbitrarily fired and establishes a formal grievance procedure. It also includes a compensatory time policy that will allow most staffers to be paid for the hours they work in excess of their normal workweek and includes time and a half pay when those excess working hours occur on week-

ends. The staffers announced they were organizing in 2019 and asked for voluntary recognition in January 2020, which they received in August 2021 after the Office of Collective Bargaining certified the union. Negotiations took two years and unionized staffers repeatedly rallied outside of City Hall to pressure Council officials to reach a deal.

In the closing months of the negotiations, numerous Council members wore ALE pins during public hearings and publicly pledged their support, including on social media. Leaders of many public- and private-sector unions also attended ALE rallies in solidarity with the workers.

“Our Council staff are dedicated, hardworking public servants who help make our city better for all New Yorkers,” Adams said in a statement after the deal was announced. “I’m proud to reach this historic contract agreement with the Association of Legislative Employees, which establishes meaningful workplace protections for Council Member Aides and analyst positions within the Finance Division. Since the start of this bargaining process, we sought to come to a meaningful and thoughtful agreement for a first contract to support these workers within a legislative body.”

DILLER: Mourners salute officer

Continued from Page 1

said. “And despite all of those interactions with bad people doing bad things to good people, he adorned that uniform to go out and continue to fight on behalf of the people of this city. So, today we mourn his life, we reflect on his bravery, we remember his sacrifice, and above all, we stand together united as one.” Adams, who earlier in the week said it was imperative to empower prosecutors and judges to keep violent recidivists off the streets, told mourners that cops’ jobs were harder now than during his police tenure, which concluded in 2006.  “It is harder today to be a police officer, more difficult than the times that I wore the uniform,” he said. But he also sought to reassure cops, who are contending with a decrease in the number of officers, pronounced anti-police sentiments from some quarters and, with Diller’s killing, a continuing series of high-profile violent incidents, even as the overall crime rate citywide continues to decline.  “You are inundated every day with those who are loud but they’re not the majority,” Adams said.  He pledged to support the officers. “And today, on the saddest days, I want Jonathan’s family to know, I want all the families of all our police officers to know, your mayor stands with you. I am you,” he continued. “We’re going to make sure you have what you need to do your job, including making sure that violent career criminals are held accountable for their crimes and doing all we can to end that gun violence in this city.” The officer’s killing also became

a political flashpoint, with the leader of at least one city police union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association’s Vincent Vallelong, calling out City Council members he said “have declared war on the police.” In a March 27 letter addressed to his “Brothers and Sisters in the NYPD,” Vallelong said they and other elected officials he suggested were unsympathetic to cops were not welcome at the officer’s funeral.

“They are as morally responsible for PO Diller’s death as the career criminal who pulled the trigger,” he wrote.

At St. Rose of Lima R.C. Church Saturday, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Hendry, in uniform but his shield adorned with a black mourning band and his voice quaking with emotion, said it was in cops’ nature to hold out hope, even for the impossible.

“We’re praying still, wishing that somehow, some way, we could bring Jonathan back home. And we feel that way, because we’re New York City police officers, saving people’s lives, helping people. It’s in our DNA. It’s what we do, it’s what Jonathan did, too,” the union leader said.

Noting Diller’s previous career in the maritime industry, Hendry said it was nonetheless clear Diller would one day be a police officer.

“But he knew that the path that he was going to take one day was to raise his right hand and take the oath and become a New York City police officer,” he said. “His goal was to rise to the top of this department. And he was on his way to doing that, no doubt about it.”

Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office Legions of police officers lined the roads along the South Shore of Long Island March 30 ahead of the funeral for NYPD Officer Jonathan Diller’s funeral in Massapequa.

Duncan Freeman/The Chief

The City Council on Tuesday announced a tentative agreement with Council staffers unionized with the Association of Legislative Employees. The first-ever agreement for the independent union comes after two years of bargaining and more than a half decade of organizing.

Working-class people rarely have a seat at the legislative table in state capitols

BY ROBBIE SEQUEIRA Stateline

In her first few months as a Minnesota state legislator in 2021, state Rep. Kaela Berg often wondered: “What the hell am I doing here?”

