A Working People’s Economy

Fighting to transform our economy so it works for working families, not just the wealthy and powerful.

While millions of New Yorkers can’t make rent or put food on the table, the wealthiest New York billionaires have grown an astounding $228 billion richer (a number that continues to grow rapidly). This reality is a result of decades-long policies in Albany that have benefited the super wealthy and harmed the working and middle class. We know our economy will only fully recover and thrive when working people have money in their wallets — and that means New York must end a range of tax breaks for the wealthy and start investing in our New York: in the working people, communities of color, and immigrants that power this state. We can recover from this crisis, rebuild our schools and subways, support struggling small businesses, and protect immigrants, renters, and students. We can create a New York where everyone earns a living wage, and can afford quality healthcare, housing, and the services they need to live a life with dignity.

Invest in our New York by Making the Wealthy Pay their Fair Share

Raising taxes on the highest incomes, extreme wealth, and big corporations to invest billions in new revenue for working people. Reforms to our tax code, including the progressive income tax, capital gains Tax, heirs’ tax, billionaires’ tax, Wall Street tax, and corporate tax would raise tens of billions of new dollars in progressive revenue, end decades of austerity politics that have slashed programs New Yorkers deserve, and immediately address income inequality that has only deepened during the pandemic.

A Living Wage for all New Yorkers

New Yorkers need a raise. We should increase the minimum wage in New York by upping New York City’s minimum wage to $20 an hour, and in areas outside the city to $17.50 per hour, this year, with annual indexed increases informed by cost of living and gains in labor productivity in every year following. The cost of living in New York is skyrocketing, and wages are nowhere close to keeping up. While corporate profits have ballooned, the workers who make those profits possible still face poverty wages.

• Establish fair pay for home care for one of the largest, growing sectors in our economy dominated by women of color that does not pass on costs to employers or nonprofit managed care companies, and instead puts the onus on the state to ensure that paid caregivers are fairly compensated with full benefits.

• Take immediate executive action to support the demands of the One Fair Wage campaign and close the wage loophole that has left tipped restaurant and service workers with sub-minimum wages that have left them in poverty. 

Economic Development by and for the People

Completely transform New York’s so-called “economic development” programs that have thus far basically served as a $10 billion corporate giveaway every year, and to instead focus state efforts on real drivers of economic growth, including investments in higher education, child care, climate action, and home care.

• Support NY’s independent, family, and small businesses that are the backbone of our economy. We should be offering tax breaks, rebates, and other incentives to small businesses for their critical role in job creation and sense of neighborhood and community. 

• Permanently expand the earned income tax credit statewide across New York to include adults without children and those who file taxes without a social security number, providing a refundable credit that gets people cash–filling a critical gap in benefits for working class people ages 18-65 who receive no cash assistance or benefits.

• Create a public banking system for New York, so that local governments can leverage public money to support local economic development, including affordable housing, green jobs, and easy-to-access financial services for New Yorkers of all incomes.

Advance the Rights of our Workers

Support the rights of workers to organize, including standing with Amazon and Starbucks workers and the rights of our frontline health workers. We should be expanding the rights and opportunities for workers to collectively bargain, securing unemployment benefits for workers on strike, and banning captive audience meetings, among other priorities.

• Establish and expand protections for workers who lack robust protections on the job, including domestic workers, nail salon workers, child care workers and farmworkers, who should immediately receive overtime for work beyond 40 hours.

• Fund excluded workers by allocating $3 billion for the Excluded Workers Fund to ensure everyone who is eligible for the program has access to it, while creating a long-term, permanent solution for excluded workers to access basic benefits on the job.

• Protect our gig economy workers, ensuring delivery and app drivers are re-classified and no longer independent contractors if they so choose, and are provided the basic rights and legal benefits and protections they’ve earned and deserve.

• Protect people’s health and livelihood by allowing predictable, flexible work, which has kept us safe during the pandemic and increased job options for thousands of New Yorkers across the state. Workers should have the freedom to choose when and how they want to return to the office.

Envision the Future of Work

New York must rebuild and prepare for the century ahead in a way that makes our state’s economy work more fairly and more efficiently for working people, addresses the climate crisis, and allows New Yorkers to find greater fulfillment and stability in their work and lives.

