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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. Did you hear that one of Mayor Mamdani's signature campaign promises has now been introduced as a bill in the City Council? It's the $30 minimum wage. Here's, at that point, candidate Mamdani talking about it in the WNYC Spectrum New York 1 mayoral debate in October.

Zohran Mamdani: The reason that we put forward $30 by 2030 is that that's the minimum that a New Yorker needs to be paid to be able to afford to live in this city. What we are looking at right now is the possibility of the place that we know and love becoming a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live. Our proposal that we've put forward would be phased in over a longer period of time for small business owners to ensure that they could deal with this. It's also one that we are confident we would be able to accomplish because of the fact that we are seeing from New Yorkers time and time again the absence of it is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut because they can't afford to live in New York City.

Brian Lehrer: Zohran Mamdani as candidate Mamdani at the WNYC New York 1 mayoral debate on October 22nd. Now, Councilmember Sandy Nurse from Brooklyn is sponsoring the bill that would eventually boost New York City's minimum wage. He did say eventually there too, by 2030, to $30 an hour. For a little context, the minimum wage here is currently $17 an hour. Some other cities, by comparison, Seattle, little higher at $21.30 an hour, $19.29-- I don't know how they arrive on such an odd number, but $19.29 in Denver and again New York at just $17 an hour despite the cost of living here.

Opponents, of course, say it would kill jobs, not just make life more livable at the bottom of the wage scale for people who have jobs. Councilmember Nurse represents the 37th district, which covers Cypress Hills, Bushwick, City Line, Ocean Hill, Brownsville, and East New York. We'll also touch on the city budget, where Councilmember Nurse, as chair of the council's Committee on Civil and Human Rights, is pushing for a significant funding increase for the city's Commission on Human Rights at a time when federal civil rights protections are being rolled back. There are, of course, a lot of other budget controversies as well after the mayor's initial proposal. Councilmember Nurse, welcome back to WNYC.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Thank you, Brian. Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, phones are open. Text thread is open on a $30 minimum wage. Are you a minimum wage worker in New York City? How do you make ends meet right now? What would $30 an hour mean for you or your family? 212-433-WNYC. If you're a business owner, what would a $30 minimum wage mean for you? 212-433-9692, call or text. Of course, you can ask a question as well as maybe make a comment with our guest City Councilmember Sandy Nurse from Brooklyn. Councilmember, how would your bill work and on what timeline?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Thank you, Brian. There are over a million New York City workers earning the minimum wage here. After taxes, a full-time worker making $17 per hour brings home about $2,000 a month, which means they're basically surviving on $500 a week. No one is truly surviving here in New York City on $500 a week, which is why one in three New Yorkers have said they expect to leave this city in the next five years.

The cost of living is just simply crushing workers. A recent study, MIT study, actually found you need about $38 per hour just to cover basic expenses. That's not even enjoying life, it's just covering basics. Our bill is asking for $30 per hour for all minimum wage workers by 2030 and for smaller businesses by 2032. $17 per hour really is just not a livable wage. It's actually a crisis. It's a daily crisis for these million workers in our city who have to make extremely tough choices between food and medicine, transportation, or rent.

We just don't believe that's a dignified life. As you mentioned, we're behind many other cities. I mean, Flagstaff, Arizona, is further ahead than us. Denver. That's really unacceptable, especially when we have an affordability crisis. People in the city just want a safe roof over their heads. They want to be able to put food on the table and enjoy the city they keep running every single day. We believe they deserve higher wages and that $30 an hour would make a world of difference for them.

Brian Lehrer: Before I get to some of the pushback arguments, humanize this for us. Who among New Yorkers are we actually talking about when we talk about minimum wage workers in the city? What job categories, for the most part, and demographically, who?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Low-wage workers are tons of New Yorkers. It's a million workers. People who work in your deli, who are in your coffee shop, people you interact with on your local commercial corridor, people who work in the bookshop when you're on your street. These are everyday New Yorkers who are working in all types of sectors, and they are struggling, and they are working multiple jobs normally just to be able to make ends meet.