A single mother and flight attendant without a college degree or prior political experience, Berg now had a seat at the legislative table, shaping policy decisions in her home state.

As she ran against a former twoterm Republican representative — a commercial real estate agent — she also was struggling for housing and living in a friend’s basement.

“I’m living in [her] basement, running for office, and the pandemic hits,” said Berg. “I went from three jobs to one.… I found that while I can pay my bills, I can’t qualify for a new apartment because you have to show two or three times the rent and I can’t do that.”

While it was gratifying to receive support from working families in her district, her transition to state policymaker felt overwhelming.

“I had the worst case of impostor syndrome,” Berg, a member of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, said in an interview. “I’m thinking, ‘Who do I think I am? I’m a working flight attendant. I don’t have a college degree. Why did I let somebody talk me into this?’” Berg is a rarity in politics: a working-class state legislator.

Just 116 of the nearly 7,400 state legislators in the United States come from working-class backgrounds, according to a biennial study conducted by Nicholas Carnes and Eric Hansen, political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago, respectively.

The researchers define legislators as “working class” if they currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical or labor union jobs. They found that 1.6 percent of state lawmakers meet that definition, compared with 50 percent of U.S. workers. Only about 2 percent of Democrats and 1 percent of Republicans qualified as working class.

Ten states — Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — have no working-class state lawmakers.

The dearth of working-class legislators raises concerns that economic challenges such as wage stagnation and the rising cost of living will get short shrift in state capitols. Working-class politicians are more likely to have personally experienced economic hardship, so they are more interested in policies to mitigate it, Carnes said. And they often propose solutions that differ from those put forward by colleagues who aren’t working class, even if it means diverging from party doctrine.

“State legislatures make consequential decisions, and if you have an entire economic class of people that are not in the room when policy decisions are being made, that’s going to tilt the kind of problems politicians pay attention to,” said Carnes. “It also dictates the kinds of solutions they consider against the interests of whoever’s out of the room.” Working-class representation in state legislatures has always been low, he noted, but the most recent count is even lower than it was two years ago, when the percentage was about 1.8 percent.

The state legislature with the highest percentage of working-class lawmakers is Alaska, with 5 percent — that’s three of 60 lawmakers. New Hampshire has the highest total number of working-class legislators, eight of 420 legislators, with a transportation worker and a bartender among the ranks.

Labor plays a part

After a 32-year career as an electrician, Democratic state Rep. Nate Roberts was part of a new wave of

‘Government works best when all types of personal experience are at the legislative table.’

first-time Idaho lawmakers entering office in 2023. Roberts knew that it wasn’t just his relative political inexperience that separated him from the rest of his colleagues.

He also was one of the only state lawmakers who had worked a union job. And during his first few weeks in office, he was shocked by how rarely issues such as wage theft, low pay and housing affordability had been talked about in committee meetings.

“That’s when I realized that the only person that’s going to advocate for working-class people is a working-class person,” he told Stateline.

“When I moved from state to state working different jobs, I realized how differently states were influenced when it came to policies for working people.”

Roberts learned the power of unions as a journeyman — and fighting to increase worker protections has become his life, he said.

Idaho is one of 26 so-called rightto-work states, where no person can be forced, as a condition of employment, to join a union. Such laws limit unions’ bargaining power. Roberts would like Idaho to follow the lead of Michigan, which in 2023 became the first state in decades to repeal a right-to-work law. That is unlikely in Idaho, given the state’s conservative political orientation. But Roberts also is pushing to update Idaho’s child labor laws, which were enacted in 1907 and have been superseded by the federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Roberts said his experience as a laborer in his younger years has emboldened him to speak out against legislation such as a Senate bill that would repeal limits on the number of hours and how late in the day a child under the age of 16 can work.

“I’m still shocked when I get pushback for going against these bills, particularly ones that I feel regress our child labor laws,” said Roberts. “I’ve experienced it. We need to not only protect our kids, but we also need to protect our workers.”

The political climate is far different in Minnesota, where the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has controlled the governor’s office, the state House and the state Senate since January 2023. Last year, the state enacted a major package of labor-friendly laws.

