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by Deirdre Bardolf, Associate Editor When restaurants were forced to close their doors to indoor dining in 2020, businesses had to “become super creative and pivot,” said Rohan Aggarwal, founder and co-owner of Queens Bully, a gastropub on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills. His restaurant was offering takeout, supplemented slightly by canned beers and frozen margaritas, but that was not cutting it. “For small businesses like ours, alcohol is where we make money,” said Aggarwal. His team got the idea to start batching out to-go cocktails but Aggarwal did not like the look or feel of the containers. Then, they found pouches with spouts to fill with libations including lychee-infused rum and cucumber vodka. Tipsy Takeout was born, complete with a website to order through and a delivery option. “Once we started Tipsy, it was a huge success,” said Aggarwal. “People were very happy with the product. It was an item they could easily travel with, especially in the summertime when people were going to the beaches, they were freezing it and sipping them on the beach. It was the perfect transportable cocktail pouch.” It also brought the mixologists back to work. “It was definitely a big boost for us,” Aggarwal said. But that did not last long. The temporary legalization of to-go drinks in 2020, part of a lifeline extended to restaurants during the peak of pandemic shutdowns, lasted just 15 months and was abruptly ended despite its popularity. “We paused the website and everything ... we kind of halted our innovation,” said Aggarwal, who said the restaurant is still “heavily” stocked with the pouches. But, he may soon have a chance to bring the program back. Gov. Hochul announced in her State of the State address on Jan. 5 that she intends to legalize the sale of alcoholic drinks to go. On Tuesday, a bill was introduced by state Sen. Leroy Comrie (D-St. Albans) and co-sponsored by state Sen. Jessica Ramos (D-Jackson Heights) to permit the sale of takeout and delivery beverages for off-premises consumption. The proposed legislation is in committee and was referred to the Investigations and Government Operations Committee. “The governor has asked us to help restaurants in this way,” said Ramos. “We are not going to let her or our restaurants down. We’re crafting legislation that truly helps put these restaurants on the path to recovery. And I believe that we can make this case to our colleagues who will vote for this,” she said. She predicts the soonest it can be enacted is with the Governor’s budget passing on April 1. “Hopefully, it would go into effect immediately,” Ramos said. The state Assembly version of the bill was introduced in 2021 and was referred to the Codes Committee at the beginning of January.

By John Whittaker for Observer Today Bills have been introduced in the state Legislature to create an $800 million unemployment program for excluded workers. Sponsored by Sen. Jessica Ramos, D-Jackson Heights, and Assemblywoman Karines Reyes, D-Bronx, S.8165/A.9037 would amend the state Labor Law to create an Excluded Workers Fund for workers who are left out of traditional worker services, including unemployment. To be eligible, workers must not have received any unemployment benefits within 12 months of application or not have received an error payment when they were previously ineligible for benefits. Workers would also have to show they have provided a service in the past for which they were paid in cash, personal check or non-payroll check; did not report the wages to the IRS; not received a wage statement from the employer; and did not not receive a Form 1099-NEC. Ramos and Reyes say those benefiting would include domestic workers, landscaping and groundskeeping workers, day laborers, construction workers and street vendors. Many of the same workers were able to claim $15,600 from the state’s $2.1 billion Excluded Worker Fund in the 2021-22 budget. Money from the fund was claimed by some 290,000 workers, Reyes and Ramos wrote in their legislative justification, and the fund quickly ran out.

On day four of his tenure as mayor of New York City, Eric Adams made a gaffe that drew the ire of many who know the lie of “low-skill” labor. Advocating for the return of workers to their midtown offices, he said, “My low-skill workers, my cooks, my dishwashers, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work at Dunkin’ Donuts — they don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office.” His poor choice of words drew backlash from across the internet (myself included). He rephrased his poor choice of words soon after, and Twitter moved on. But the harm perpetuated by the myth of low-skill labor lingers. It’s an old lie, one that has implications much bigger than what Mayor Adams was alluding to. Historically, enforcing the idea that a worker is low-skilled has proved to be an excellent way to justify suppressing their wages. I could talk about how this age-old strategy to suppress wages is a reflection of our culture’s low opinion of domestic labor and women’s invisible labor, or dive into the many classist and racist assumptions that underlie how we assign value to work. But at this juncture, I’d rather just leave the myth behind. There are no low-skill workers, only low-wage workers. Whether you work as a dishwasher or in a corner office, you deserve a wage that allows you to live with dignity. With the exception of a few notable sectors, the minimum wage in New York City is $15 an hour. A statewide path to $15 was passed by the New York State Legislature in the 2016-17 state budget and created a phase-in process that allowed each region to get to $15 incrementally. The movement known as the Fight for $15 started four years earlier, when 200 fast food workers in New York City walked off the job, demanding a living wage; it has since brought together a strong coalition of unions and expanded across the country, even leading a successful push for a ballot measure that, in 2020, established a $15 minimum wage in solidly red Florida. The Fight for $15 exemplifies a belief that I hold dear from my time in the labor movement, and as the chair of the New York State Senate’s Labor Committee: So-called low-skill workers can win big when they are organized. The problem is that workers, even organized workers, are fighting on many fronts, and the real cost of living that inspired the demand for the $15 minimum wage has drastically increased since the Fight for $15 kicked off. Until 1968, wages generally climbed with both inflation and productivity, allowing working families to maintain the spending power needed to maintain economic security. In January 2020, the Center for Economic and Policy Research asserted that a minimum wage that climbed steadily with productivity would be about $24 an hour. After a decade of fighting for $15 an hour, productivity and inflation have outpaced us again. To give workers a boost, we need to develop a structural fix to relieve us from the grueling battle that goes into incremental, state-by-state wage increases, and free up organizing capacity for our other fights.