They are cramped in apartments. The average rent for a room in a shared apartment is, on the conservative end, $1,200 to $1,800 a month. The average cost of groceries for a person is about $600 a month, transportation, $132, utilities and WiFi 200. That's already over your whole monthly paycheck. That's if you're sharing expenses and living with other people. The math just isn't adding up, and the wages aren't adding up. They're too low, and the cost of living is too high for all of the people you interact with throughout the city who are keeping this city running.

Brian Lehrer: When you talk about the cost of living, that brings up one of the contradictions or paradoxes that opponents of raising the minimum wage so high bring up, that raising the minimum wage is, in and of itself, inflationary. If wages go up, especially significantly, businesses will pass the cost along to consumers, and then prices will go up. How do you know that the wage increase will outpace the price increases?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes, that's a great question, Brian. During recent periods of record inflation, it's actually really been corporate price gouging that increased costs so drastically, and not the cost of labor. I mean, if you remember during the pandemic, when people were charging outrageous amounts for Lysol and basic goods because they knew that people needed them, it was big businesses that were actually overcharging people, and they never really brought their costs down, even when other costs came down. The fact is, prices have already outpaced wages. Raising the minimum wage is the best thing we can do to ensure New Yorkers can afford life in the city.

Brian Lehrer: Can you back that up? Because a lot of listeners may hear that and think, yes, price gouging is definitely a thing, but it's not the only thing. Maybe it's not the major thing that's creating the prices that consumers have to pay today.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: I mean, what you can look at when we raised the wage before, we raised the wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour over a period of time. Actually, there was a study that looked at Pennsylvania and New York, and they looked at a couple different sectors. They looked at the leisure, hospitality, and retail sectors, and they found that Pennsylvania stayed at $7.25 and New York continued to raise their wage year over year.

What they found is that those sectors in New York far outpaced Pennsylvania's throughout the entire wage increase schedule. That was the reverse of what critics of the minimum wage increases predicted. There was another study done by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. It was a detailed analysis on the effects of the $15 and higher minimum wages across the United States. They found substantial pay growth and no disemployment. There are a lot of contributors to the high cost of living.

We have issues with housing. For businesses, the cost of rent is high. There's issues with insurance. There are a lot of policy solutions for those things, and this is just one of them to provide immediate relief to workers. It's been a benefit to businesses and a lot of the sectors here in New York City when they have raised the wage. We actually have a small business owner in our coalition. He runs a organization called Better Help Maids, and he actually came and advocated at our press conference recently and said-- it's actually called Well-Paid Maids. I don't want to misspeak.

He came and explained how paying fair wages has actually helped his business because he's investing in his workers. His workers stay longer. They're invested in the company. They provide better customer service, they provide higher productivity. Aaron's business is growing and thriving because he's paying fair wages. We do have small business owners who understand that higher wages helps them grow as well.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call from Jack in Richmond Hill, who is a pharmacist. You're on WNYC with Brooklyn City Councilmember Sandy Nurse on her bill that would increase the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour. Hi, Jack.

Jack: Hi, Brian. How are you? We spoke a couple of months back when you were talking about drug prices, and we talked about reimbursement. Your guest was talking about how PBMs take away money from insurance companies and from pharmacies--

Brian Lehrer: Pharmacy managers. Yes, those middleman companies. Go ahead.

Jack: I have a question that if I am getting negative reimbursements on my prescription costs, and I am struggling to make money as is with a six-year degree. These pharmacists that graduate with a PharmD degree making on an average anywhere from $45 to $50 an hour. If they open a business, such as I did, how am I going to afford paying people $30 an hour standing in the front ringing the registers, helping the customers, whatever they're doing?