Minnesota also passed a slew of tenant-landlord laws, with protections favoring the state’s renters. Berg said the backgrounds of working-class legislators like herself can inform statehouse conversations, even if lawmakers with different backgrounds support pro-labor policies.

“I don’t think there’s enough value in having people with lived experience in the legislature,” Berg said. “When you take someone who … still lives paycheck to paycheck, they are bringing that personal experience to fight for a bill that will impact working families.”

For Wisconsin state Rep. Jenna Jacobson, joining the legislature in 2023 was a lot like “drinking from a fire hose,” she recalled.

One of her policy priorities — expanding aid for free school meals — was influenced by her experience as a schoolkid. “I was one of the kids on free and reduced lunches growing up. I had the special colored cards because of

that,” said Jacobson, a Democrat. “I know so many of our kids who are in a similar spot.”

For working-class Americans, financial and societal barriers are a major disincentive to pursuing state offices, said Amanda Litman, co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, a progressive organization that recruits candidates for down-ballot races.

A 2021 national survey by Tufts University found that local candidates who experienced poverty in their youth felt especially constrained.

“Structurally, it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich, or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families to enter politics,” Litman said. “And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”

Time-consuming effort

The eligibility criteria for statewide office vary greatly by state.

Only five states — Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine and Minnesota — allow public financing options for candidates vying for state legislative seats.

Becoming comfortable wielding political power as a working-class person is a transition that can take a while, Indiana Republican state Rep. Peggy Mayfield told Stateline. Mayfield, who worked as a secretary at the insurance company she and her husband owned together, is now a 12-year veteran in the legislature who knows how to navigate state politics and get bills passed.

But running for office, much less holding state office, is time-consuming and requires sacrifices, she said. “If I had an employee who came to me and said, ‘I wanna run for office,’ I’m faced with saying, ‘I’m gonna let you off four months a year,’ or make a difficult choice,” said Mayfield, describing how hard it is for many workers who don’t have that privilege. “Running for office itself becomes a full-time job … and for some in the working class it may not make sense to go into politics, if they can pursue more profitable opportunities in

the private sector.” Some states have worked to raise legislative pay, which could entice more working-class people to take a shot at elective office.

Earlier this year, Kansas raised salaries for rank-and-file lawmakers from about $29,000 to $57,000 after some said the lower pay wasn’t enough to live on. Arizona, Kentucky, New Jersey and Vermont are among the states with measures this session that could increase lawmakers’ pay.

New York passed legislation in 2022 that made its lawmakers the highest paid in the country. Pennsylvania has cost-of-living adjustments.

Roberts, the electrician-turnedlawmaker in Idaho, said: “We don’t do this for the pay, and some of us certainly aren’t getting rich off this job. Some of us are making ends meet. “But we have residents who are also making ends meet, and they rely on us to speak on the issues affecting them, and that’s what keeps you going,” Roberts added. Lawmakers in Idaho make $19,927, after a pay raise passed in 2022. Another barrier for would-be working-class lawmakers, Carnes said, is running a viable campaign against more established political candidates. The working class needs infrastructure and coalition-build-

ing to compete politically, he said, similar to women candidates who get support from EMILY’s List (a pro-abortion rights group).

“The solution is pretty straightforward,” said Carnes. “If you commit to working-class people and partner with labor unions and political parties on recruiting and training working-class people to run for office — it’s possible you will see more working-class state legislators.”

In Minnesota, Rep. Berg soon realized that her best legislative asset was her ability to vouch for the working experiences of everyday Minnesotans.

A flight attendant for Endeavor Air, Berg has signed on to a bill that, among other provisions, would delete the exemption for air flight crews in the state’s law on employee sick time. Her experience allowed her to confidently explain to legislative peers how the exemption had hurt flight crews.

“Government works best when all types of personal experience are at the legislative table,” Berg said.

“I knew that I was uniquely able to speak on issues that my other colleagues never experienced.”

Stateline, founded in 1998, provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy: https://stateline.org/

Minnesota State Rep. Kaela Berg

Minnesota State Rep. Kaela Berg is among just 1.6 percent of state lawmakers nationwide that meet the definition of “working class,” according to research by political scientists at Duke University and Loyola University Chicago.

