Buffalo Workers Closer to Receiving Back Wages Owed Under Living Wage Law

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.jwjblog.org/2009/10/buffalo-workers-closer-to-receiving-back-wages-owed-under-living-wage-law/

By jwjnational, on October 19th, 2009

City seasonal workers launched a class-action lawsuit against the City of Buffalo in early 2008 as part of their campaign to secure back wages owed to them under the City of Buffalo’s Living Wage Ordinance. Their lawsuit inched closer to victory last week when NYS Supreme Court Judge Timothy Drury issued a decision that strongly supports the workers’ claims. Judge Drury ruled that the wage freeze imposed by the Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority that was lifted in July of 2007 should never have been applied to the seasonal workers, stating clearly that the local Living Wage Ordinance is not pre-empted by the Fiscal Stability Act.

Abraham McKinney, one of the plaintiffs in the case said:

I feel good about Judge Drury’s decision. I’ve worked as a seasonal for over eight years. Funny thing is that there isn’t anything ’seasonal’ about my work. I get laid off every six months for five work days. I applied for a seasonal laborer position thinking it would be a stepping stone to a decent city job but I’ve never been offered a permanent position and until recently our wages were impossible to live on. No one who is earning poverty level wages should have their pay frozen. The city has been saving money off of our backs forever, and now it is time for them to do right by us.

The Living Wage Ordinance, advanced by the Coalition for Economic Justice/JwJ and other concerned community groups, went into effect for City employees in 2004 but was not enforced by the City until advocates and workers publically rallied around the issue. After the first of the year in 2008, and after numerous public demonstrations, media events, and meetings, the City acknowledged that seasonal laborers were covered under the local Living Wage Ordinance and raised the workers’ wages from $8.15/hour to just over $11/hour and compensated them for lost wages during the period of July, 2007 to January, 2008. However, the retroactive pay did not include lost wages from the time that the Ordinance took effect in April of 2004 until the end of the Buffalo control board wage freeze in July of 2007.

“I feel that the work that we were doing for the last several years wasn’t being compensated. The living wage law has been on the books with the city so we should have been getting paid the living wage since it went into effect, wage freeze or no wage freeze. The law is the law. It’s finally time to stop hiding behind the control board,” said McKinney.

“We owe attorney John Lichtenthal and others at Lipsitz, Green, Scime and Cambria a great debt for their work on this case. It was always clear to us that the Buffalo Control Board’s wage freeze shouldn’t have applied to ’seasonal’ city workers. These folks should have been paid a living wage back in 2004 but they were simply ignored and exploited. Now they have a real chance of winning what is rightfully theirs,” said Allison Duwe, Executive Director for the Coalition for Economic Justice.