I have somebody who's coordinating my deliveries, $30 an hour, when I myself probably net out somewhere around $45 after all my losses with the PBMs. There are several other businesses that are regulated by insurance companies and other agencies. Not everybody is making cash money like this woman is talking about for cleaning services, et cetera. A lot of us work in a regulated industry where payments are capped. I don't think a lot of the industries can afford a $30 minimum wage.

Brian Lehrer: Councilmember, talk to pharmacist Jack from Richmond Hill.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes, and it sounds like some of the challenges you're facing are issues that would be dealt with some other policy solutions, such as the reimbursement rate, which I also agree is a major problem. The pharmaceutical industry, the medical industry, the transparency that is required to help bring down those costs is something that those industries fight against very clearly with a lot of money behind it. Raising the minimum wage boosts consumer spending.

Our economy depends on consumer spending. Businesses, generally, you have more customers and consumers than you do have employees. When those customers have more money to spend, they spend it locally, they put it back into the economy. The minimum wage increases go right back into local businesses. This bill isn't going to solve every single challenge that small businesses or large businesses face, but it will make a world of difference for people who are earning $17 an hour and are maybe sometimes not even able to get to work because they can't afford to get there.

A huge population of people living in our shelter system are working at minimum wage, and they cannot get out of the shelter system because they cannot afford to live in housing and live out in the world. I agree, and I am extremely empathetic and interested in continuing to fight against those bigger costs that are impacting businesses. We are also interested in making sure workers can afford to stay here and live here.

Brian Lehrer: Jack, what do you think about that argument that if consumers who have been making $17 an hour were now making $30 an hour, they might have more money to spend at your pharmacy, for example, on things other than prescriptions, which I understand, as you describe, are regulated in terms of price, but all the other things you might sell at your pharmacy and maybe it would even out. What do you think about that argument?

Jack: A lot of that excess money that could be spent on goods, a lot of that has come out of pharmacies at this point. You see that a lot of the Walgreens, CVS, big box stores, they're closing locations just because they don't have enough people walking in for that inventory. Some of it is part of the theft issue. The other is because people are using Amazons for delivery for some of those products, most of those products. The foot traffic for people coming in to spend money has gone down drastically. A lot of that money has also moved over to OTC cards, which is, again, part regulated. People that use OTC cards to make purchases for these pharmacy items are now--

Brian Lehrer: You're saying you really do make most of your living on prescription drugs, per se, at the pharmacy?

Jack: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Jack, thank you very much for your call. I appreciate it. Councilmember, go ahead.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes, and Brian, I just wanted to mention that, particularly for small businesses, as these big box stores are closing down, I had a Rite Aid a block away from me. It closed down, and I could go to the Walgreens another five or six blocks down. I've actually moved to shopping at my smaller pharmacy. This is really important because for small businesses to survive and thrive in competition with large corporations, they have to give customers a reason to shop at their store and keep buying from them.

Not just because of the loss of convenience of a big store that has a bunch of stuff in it, but also because of the experience they have when they're in that shop. That depends heavily on customer service, which depends on employees. Employees who are not paid enough to live have an immense amount of stress and anxiety. They're worrying about all of their ability to make their basic payments. They have better morale. Studies show this. When they can afford to stay with the business, they're engaged, they're engaged with the customers. People want to go back because they have a good experience there. This also helps small businesses thrive.

Brian Lehrer: What about the city's own payroll? Not all city workers earn $30 an hour. Would the bill also require the city to bring its own workforce up to that floor? You know, as a member of City Council, and the budget is topic number one this week for the coming fiscal year. There's already a projected deficit that you'll have to close. What would this do to that with respect to city workers?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes, a lot of city workers are on contract and are in a union. They bargain for their wages. For minimum wage workers outside, those are folks that are working in retail jobs in the shops in your neighborhood. Those folks are ones who this bill is meant to improve their lives, meant to put more money in their pockets, help them continue to stay here in New York City, in the city that they keep running every single day.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from another business owner from your district, I think. Keisha in Bedford-Stuyvesant, you're on WNYC. Hello, Keisha.