Idaho State Rep. Nate Roberts

After a 32-year career as an electrician, Democratic state Rep. Nate Roberts was part of a new wave of first-time Idaho lawmakers entering office in 2023.

World Central Kitchen is saving lives with food but paying a price in blood

BY ASHRAF KHALIL Associated Press

The deaths of seven World Central Kitchen workers in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza was a tragic turn for an American homegrown charity that, in less than 15 years, has mushroomed from the grassroots brainchild of a celebrity chef into one of the world’s most recognized food relief organizations.

The killings also interrupted a crucial flow of desperately needed food into the besieged coastal strip, as international organizations and charities warn of a looming famine. World Central Kitchen, in partnership with the United Arab Emirates, had just delivered a cargo ship with 400 tons of canned goods from Cyprus to Gaza. Around 100 tons were unloaded before the charity suspended operations, in the wake of the attack; the rest was being taken back to Cyprus, Cypriot Foreign Ministry spokesman Theodoros Gotsis said.

It’s an unprecedented crisis for José Andrés, the restauranteur who founded the charity to provide immediate food relief to disaster-stricken areas and has grown it into a global operation working in multiple war zones. Founded in 2010, the organization achieved international prominence for its work in Puerto Rico in 2017 feeding victims of Hurricane Maria. It also operates in Ukraine, providing more than 100 million meals to refugees, according to the group’s website, and earning Andrés a medal from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

World Central Kitchen has quickly become a mainstay of American philanthropy, with contributions on par with much older organizations. The charity in 2022 reported $518 million in total contributions and Andrés himself received $100 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2021. Andrés rose to prominence with a string of successful restaurants in Washington, D.C., just as the celebrity chef phenomenon was taking off. He developed close ties with former President Barack Obama at a time when current President Joe Biden served as vice president. Andrés prepared meals at the White House, and Obama and former first

lady Michelle Obama were frequent guests at his restaurants. The Spanish-born Andrés became a naturalized citizen during the Obama administration in a ceremony at the White House. He remains connected to the Biden administration, serving as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition. In February, he spoke at a conference on hunger hosted by second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Andrés publicly feuded with former President Donald Trump over a planned restaurant in what was then the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The chef tried to pull out of a contract in protest over Trump’s incendiary comments about Mexican and Latin American immigrants crossing the U.S. border. The pair sued each other and then settled out of court. When the hotel was sold and reopened as a Waldorf-Astoria; Andrés almost immediately announced new plans to launch a restaurant there.

In a statement Tuesday night, Biden said he had spoken with Andrés “to convey my deepest condolences for the deaths of these courageous aid workers and to express my continued support for his and his team’s relentless and heroic efforts to get food to hungry people around the globe.”

Serious blow to relief efforts

Biden said bluntly that Israel was not doing enough to protect aid workers. “This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed,” he said.

When fighters from Hamas — the militant group that controls Gaza — breached the border on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking hundreds of hostages, Andrés quickly moved to organize support for Gazan civilians sure to be caught up in the Israeli military response. With funding from the Emirati government, his group organized an

initial food shipment from Cyprus and set up more than 60 kitchens in Gaza producing thousands of meals a day. The latest food shipment was meant to expand upon that model.

In a March telephone interview with The Associated Press shortly before the most recent shipment launched from Cyprus, Andrés credited his campaign with sparking governments into action and helping inspire the U.S. government plan to build a temporary port in Gaza to receive aid shipments.

“We have awakened the international community to do more for the people of Gaza,” he told the AP. “Everybody should have food and water, it’s a universal right.”

The loss of World Central Kitchen’s efforts will be a serious blow to overall humanitarian efforts in Gaza.

“WCK is a key player in efforts to address food insecurity in Gaza and has provided essential food aid to thousands of families, contributing significantly to combating the cata-

strophic hunger there,” said a statement from the U.N.’s World Food Program.