A Working People’s Economy for New York

1. Invest in our New York by Making the Wealthy Pay their Fair Share

2. A Living Wage for all New Yorkers

3. Economic Development by and for the People

4. Advance the Rights of our Workers

5. Envision the Future of Work

Invest in our New York by making the wealthy pay their fair share

From low wages to a lack of investment in our communities, New Yorkers were suffering before the pandemic. The pandemic hurt families even further and our recovery has been uniquely slow - our unemployment rate is nearly twice the national average and we have yet to recover 25% of the jobs initially lost. Meanwhile, New York’s billionaires grew $228 billion richer. 

We can take care of each other and rebuild our economy by ending tax breaks for the wealthiest New Yorkers and largest corporations. We must go significantly further than the limited tax reforms of 2021 and fully pass the six-bill, Invest in our New York package–a Progressive Income Tax, Capital Gains Tax, Heirs’ Tax, Billionaires’ Tax, Wall Street Tax, and Corporate Tax. By doing so, we can raise $50 billion to invest in our communities, end decades of austerity politics that have slashed programs New Yorkers need, and immediately address income inequality that has only deepened during the pandemic. 

Without this additional revenue, we simply cannot meet the needs of our communities, address the climate or housing crises facing our state, or position New York for the bright future all of us deserve.

Economic Development by and for the People

It’s no secret we need to create more jobs in New York, but Governor Hochul’s plans for workforce development and job stimulation vastly underestimate what our economy needs. We need to be talking about millions of jobs, not a few hundred thousand. We can create jobs with public investments in infrastructure and a green economy, and finally expanding high-speed broadband in low-income and rural communities. The Williams/Archila administration will fight to get New Yorkers back to work with truly Universal Child Care and grow the labor workforce with free higher education at SUNY and greater investments in job training for skilled manufacturing and technical jobs. And we’ll set ambitious targets to invest in minority and women owned businesses through state contracts.

Under the Cuomo/Hochul and Hochul/Benjamin administrations, New York doled out bad deal after bad deal, giving handouts to billionaires for private projects while gutting necessary programs and services. The most obvious and recent example of this being the $850 million giveaway of public funds to build a new football stadium for a team owned by billionaires. We must put a stop to this corporate welfare and the use of public money to backstop lucrative developments that enrich a handful of wealthy donors. Our administration will be accountable to the public first and the public only. It’s why we have proposed a full reset and orientation of the Empire State Development Corporation, including both the New York State Urban Development Corporation and the New York Job Development Authority, to finally meet communities’ needs, not the interests of powerful corporations and wealthy donors. 

New York State and its local governments currently spend in the neighborhood of $10 billion annually on a broad array of economic development programs, largely benefiting big businesses, with results that leave much to be desired. It’s time for New York to begin to redefine “economic development” as improving the quality of life for regular New Yorkers and challenge traditional tax abatement and corporate subsidy style economic stimulus. The state and local governments need to realize true economic development is about investments in public goods like childcare, K-12 and higher education, the public workforce, homecare and affordable housing. These investments benefit individuals, families, workers, businesses and the overall economic health of local communities.

SUNY is Economic Development

According to a 2018 report from the Rockefeller Institute of Government, SUNY is a key driver of the New York State economic engine. SUNY’s economic impact in New York State is $28.6 billion, which represents a 27 percent growth in overall state economic impact since 2008.

The SUNY system educates approximately 436,277 students, employs 77,900 faculty and staff, and has an operating budget of $11.2 billion. To put this in perspective, if SUNY were a private company it would be among the ten largest employers in New York State. We must invest sufficient funds to revitalize SUNY and extend free tuition to all. 

CUNY is Economic Development

CUNY is a crucial institution and often one of the only college options for working class New Yorkers. However, it has faced decades of underfunding, affecting both the affordability and quality of education our students receive. According to a March 2021 report from the New York City Comptroller, state support for CUNY is a wise economic investment. 79 percent of CUNY graduates work full time in New York State after graduation, earning a combined $57 billion annually in 2019, $28.6 billion more than students would have earned without a post-secondary degree. CUNY graduates working in New York State paid an estimated $4.2 billion in state income taxes. 

