The Immigrant Workers Bill of Rights was created by legislation that the City Council enacted last week in an effort to combat wage theft and other types of abuse.
The bill’s author, councilmember Shahana Hanif, stated that one goal of the legislation was to safeguard asylum seekers who have been granted work permits and are now starting to work in the city.
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Hanif noted in a statement, “Labor laws exist on our books to protect all of our workers, including new arrivals and more established immigrants.” She added, “This Bill of Rights will go a long way to ensuring they are followed.”
According to a representative for Mayor Eric Adams, the measure will become law after the Council passed it 43–8. The mayor did not plan to veto the legislation.
Amaris Cockfield, the spokeswoman, stated in a prepared statement, “For 22 months as mayor and years before, Mayor Adams has stood up for immigrant workers and all blue-collar New Yorkers – fighting for better pay and working conditions for the city’s 60,000 Deliveristas and for the rights for tens of thousands of new arrivals to work and provide for their families.”
The Bill of Rights’ specifics are still unknown, but the law requires the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA), the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), and the New York City Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) to collaborate in creating the document by March of next year. Employers are then required to post the document “in a conspicuous location in the workplace.”
The law also mandates that LinkNYC kiosks, advertisements in newspapers, online, and the subway be used to notify employees of their rights across the city. New York employers are already obligated to inform employees of a number of employment rights, such as those regarding salaries and occupational hazards, but there isn’t a complete law that specifically targets foreign workers.
The bill’s passage coincided with the announcement by state Attorney General Letitia James that Lyft and Uber would pay $328 million in settlements. Her office had been looking into the rideshare companies and discovered that they had been “cheating drivers out of hundreds of millions of dollars” in pay, primarily by billing drivers fees that should have come from riders.
There was no acknowledgment of misconduct in the agreements.
Furthermore, over $203 million in salaries were pilfered from 127,000 workers in New York during a five-year period, from 2017 to 2001, according to a study released in August by Documented and ProPublica. However, the research also noted that the total is “almost certainly a significant undercount.”
Hanif stated that the experiences of individuals like her father, who entered the US illegally from Bangladesh, served as inspiration for the law.
“My father worked under the table as a restaurant worker and then as a construction laborer, unaware of his rights in the City, and took whatever we could get at the end of the day,” she noted.
Brooklyn Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who represents the 37th City Council District, stated that her office has been contacted on “a number of cases” involving the exploitation or deception of immigrant workers and company owners. A surge of more than 110,000 asylum seekers arrived in New York City starting in the spring of 2022.
She stated to a news media house, “We see workers being paid lower cash wages than was agreed upon and a lack of worker safety and protections provided.” Nurse added, “The worst part is that these individuals feel they have nowhere to turn because of their status. All workers have rights and it’s our duty as a city to guarantee them.”
Darly Corniel, director of Education-Program Operations at the New York-based Consortium for Worker Education, stated that wage theft was a major issue for foreign workers during a council hearing on the measure in April.
According to Corniel, employees who don’t have sufficient paperwork find it particularly challenging to speak with their bosses about the issue; many “simply stay in a job because they’re afraid that if they leave, they’ll be retaliated against.”
She stated that some employees worry that they would face reprisals in the form of being reported to immigration authorities by an employer or previous employer.
According to Corniel, “working overtime without getting paid is another form of wage theft.”
Worker rights have become more of a concern because so many asylum seekers moved into the city since last year. As many migrants as possible will be able to leave city-run shelters if lawmakers and local authorities are successful in securing their right to work.
On October 18, 2023, Hanif said on X, the former Twitter platform, that the city had assisted in the filing of 5,600 asylum applications through its Office of Asylum Seeker Operations and that 300 applications had been submitted for Temporary Protected Status recipients, including Venezuelans who had benefitted greatly from an extension of TPS announced by the Biden administration on September 20.
Hanif stated at the time that 600 more TPS holders had appointments set up at OASO, giving them the legal authority to work in the country. Hanif’s assistant stated that a large pick-up in speed was anticipated.