Tiecha Merritt: Hi, my name is Tiecha Merritt. I'm the former president of Tompkins Avenue Merchant Association and one of the founders. I also have a small business. A lot of businesses are facing high rent, which is like $5,000 to almost $10,000 a month. We have to pay for our garbage. Even though we pay taxes, we still have to pay for garbage collection. We have to pay for permits. We have to pay for fines.

My question to you, not only do we have to pay, you want us to pay $30 an hour, but also $30 an hour plus the tax for each employee that we have to pay on each payroll. That's almost like $35 an hour or more. There is no way a business can survive that if they are making an average of $100,000 to $200,000 a year. Now, if you're talking about businesses like McDonald's that are making billions of dollars, we understand that. For a small business making $200,000 to $300,000 or $100,000, one employee alone is going to cost you over $60,000 in wages. You're going to be driving small businesses out of New York City. We are the heart of New York City. That is ridiculous. Within five years to do that, I am not a supporter of that at all.

Brian Lehrer: Keisha, thank you for your call. We could keep taking calls like this, Councilmember. Now, that's not to say it's a scientific poll of the people of the city of New York. I say this a lot on this show. The people who call in are generally more aggrieved than they are happy with whatever it is we're talking about. I don't want to misportray what we're getting on the phones as somehow public opinion, period. You see what you're provoking in business owners like Keisha.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes. I mean, the point of legislation is public debate, right? I welcome public debate, and I welcome engagement here because at the end of the day, those workers working in that small business, whether it's one or two workers, if they are getting paid $17 an hour, that worker is probably miserable. They are struggling. They are living with a ton of people, they are making choices.

When they leave that shop at night, they are going home, making very, very tough choices about what type of food they can put on the table. Is it healthy food? Is it junk food? They are thinking about, "Can I afford my prescription medicine at the pharmacy or not? Can I pay for childcare or not? Do I have to stop working because I can't pay for childcare? Do I have enough money to get on the train and buy my monthly pass?" This is the challenges our workers are facing.

Most of them are expecting to leave. One in three New Yorkers expects to leave in the next five years because the cost of living here is crushing them. Like I said, there are many things we should be doing all at once to support small businesses and bring the cost of running businesses down. The Mamdani administration launched a task force to support small businesses through identifying a bunch of fees and junk fees that businesses are paying.

There is legislation right now at the state level for commercial rent stabilization because we do recognize that the cost of rent for small businesses is skyrocketing, and it makes it almost impossible. There are a lot of different solutions that need to happen at the same time. What this bill is focused on is the human worker at the heart of it. Small businesses are the heart of New York City, but the workers are actually the lifeblood of this city. If we are not protecting them and keeping them here, then we won't have any businesses here.

As I mentioned before, when we looked at the Pennsylvania versus New York wage increases over a similar period, 2013 to 2019, so six years versus five, we found that the retail sector grew every year that New York City's wage increased, whereas Pennsylvania, which stayed at a meager $7, did not. There is data, there is scientific evidence to support this. I do want to engage, and I do want to have the small business community collaborate and figure out what we can do so that everybody can win.

Brian Lehrer: You are getting support from some of our listeners as well. One writes, "I wonder if the small business owners can imagine the lives of their employees who are living on so much less than $60,000 per year." Another one writes, "Sandy Nurse represents me. I own a small business. Workers over owners, always. People deserve a livable wage. Otherwise, what's the point of having a minimum wage? Props to the councilmember." One more behind you on this, I think. Ricky in Flatbush, you're on WNYC. Hi, Ricky.