We should invest an additional $1.2 billion annually over the next 5 years to achieve a New Deal for CUNY which would increase the number of faculty, protect the quality of education, address degraded and dangerous building conditions, and restore CUNY as a tuition-free university. 

Child Care is Economic Development

The recently passed 2022 state budget came up far short on child care, failing to invest enough to set us on a path for universal child care, and explicitly excluding undocumented children. New York can and must do better. 

Indeed, both families and businesses in New York State understand that childcare is a critical component of thriving local economies. In a 2020 survey of 80 businesses across the seven-county north country region, childcare was identified as a top priority by employers. This was made even worse by the pandemic, as 42% of women (with children under 2) were forced out of the workforce. 

Regional Economic Development Councils (REDCs) were required to include childcare as part of their 2019 regional strategies moving forward. Unfortunately, there has been minimal investment in the sector on the part of REDCs since the inception of this requirement. In fact, between 2019 and 2021 childcare investments went from $11.5 million to a mere $3.6 million.

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis demonstrated that early childhood investments provide an amazing return on investment, up to $16 in benefits every year for every dollar of public money targeted towards high-quality education and care.

Access to stable, high-quality child care also helps parents improve their labor productivity by increasing work hours, missing fewer work days and pursuing further education. Sadly, New York’s early childhood educators, nearly all women, largely women of color, live in poverty at more than twice the rate of New York workers in general.

Research demonstrates that the entire community benefits as well as from investments in early childhood education. In fact, the availability of early childhood education programs attracts homebuyers and increases property values by $13 for every dollar invested in local programs and reduces grade retention and is shown to save school systems money for K-12 education. Participants in high-quality early childhood education also show long-term gains in the form of lower rates of incarceration (46% reduction), lower rates of arrest for violent crimes (33% reduction) and a reduced likelihood of receiving government assistance (26% reduction). 

Homecare is Economic Development

Rigorous academic studies have found that public funding to raise home care wages would require significant resources, but those costs would be surpassed by the resulting savings, tax revenues, and economic spillover effects. The net economic gain would total at least $6.3 billion. Lifting wages would also help fill nearly 20,000 vacant home care positions each year and would create nearly 18,000 jobs in other industries by boosting local economic activity. These findings align with past studies on public investment in the care sector, which have found large effects on economic activity and on job creation both within and beyond care industries.

Research has found that raising home care wages to 150% of the minimum wage would end New York’s massive home care shortage within the next five years — allowing older adults and disabled people to live and age safely at home.

Currently, 42% of the state’s home care workers live in or near poverty. The Fair Pay for Home Care Act would lift over 200,000 home care workers out of poverty wages.The bill would overwhelmingly improve existing jobs and create new jobs for women and people of color: currently, New York’s care sector is 91% female and 77% people of color. As the country and state wrestle with historic racial injustice, along with the disproportionate impact of COVID on communities of color, Fair Pay for Home Care is an investment in equity, and lifting up a historically underpaid workforce.

As New York faces widespread unemployment, the Act would bring 200,000 new home care workers into the field over the next decade and additionally create 180,000 jobs in other sectors and industries via increased spending and economic activity.The Act would pay for itself and generate billions for New York's state economy through new income and sales tax revenue, economic spillover, and reductions in Medicaid and social assistance.

Climate Action is Economic Development

We must get serious about investing in our future. By providing at least $10 billion in climate action funding annually until we meet our climate goals– based on what both state agencies and outside experts agree is necessary–we can jumpstart our state’s transition to a green energy economy.

This funding will invest in projects that reduce emissions, target assistance to low-income communities and communities of color, help displaced fossil fuel workers and impacted communities, modernize our public transit system, and provide funding to residents, small businesses and non-profit organizations to reduce energy burdens – while creating well over 100,000 new, quality jobs each year and raise living standards throughout the state.

Housing is Economic Development

New York has a severe housing shortage, resulting in huge cost burdens and displacement of working class and middle class families. Every day New Yorkers - from teachers, to municipal workers, to nurses - know the struggle of finding, and keeping, housing. With rising rents, unattainable mortgages, and shameful conditions, searching for a home is burdensome at best, and hopeless at worst. With all the instability it causes families, the housing crisis has created, and will continue to create, serious economic shocks to New York. And in large part, this is because we’ve let profit-motivated private developers entirely dictate the New York housing market. 