The killings may also represent a turning point in Andrés’ public perspective on the Israeli government. The chef was a vocal critic of Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks. He spoke on the X social media platform of Israel’s right to defend its citizens and called for the ouster of a Spanish government minister who accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza.

But on Tuesday, Andrés harshly criticized the Israeli military.

“The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing. It needs to stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon,” he wrote on X. “No more innocent lives lost.”

His organization laid the blame squarely on the Israel Defense Forces, saying the IDF had coordinated over the movement of the cars carrying the workers as they left northern Gaza late Monday.

Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, Israel’s military chief, said Tuesday that the strike was “a mistake that followed a misidentification — at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened.”

Footage of the aftermath showed a vehicle with the charity’s logo printed across its roof to make it identifiable from the air. A projectile had blasted a large hole through the roof. Two other vehicles in the convoy were incinerated and mangled, indicating multiple hits.

Other footage showed the bodies, several wearing protective gear with the charity’s logo, at a hospital in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah. Those killed included three British nationals, an Australian, a Polish national, an American-Canadian dual citizen and a Palestinian, according to hospital records.

Associated Press reporters Thalia Beaty and Rhonda Shafner in New York City, Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, Hannah Arhirova in Kyiv, and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.

Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo

Jose Andres, a Spanish chef, and founder of World Central Kitchen unloads the humanitarian food packages delivered with WCK’s truck in Kherson, Ukraine, in November 2022. World Central Kitchen called a halt to its work in the Gaza Strip after an apparent Israeli strike killed seven of its workers, mostly foreigners.

JOB HIGHLIGHT

The current minimum salary for the position is $35.86 per hour for a 40-hour work week, increasing to $2.01 per hour in the sixth year of service. Benefits night and weekend salary differentials, paid holidays, vacation and sick leave, a comprehensive medical plan and a pension plan. The fee is $85.

Plant and equipment maintainers with the MTA start at $36/hr

Some of the physical activities performed by Plant and Equipment Maintainers (Electrical) and environmental conditions they experience are: crouching while working in confined spaces, climbing ladders, platforms and scaffolds; working in dimly lit areas; using hand and power tools and equipment; and working outdoors in all weather conditions

REQUIREMENTS By May 15, applicants must meet either of the following requirements:

1) Four years of full-time paid experience as an electrician at the journey-level working from blueprints, schematics and technical drawings, installing, inspecting, troubleshooting, testing, overhauling, repairing and maintaining industrial and commercial electrical equipment and systems; or

2) Three years of full-time paid experience at the journey-level as describe in “1” above, plus graduation from a recognized trade school, vocational high school or community college with a major sequence of

courses in electronic technology or electrical installations; or

3) Three years of full-time satisfactory experience at the journey-level described in “1” above, plus two years of relevant full-time satisfactory helper experience as described in “1” above; or

4) Completion of a four-year, fulltime apprenticeship in the electrical trade recognized by New York State Department of Labor, the U.S. Department of Labor or any state apprenticeship council which is recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor.

THE TEST

Applicants will be given a competitive practical skills test. A score of at least 70 percent is required to pass. Scores are used to determine places on the eligible list.

The practical skills test may measure your knowledge, skills and abilities in the following and other related areas:

• Lighting and other Electrical Systems — Knowledge of the installation, testing, maintenance and repair of lighting and other electrical

systems utilizing safe work practices.

• Schematics — The ability to read electrical schematics. This includes the ability to read and understand schematic symbols.

• Meter Usage — The ability to utilize an electrical meter to troubleshoot a circuit, component and/ or piece of equipment utilizing safe work practices.

• Mechanical Aptitude — The ability to understand and apply mechanical concepts and principles to solve problems.

• Tool Usage — Knowledge of hand tools, power tools and/or multi-purpose tools and their proper usage in the electrical trade utilizing safe work practices.

OTHER REQUIREMENTS

Appointees must possess either:

1) A valid Class A or Class B commercial driver’s license with a passenger endorsement and no disqualifying restrictions that would preclude the performance of the duties of this title; or

2) A valid driver’s license and a learner’s permit for a Class B CDL

with a passenger endorsement and no disqualifying restrictions.