Ricky: Hey, how are you doing, Brian? I'm loving what the councilwoman is saying because she's speaking for the small people that really is not getting valued out here. I understand the business owners from the small business owners. You're a boss, and if everybody become a boss, then who's going to be the worker? Who's going to show up? That's all that called in, was the boss people. This guy own a pharmacy, this lady owned whatever business she owns, and everybody own, but nobody's speaking for the person that got to show up at work, that got to get up five o'clock in the morning, go show up to these places, open up the places, making sure it's functioning.

I'm a driver and I deliver every day, and I'm living check to check. I'm just loving what she's saying. We need a raise because everything else is going up. The food, the rent, everything else is going up around us. Yes, it's not just the small business owners. It's a big corporation like Amazon and McDonald's and Burger King, and all these big things that's out here that people work at every day. Not just the small business owners.

We're not just attacking those. You know what I'm saying? We want you to be a boss and do your thing, but at the same time, check in with your worker. We live in check to check. You don't know how we eat. Like the lady said. You know what I'm saying? The MetroCard, the OMNY card, everything is going, and it's hitting you at once, and it's nothing going up for you at the job. The job is not-- nothing going up for you. It's just every day you go into work, and you have to figure it out.

I'm just glad that somebody's saying something. You know what I'm saying? At least put it out there and get the conversation started. Even if this ain't $30, $25, $28, something's going to change, but we can't just stay at the same level, and expect the same, like people not to leave or think about going somewhere else. It's impossible.

Brian Lehrer: Ricky, thank you for raising your voice.

Ricky: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: Please call us again. Councilmember, he brought up maybe there's a difference between Amazon, he cited as an example, and Joe's Pharmacy in Richmond Hill. Whatever it is. Could there be different minimum wages in the city for companies of different sizes?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Right now, the bill has two tiers. Businesses who have 500 or more employees will have to get to the $30 by 2030. Smaller businesses, 500 or less employees, will have even longer. They'll have till 2032. Look, I think what we've seen across the city and of course across the nation is that there is a lot of workers at Amazon, workers at Starbucks, workers at a number of big corporations have organized. I mean, the delivery workers organized and pushed to get a higher minimum wage. We just passed a bill last year to get the Instacart workers to have $21.44 for a minimum wage, which again, is not enough to live on.

These fights go on for a very long time, sometimes years. People get fired for fighting for minimum wage increases. Across the board, workers are fed up. Not just here in New York City, everywhere. I mean, everybody is living paycheck to paycheck. The cost of living is just astronomical. What we're asking for $30 an hour is even $8 below what more than one study has said people need. We're trying to fight for people who do love to work. They love to work. They want to raise their families here. They want to put food on the table. Not just that, they want to have a little bit extra, just a little bit left over to enjoy life in the city. Take their kids to a movie theater, take their kids out for a day. People just want to breathe a little bit. That's what we're asking for here.

This bill is not meant to crush anybody who is running a small business. We love small businesses. I helped start a bid in my district last year. I have a lot of immigrant-owned businesses. This year, the Council also fought for the vendors, the smallest businesses in New York City. We care about everybody who's trying to make a living here. We want to keep New York City thriving. That means workers, that means small business owners. That means everybody. That's why we're focused on universal childcare and affordable housing. There's a ton of things that need to happen at once. This is just one tool to get us there, to make an intervention in the lives of people in a really meaningful, direct way.

Brian Lehrer: How's your headcount for this in City Council? We know the mayor supports it. We played the clip of him at the beginning of the segment. He raised the $30 minimum wage on the campaign trail. You have 51 members of City Council, so you need 26. How close are you?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: That's right. I think I haven't looked at the thing. I think we have maybe like 10 folks on. 10 or 12, we've got a dozen. We actually introduced this bill last year, and I know that we all love the mayor, but the Council has been working on this issue for a lot longer than he was running for mayor. We introduced this last year, and this year we reintroduced it. We have new councilmembers. We have a much bigger coalition with labor groups, grassroots groups, small business owners. This is just the first step, was getting it introduced and starting the public conversation.