As we describe in our Housing for All Platform, we will make unprecedented and historic investments and implement bold policy changes to make high quality and truly affordable housing a reality for all New Yorkers. New York needs to build and preserve one million affordable housing units across the state to solve our housing crisis, and we propose that process begins with a wholly new approach to housing and economic development at Empire State Development and New York State Urban Development Corporation. Instead of the failed practices of give-aways to large real estate developers, an ESD under our administration will ensure that our public land is developed to create publicly-controlled and publicly-financed housing that is permanently affordable and used for the social good.

Other economic development initiatives:

• We would permanently expand the earned income tax credit statewide across New York to include adults without children and those who file taxes without a social security number. Decades of research have shown that EITC and other similar tax credits are some of the most successful poverty-reduction programs.  We need to go bigger and expand this critical poverty-reduction measure beyond the one time expansion passed in this year’s budget. By providing a refundable credit that gets people cash, we can fill a critical gap in benefits for working class people ages 18-65 who receive no cash assistance or benefits.

• New York must also do more to support and protect our state’s independent, family, and small businesses that serve as the backbone of our economy. These small businesses and farms have a deeply critical role in job creation, driving local economic conditions, and creating neighborhood and community cohesion. For far too long, Albany has focused its attention and policies towards the benefit of large corporations, instead of towards independent businesses. We propose a new approach that will center independent and small businesses; working closely with small business alliances, the state should create new investments and tax incentives for independent enterprises. We must extend and continue to develop programs and protections for these small businesses, many of which have struggled tremendously during the challenges of the pandemic. 

• New York’s entrepreneurial street vendors, many of whom are immigrants, are also an important part of the state and in particular New York City’s economy. But for too long and in too many ways, these street vendors have been targeted by law enforcement in ways that are both cruel and unnecessary. Albany should create a clear regulatory framework for these small business operators, both legalizing and decriminalizing street vending by passing S1175A/A5081A. New York should also build upon existing programs, including those within New York City, that support and incubate worker-owned cooperatives and other small business models. 

• Public banks are financial institutions created by government entities, and accountable to the people. New Yorkers should not exclusively be at the whim of large commercial banks, who make decisions in the interests of their profits and shareholders, not in the public interest. Through public banking, local governments can leverage public money to support local economic development, including affordable housing, green jobs, equitable financial services, and more. Public banking is common throughout the world and increasingly in the United States as well – helping to support farming and city-based small businesses. New York should create a regulatory framework for New York cities, counties, and regions seeking to establish public banks. 

A Living Wage for all New Yorkers

The cost of living in New York is skyrocketing, yet wages are nowhere close to keeping up. Rents are skyrocketing, gas prices are soaring, and Wall Street bonuses increased 20% over one year, while many New Yorkers haven’t seen a raise in years. While corporate profits have ballooned, the workers who make those profits possible still face poverty wages. Working people’s incomes should not be subject to political football, and must instead be protected over the long-term. Wages statewide need to be increased. New York City’s $15 minimum wage has not changed in years, and the minimum wage in upstate New York is still below $15.  Meanwhile, the costs of living across the state have continued to grow massively, with housing costs in particular skyrocketing. New Yorkers need a raise. We should increase the minimum wage in New York by upping New York City’s minimum wage to $20 an hour this year, and in areas outside the city to $17.50 per hour, with annual indexed increases informed by cost of living and gains in labor productivity in every year following. The cost of living in New York is skyrocketing, and wages are nowhere close to keeping up. While corporate profits have ballooned, the workers who make those profits possible still face poverty wages.

A Williams/Archila administration would also take immediate executive action to support the demands of the One Fair Wage campaign and close the wage loophole that has left tipped restaurant and service workers with sub-minimum wages that have left them in poverty.  We will continue fighting for a legal right to paid leave for all workers, especially for the thousands of New Yorkers who take no vacation time away from work, and fight for stronger health and safety protections, including standard workplace rules.