by Lachlan Hyatt New York should more aggressively tax the state’s billionaires and large businesses to support workers, provide child care, and boost a just economic recovery from the pandemic, according to State Senator Jessica Ramos. Speaking on a recent episode of the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette, Ramos, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Senate's labor committee, outlined her 2022 goals. At the top of the list is vastly expanding affordable child care across the state through legislation Ramos is sponsoring. Also on her agenda is replenishing, with $3 billion at that, the Excluded Workers Fund, passing legislation to tie increases in the state’s minimum wage to inflation, establishing a wage board for workers in the nail salon industry, and more. “I’ve always said I’m interested in helping more New Yorkers become millionaires,” Ramos told podcast host Ben Max. “We need to pump more money into our smaller communities, and really invest in entrepreneurship, which is why I also fight so hard for street vendors and for small business owners, especially restaurant owners. We have to stop letting billionaires pay fewer taxes than us, because they’re hoarding the money. They’re keeping all of their assets and it doesn’t get pumped back into our streets.”

By Jorge Fuentelsaz New York, Jan 30 (EFE).- The thousands of unlicensed street vendors in New York City, who – far from the tourist attractions of Manhattan – offer all sorts of food, from Mexican tamales to Egyptian kebabs, are tired of the continuous fines they are being handed by local authorities and want to normalize their status. Despite the snow and the cold that these days are making the Big Apple shiver, Ecuadorians Gladis and Jenny have been working since five in the morning on Crowne Plaza in Queens selling tamales, champurrados, arroz con leche and coffee to the early-bird workers in the area. “Sometimes they’ve taken our food, (or) they’ve kicked us out, although nothing has happened here because of the pandemic. We don’t have work, we have to devote ourselves to this and I have a 12-year-old boy and I don’t get anything from the government, nothing. And I support him from this (work),” Gladis told EFE, protecting herself from the snow with a big-brimmed beach hat. They’ve been on a war footing since the outbreak of Covid-19 and last Thursday about 200 people gathered on Herald Square, at the intersection of 34th St. and Broadway, to call on state lawmakers to support two new bills giving all street vendors sales permits based on sanitation and health criteria and not as per the city’s quota for awarding such permits. “We’re raising our voices so that finally they approve that law and give us permits to work with dignity. It’s the only work we have to put food on our tables,” Clotilde Juarez, a Mexican mother of three US-born kids, told EFE, with great emotion. Juarez sells chalupas and cornmeal snacks in Queens, “rain, storm or snow.” She said that she started out as a street seller two decades ago and that she had stopped temporarily to work in a laundromat but the pandemic crisis left her without a job and that pushed her to resume selling snacks from her vending cart. She is an undocumented immigrant, like the majority of the thousands of street vendors who make their living by offering their wares and food items on the streets. “Everything we do, we do out of simple necessity. It’s our last option, because we know that they’re coming and they’ll take this spot from us, they’ll throw (our goods) in the trash, they’ll kick us our of the parks, but if you’re a parent you have to do it, you have to pay for your food, your rent,” Juarez said. Speaking at the last demonstration, called by the Street Vendor Project non-governmental organization, was state Sen. Jessica Ramos, the sponsor of a new bill to facilitate the awarding of licenses to street vendors in New York boroughs with more than one million residents.

Gov. Hochul surprised many New Yorkers when, in her State of the State address last week, she proposed that an unused, 14-mile-long right-of-way that runs between Brooklyn and Queens be converted to a new passenger rail service. Dubbed the “Interborough Express,” the proposed new line would stretch from Bay Ridge to Jackson Heights and potentially serve a million riders daily. I agree that we need big ideas to solve our transit problems. For too long the MTA has favored the wealthier residents of Manhattan with the best possible service — while leaving far fewer options for other New Yorkers. Queens, where I was born, raised, and now serve as a state senator, is a distant fourth, and last, among the boroughs in terms of MTA subway stops per resident (the subway doesn’t serve Staten Island); in fact, much of our borough is a well-documented transit desert. So the MTA needs to do a lot more to connect more communities, especially underserved communities of color, by providing more transit options, especially rail.