Appointments for those who qualify under “2” above will be subject to the receipt of a Class B valid CDL with no disqualifying restrictions within 120 days of appointment. The Class A or Class B CDL with no disqualifying restrictions must be maintained for the duration of employment in the title.

Those with commercial driving experience in the military or New York National Guard within the last year may be eligible for a waiver of the state commercial driving skills test.

A drug screening is required for appointment. Incumbents will be subject to random drug and alcohol tests.

City residency is not required for this position. Appointees must be able to understand and be understood in English.

For complete information on the position and its requirements and on how to apply, go to https://new. mta.info/document/136051.

on education and experience, or by oral tests or performance exams.

DCAS Computer-based Testing and Application Centers (CTACs) have re-opened to the public. However, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, walk-ins are no longer accepted and appointments must be scheduled online through OASys for eligible list or examination related inquiries.

All examination and eligible list related notifications will be sent by email only, you will no longer receive notifications via the US mail.

All new hires must be vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, unless they have been granted a reasonable accommodation for religion or disability. If you are offered city employment, this requirement must be met by your date of hire, unless a reasonable accommodation for exemption is received and approved by the hiring agency.

For further information about where to apply to civil service exams and jobs, visit the thechief.org/exams.

The Federal Government has decentralized its personnel operations and holds few exams on a national or regional basis. Most Federal vacancies are filled by individual agencies based on education-and-experience evaluations. For information, contact the U.S. Office of Personnel Management or individual agencies, or see www.usajobs.gov.

CITY EXAMS

No scheduled exams.

CUNY EXAMS

➤ OPEN CONTINUOUSLY

2059 Campus Security Assistant $31,320

2060 Campus Peace Officer $33,825

MTA EXAMS

➤ CLOSE APRIL 30

4615 Bus Operator (NYCT) $26.98 per hour

4127/4331 Bus Operator (MaBSTOA and MTA Bus) $26.98 per hour

➤ CLOSES MAY 15

4132 P/E Maintainer (Electrical)

87-917 Special Investigator I (Collision Investigation) $90,690-$124,568

➤ OPEN CONTINUOUSLY 7078 CR(D) Cytotechnologist I $43,863$91,243 7094 CR(D) Cytotechnologist II $52,099$108,383 7095 CR(D) Cytotechnologist III $66,357$132,168

61-639 CR Librarian I $43,000-$61,333

60-180 CR Librarian I, Bilingual (Spanish Speaking) 5263 CR(D) Medical Technologist I $31,963-$74,978

5002 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Acute Care) $59,507-$108,383

5003 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Adult Health) $59,507-$108,383

5004 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Community Health) $59,507$108,383

5005 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Family Health) $59,507-$108,383

5006 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Gerontology) $59,507-$108,383

5007 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Neonatology) $59,507-$108,383

5008 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Obstetrics/Gynecology) $59,507$108,383

5009 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Oncology) $59,507-$108,383

5010 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Palliative Care) $59,507-$108,383

5011 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Pediatrics) $59,507-$108,383

5012 CR Nurse Practitioner I (Perinatology) $59,507-$108,383

LABOR AROUND THE WORLD LABOR AROUND THE WORLD LABOR AROUND THE WORLD

Freight railroads must maintain 2-person crews

New federal rule first proposed under Obama

BY JOSH FUNK AP Business Writer

Major freight railroads will have to maintain two-person crews on most routes under a new federal rule that was finalized Tuesday in a milestone in organized labor’s long fight to preserve the practice.

The Transportation Department’s Federal Railroad Administration released the details of the rule that was first proposed during former President Barack Obama’s administration. Out of more than 13,000 comments on the rule, about 60 opposed it.

There has been intense focus on railroad safety since a fiery February 2023 derailment in Ohio, but few significant changes have been made apart from steps the railroads pledged to take themselves and the agreements they made to start providing paid sick time to nearly all workers. Such changes include adding hundreds more trackside detectors and tweaking how to respond to alerts from them. A railroad safety bill proposed in response to the derailment has stalled in Congress. Rail unions have long opposed one-person crews because of safety and job concerns. Labor agreements requiring two-person crews have been in place for roughly 30 years at major railroads, although many short-line railroads already operate with one-person crews without problems. The unions say that conductors are crucial in helping operate the train and keeping engineers alert, and that they serve as first responders.