As we take the critical steps to get New Yorkers a raise and increase wages for workers, we must also be providing tax relief and ensuring state and federal support continue to flow to small restaurants and bars that have struggled during this pandemic period. Our small and family-run businesses and their staff are the bedrock of our economy and we should be doing much more to protect them in the immediate moment and for the future. We should maintain and build upon programs developed during the pandemic to get subsidies, small business funds, and loan extension programs for independent family businesses and restaurants.

Advance the Rights of our Workers

Whether you’re a farmworker or a factory worker, a software engineer or a secretary, an artist or an accountant, you deserve to feel safe at your job, confident in your career, and fairly compensated by your paycheck. As governor and lieutenant governor, we will fight for a living wage for all workers, your right to organize a union, and strong workplace protections regardless of the work you do.

• We stand with and are inspired by workers across the nation, including Starbucks and Amazon workers here in New York, who are exercising their rights and power as workers. Strong labor movements and organizations in New York State are crucial in ensuring that all workers have safe working conditions, fair treatment from employers, livable wages, and basic benefits. We will fight against efforts from any direction to diminish a workers’ right to join a union, or a union’s ability to advocate for all workers Where the state has authority, we will work diligently toward ensuring workers have greater and more rigorous collective bargaining rights across the state, banning captive audience meetings, and fighting to ensure striking workers are eligible for unemployment insurance. We must end and “claw back” any tax breaks, credits, or public subsidies given to companies such as Amazon that engage in violations of federal and state worker laws, and support measures to ensure strong workplace safety at these company warehouse sites.  We will fight for clear labor standards and a prevailing wage for publicly-funded projects, whether via federal infrastructure money or any green economy projects across the state. Finally, we must fully fund New York’s Department of Labor, which has been under-resourced for far too long to ensure proper enforcement of labor law and labor rights, including for the critical NY HERO Act passed last year. And, as we do that, we must pass the EmPIRE Worker Protection Act to enable workers to step up to enforce their rights.

• New York must protect our gig economy workers, ensuring delivery, rideshare drivers are re-classified and no longer independent contractors if they so choose, and provided the basic rights and legal benefits and protections they’ve earned and deserve. New York should have clear legal classifications for its workers, ensuring they have workplace and wage protections, access to bargaining rights, and other important rights. We also stand with our taxi medallion drivers who have long been and continue to be a critical part of New York City’s vibrant infrastructure and economy.

• The fight for the Excluded Workers Fund showed that our safety net is riddled with gaps that shut out our state’s most vulnerable workers, especially Black and brown working families. Thanks to activists and workers who put their bodies on the line, last year, New York made history by passing the largest and first-in-the-nation $2.1 billion Excluded Workers Fund, giving relief to New Yorkers excluded from federal relief funds. However, this only covered a fraction of total eligible workers and left many without access, and the most recent budget failed to include additional funding for this critical program. We cannot leave our immigrant communities behind. We must invest an additional $3 billion to the Excluded Worker Fund to ensure everyone has access to the support they need, while creating a long-term, permanent solution for excluded workers to access basic benefits on the job.

• Protect people’s health and livelihood by allowing predictable, flexible hybrid work, which has kept us safe during the pandemic and increased job options for thousands of New Yorkers across the state. Workers should have the freedom to choose when and how they want to return to the office.

Envision the Future of Work

Both technology and the pandemic have fundamentally revealed and altered much about the deep inequities and inefficiencies in our economic systems and work structures. New York must rebuild and prepare for the century ahead in a way that makes our state’s economy work more fairly and more efficiently for workers, addresses and can help alleviate the climate crisis, and allows New Yorkers to find greater fulfillment and stability in their lives after the trauma of this period. 

In the immediate moment, we must continue to give employees the option of remote work as we still face public health concerns in the uncertainty of the pandemic. The state, coordinating closely with New York City partners, should also begin converting unused offices, especially in midtown Manhattan, to meet the housing stock and affordability crisis, which represent the clearest and most immediate issues facing the working people of New York. 

A Williams/Archila administration would create a statewide Future of Work Commission composed of workers, labor unions, academics, community leaders, and small and large business operators to study, examine, and offer recommendations about the future of work in New York. The Commission would engage with concepts such as permanent remote work flexibility, a four day work week, a 50% reduction in work commute times, and adjusting workplace rules and norms to reduce the overwhelming workload conditions that have led to widespread mental health challenges and deep stress among the workforce.