We want to get a hearing, and we want as many New Yorkers as possible who are both in favor of this and against it to come out and talk about it. Because I think at the end of the day, what's on everybody's mind is that the cost of living is too damn high and people are not making enough to get by in this city, and we need all the solutions on the table to make life better here. We are going to be working extremely hard to build that coalition and to reach some consensus with all the stakeholders who will be directly impacted by this.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, off the topic of the minimum wage, I want to give you a chance to describe to our listeners your particular-- What's the term? One of your particular priorities for the city budget, because it's one that I think doesn't get a lot of headline coverage. You are chair of the Council's Committee on Civil and Human Rights, and I see that you're pushing for a $10 million increase even as the city is trying to close a budget gap and fund other things for the city's Commission on Human Rights. What does that agency actually do? Why do you think it needs more money right now?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes, thank you for asking this. The Commission on Human Rights is really the protectors and defenders of New York City's civil and human rights laws. We have some of the most comprehensive, some of the strongest human rights laws in the country. That's because countless New Yorkers have fought for these rights to defend against all sorts of-- To defend and fight against all sorts of discrimination.

This little commission is little. It's a small but mighty commission. It's never really gotten the resources it needs, and we're continuing to ask more of it. In the last few years, we've added new protective classes. We've expanded the human rights laws to prevent discrimination based on criminal history, height, weight, whether you have tattoos or not, at your job. Of course, your source of income, if you're using a housing voucher with a landlord. As employers and landlords are searching for new ways to cherry-pick their tenants or their employees, or attempt to get around human rights laws, we cannot shortchange the enforcement agencies.

We're asking for an additional 10 million to bring the commission to 25 million in total, which they've never had to do what they need to do to defend our laws. There's a bill at the Council to create a hotline where folks who are experiencing antisemitism or Islamophobia could call in. This would be in addition to a hotline we already have that has extraordinary wait times, almost 40 minutes or longer to get the phone picked up, if that. We can't depend on folks who don't have enough resources to protect New Yorkers.

I'm really hoping that with this budget and with this mayor, who has championed human rights throughout his political career, that we actually get the resources we need to defend the rights of all New Yorkers here. I'm really grateful that you actually brought it up because it is a little commission that doesn't get a lot of love, but it deserves all the resources we can give it to make sure that people aren't discriminated against at their jobs, when they're looking for an apartment, or anywhere else. We're hoping for that 25 million this year.

Brian Lehrer: One quick follow-up on this, then we're out of time. The Trump administration has been cutting or threatening federal civil rights enforcement of various kinds. At the EEOC, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, other agencies. Does that federal retreat make what's happening at the city level more expensive? Are you seeing cases that would have gone federal now landing at the city commission to try to get resolution for the people involved?

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Yes. Certainly, the number of calls and inquiries to the commission has increased exponentially year over year, and especially during the Trump era. I mean, the fact is, we have a president who is almost explicitly, very explicitly, a white nationalist, and he is cutting any program that is meant to create equity and level the playing field for everybody in this country. In New York City, where we have millions and millions of people, that creates a lot of problems.

We're lucky that the commission is actually almost 100% funded by the city and not dependent on federal funding streams. That makes it that much more important that this year in the city budget, that we actually provide the expansion it needs, because there's more calls, there's more people walking in the door. We've had landlords threaten to call ICE on tenants, put signs up in the building that have, literally, ICE on it, to scare people, and to maybe try to drive people out.

This is blatant discrimination. These are the types of cases that are coming to this commission. We need them to have the resources, including the enforcement piece, because they do have enforcement capability. We really, really want to make sure this is on the top of mind for New Yorkers, because we no longer rely on the agencies at the federal government to protect our civil and human rights.

Brian Lehrer: New York City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, representing District 37 in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Cypress Hills, Bushwick, City Line, Ocean Hill, Brownsville, and East New York. Councilmember, thanks for some time today in talking through these issues.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse: Thank you so much, Brian.

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