“As trains — many carrying hazardous material — have grown longer, crews should not be getting smaller,” said Eddie Hall, the president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union. He praised the FRA for taking the step President Joe Biden promised. Hall said keeping two people in the cab of a locomotive is crucial now that railroads rely on longer trains that routinely stretch for miles.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the U.S. shouldn’t accept the current average of nearly three derailments a day, and that regulators will keep fighting to improve that record.

“When good safety rules have been put in place over the years, especially after high-profile incidents, we see derailments come down on mainline tracks. But as attention faded on those incidents, the railroad industry lobby was consistently able to weaken or delay important safety provisions,” Buttigieg said at a news conference.

Railroads have a history of resisting new regulations as they sought the discretion to operate trains with only one person and to move conductors to ground-based jobs in places with automatic braking systems. Conductors in a truck would respond to train problems and derailments in a certain territory. It has been a key issue in contract talks for years, though the railroads abandoned the proposal just as the 2022 negotiations approached a strike.

The railroads argue that the size of train crews should be de-

termined by contract talks, not regulators or lawmakers, because they maintain there isn’t enough data to show that two-person crews are safer. The norm on major railroads is two-person crews, so current safety statistics reflect that reality. The industry pointed out that the FRA abandoned the original version of this rule during the administration of former President Donald Trump, with the agency saying in 2019 that there wasn’t enough evidence to support it. “FRA is doubling down on an unfounded and unnecessary regulation that has no proven connection to rail safety,” said Ian Jefferies, president and CEO of the Association of American Railroads trade group.

But industry challenge unlikely

The East Palestine, Ohio, derailment put a national spotlight on rail safety because of the consequences of the hazardous chemicals that spilled and caught fire, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate and causing lingering health concerns.

Investigators haven’t suggested the crew on that train did anything wrong. And it actually included three people because there was a trainee aboard. The National Transportation Safety Board has said the derailment was likely caused by an overheating wheel bearing that wasn’t caught in time by sensors.

U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said it’s still important to pass a rail safety bill he cosponsored along with several Republicans because it would ensure future administrations couldn’t drop the crew-size rule and would make other meaningful improvements, including standards for trackside detectors and railcar inspections. Brown said he wants to ensure “no community ever has to suffer like East Palestine did.”

The worst railroad disaster in recent history involved a one-person crew. In 2013, the brakes failed on a train parked in the hills above the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic. The train rolled downhill and derailed, killing 47 people and causing millions of dollars in damage.

Another fiery derailment outside Casselton, North Dakota, in 2013 demonstrated some of the benefit of having a conductor aboard the train. The conductor helped separate undamaged tank cars filled with crude oil from the rest of the train so they could be pulled away from the fire.

At least 11 states have already approved rules requiring two-person crews. States frustrated with the federal government’s reluctance to pass new regulations on railroads have also tried to pass restrictions on train length and blocked crossings.

The industry often challenges the state rules in court, though with this new federal rule it’s not clear whether the railroads will resort to that tactic. The railroads generally argue in their state lawsuits that the federal government should be the only one to regulate the industry to ensure a uniform set of rules, and they wouldn’t be able to make that argument in a challenge to the federal rule.

Workers had little warning before bridge collapsed

Concerns raised over safety, communication

BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ and CLAUDIA LAUER Associated Press

In the moments before the cargo ship Dali rammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge and sent it crumbling into the water, a flurry of urgent warnings crackled over radios and enabled police to block traffic from getting on the span, likely saving lives.

But those warnings seemingly didn’t reach the six construction workers who were killed in last week’s collapse of the Baltimore bridge. Their deaths have raised questions about whether the construction company took proper precautions, including keeping a safety boat nearby that might have been able to warn them at least a few seconds before impact.

“If you’re working over a bridge like that, the standard interpretation doesn’t give you an option,” said Janine McCartney, a safety engineer for HHC Safety Engineering Services Inc. “The skiff is required, period.”

Coast Guard representatives and other officials said they were unaware of any Brawner boat in the water at the time of the March 26 collapse. And satellite images from around the time of the collapse appeared to show no skiff in the river near the bridge.

Even if the workers had been warned that the giant ship was about to hit, it’s unclear if they would have had enough time to scramble to safety.

The archived recordings of the bridge’s maintenance radio channel from early that morning include only one minor exchange between two maintenance work-

Federal regulations require construction companies to keep such boats, commonly known as skiffs, on hand whenever crews are working over waterways, safety experts told The Associated Press. There is no indication that the construction company, Brawner Builders, had a rescue boat on the water or ready to be launched as the bridge fell.

‘They’re just holding traffic because a ship lost its steering, that’s all.’ Portion of an archived recording of exchange between two maintenance workers less than 30 seconds before the bridge’s collapse.

ers about the approaching ship, though it’s unclear if either was on or near the span at the time. In the exchange, a man with a muffled voice seemed to ask what was going on, and the other replied, “They’re just holding traffic because a ship lost its steering, that’s all.” The bridge collapsed less than 30 seconds later.

But if a safety boat were present, experts said, it might have been able to use a marine radio and required walkie-talkies to warn the construction workers about the Dali’s distress calls, possibly giving them a chance to act. Authorities say a construction inspector was able to run to a section of the bridge that didn’t collapse, though it’s unknown what warning, if any, he received.

A Brawner representative declined to comment for this story, saying the company is focused on taking care of the families of the workers, who were filling potholes on the bridge when it collapsed. Brawner has used safety skiffs for work on bridges in the past, according to a deposition of a company executive that was part of a 2011 lawsuit.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations say construction companies performing work over waterways must have at least one safety boat available. OSHA officials have said in rule interpretations over the years that the required boat can “ensure prompt rescue of employees that fall into the water, regardless of other precautions taken to prevent this from occurring.”

Mississippi catfish farms settle suit claiming immigrants were paid more than local Black workers

BY EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS Associated Press

Two Mississippi catfish farms have settled a lawsuit alleging that they brought workers from Mexico to the U.S. and paid them significantly more than they previously paid local Black farmworkers for the same type of labor, plaintiffs’ attorneys said Tuesday. Southern Migrant Legal Services and Mississippi Center for Justice sued Jerry Nobile, his son Will Nobile and their farms in August on behalf of 14 Black farmworkers. The federal lawsuit said the Black workers were “systematically underpaid and denied job opportunities for years in favor of non-Black foreign workers” at Nobile Fish Farms, which also raise corn and soybeans. The plaintiffs’ attorneys said the lawsuit concluded on “mutually agreeable terms” under a confidential settlement. Court records show the lawsuit

against Nobile Fish Farms was settled in February. Mississippi Center for Justice attorney Rob McDuff told The Associated Press that the deal was announced Tuesday because “all the terms of the settlement have been fulfilled.”

“We hope our legal efforts will make clear to farmers in the Delta, and across the U.S., that they need to pay fair wages to local workers,” McDuff said in a statement Tuesday. An attorney for Nobile Fish Farms was out of town Tuesday and did not immediately respond to a phone message from the AP.

It was the eighth settlement on behalf of Black farmworkers who said they were pushed aside after higher-paid immigrants were hired at farms in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest parts of the United States. Five of the settlements were reached without lawsuits being filed, according to Southern Migrant Legal Services and Mississippi Center for Justice.

In December 2022, two farms settled lawsuits over claims that they hired white laborers from South Africa and paid them more than the local Black employees for the same type of work.

All three of the lawsuits were against farms in Sunflower County, which is about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northwest of Jackson. The county’s population is just under 24,500, and about 74 percent of residents are Black, according to the Census Bureau.

Hannah Wolf, a Southern Migrant Legal Services attorney in the case against Nobile Fish Farms, said the H-2A guest worker program requires employers to try hire local workers before bringing immigrant workers, “but we continue to hear from U.S. workers who report being pushed out of their jobs and replaced with guest workers.”

“We will continue to investigate those claims and bring legal action when warranted,” Wolf said.

Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo

Wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore rests on the container ship Dali.