Our 2024 Employment Legislative Agenda items include the following:
CIDNY supports “Temperature Extreme Mitigation Program (TEMP) Act” (S01604C Ramos/A03321-C Joyner): As New York State continues to experience “record” weather (record heat, record cold, record flooding, etc.), it becomes more imperative than ever to protect employees from the effects of working in extreme weather. The TEMP Act offers this protection by requiring employers to conduct training sessions, develop plans to address heat stress, allow a period of acclimation for new workers in certain industries, and provide employees with protective gear, shade, breaks, and water. Extreme weather impacts industries across the board, and heat-related injuries alone account for tens of thousands of workplace injuries every year (according to a national study published in 2023 by Lai et al). The industries disproportionately affected by extreme weather are also some of the industries where people with disabilities are most likely to be employed: 19.1% of workers with a disability work in a service occupation, and 15.3% of workers with disability work in production, transportation, or material moving. The TEMP Act proposes mandatory protections for the people who work in these industries (among others) and in doing so, proposes mandatory protection for people with disabilities who might not only be more vulnerable to injury, but who also might be further discouraged or discounted from seeking employment associated with an increasingly high physical or cognitive risk.
CIDNY supports waiving state’s sovereign immunity to liability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (A6541 Kelles /S1164A Sanders Jr.): This bill would allow State employees to sue the State of New York in state or federal court for violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As it stands, employees with disabilities face barriers at nearly every point in the employment process. Many of the practices involved in applying, hiring, and training are implicitly discriminatory. Once a candidate is employed, accommodation, though legally required, are often not fully supplied. Employees in the private sector, still face these barriers, but they have access to legal recourse upon encountering these barriers. State employees, as of now, are more limited. This bill would change that. In addition, this bill would allow people with disabilities, regardless of whether they are state employees, to bring civil action against the State of New York if government 11 services, programs, and activities are not made accessible to the disabled public, further ensuring that people with disabilities are able to receive the services they are entitled to, not just under the ADA, but as citizens of New York
CIDNY supports establishing a small business tax credit for the employment of disabled persons. (A4733 Rajkumar /S1555 Addabbo): According to a 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, people with disabilities are more than twice as likely as people without disabilities to be unemployed (7.6% vs 3.5%), and when employed, they are more than twice as likely as people without disabilities to work part time (30% vs 16%). While the reasons behind these statistics are both numerous and nuanced, a contributing factor is hiring bias. Despite evidence to the contrary, many employers still believe, even subconsciously, that hiring people with disabilities is a bad “investment” that will ultimately cost them money. This bill would provide a tax credit of $5,000 to $25,000 to businesses that employ 100 people or less, provided they employ a person with a disability, working at least 35 hours a week, for the duration of six months. This bill would explicitly address one of the biggest implicit barriers people with disabilities typically face when attempting to obtain employment.
CIDNY supports, with caveats, legislation relating to the minimum wage for employees with disabilities. (A4347 Steck /S3434 Skoufis): According to data obtained from the American Community Survey, approximately 30% of people with disabilities live below the poverty line. This is almost twice the rate of people without disabilities living below the poverty line (17%), and there are several factors that contribute to this discrepancy, including barriers to obtaining employment, benefits that have income and savings caps to qualify, and the continued legality in some places of a subminimum wage for people with disabilities. This bill advocates for eliminating the subminimum wage for employees when that wage is based on age or disability. CIDNY supports the discontinuation of the subminimum wage as an incentive for employers to hire people with disabilities, but does so with the understanding that other protections for the hiring and retention of disabled employees need to be put in place. 12 Generally, subminimum wage does not refer to competitive integrated employment, but rather to sheltered workshops, or other job programs designed for people with disabilities who are unable to find work competitively. Though this bill specifies that the elimination of the subminimum wage refers to employees in “comparable positions[s]” to employees without disabilities, it also mentions prohibiting these workshops, which are a lifeline for many disabled individuals who cannot seek competitive integrated employment. While CIDNY supports ending the subminimum wage for disabled employees, it also acknowledges that not every disabled employee will be able to obtain a comparable position to a nondisabled employee, even with accommodations. These employees also deserve protection, and those protections must be put in place concurrently with ending subminimum wages. Otherwise, there is the risk of wages going up, but employment going down. Therefore, while CIDNY supports ending the subminimum wage, it does so while advocating for countering the narrative that the only two options for employment for people with disabilities are competitive integrated employment and subminimum wages. CIDNY supports finding an option for alternative funding for these sheltered workshops that does not come at the expense of the employees.
CIDNY supports securing wages earned against theft act (SWEAT) (A7752 Rosenthal L./ S7539 Ramos): Wage theft, or an employer failing to pay an employee the legal wage they are entitled to, can occur several ways: an employer can refuse to pay overtime or can demand an employee work off the clock; an employer can deny an employee meal breaks; an employer can take illegal deductions, or can confiscate tips, or can refuse to make up the difference between tips and the minimum wage. This means that certain employees, e.g., part-time hourly workers, “gig” workers, and people who work in the service industry, are more susceptible to wage theft. According to a 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 30% of people with disabilities work part-time, 9.5% are self-employed, and 19.1% work in service occupations. All of these rates are higher in the disabled community than in the nondisabled community (16%, 6.1%, and 15.9% respectively). People with disabilities may also feel an added pressure to say yes when their bosses make unreasonable demands, given the barriers people with disabilities face in obtaining employment in the first place, coupled with a 13 potentially higher dependence on work-related medical benefits which they might be afraid to lose. This bill both provides grounds for attachment (the court will have the ability to put a lien on the employers' property) and would allow employees to “hold shareholders of non-publicly traded corporations personally liable for wage theft.” It increases the likelihood that employees who are the victims of wage theft will eventually secure repayment from their employers, and it also removes several barriers to the actual process of pursuing a claim, both of which are invaluable services to the employees who seek them, and who are disproportionately likely to be disabled.
CIDNY supports the wage theft attachment act. (A46 Rosenthal L./ S1977 Ramos): Wage theft, or an employer failing to pay an employee the legal wage they are entitled to, can occur several ways: an employer can refuse to pay overtime or can demand an employee work off the clock; an employer can deny an employee meal breaks; an employer can take illegal deductions, can confiscate tips, or can refuse to make up the difference between tips and the minimum wage. This means that certain employees-part-time hourly workers, “gig” workers, and people who work in the service industry are more susceptible to wage theft. According to a 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 30% of people with disabilities work part-time, 9.5% are self-employed, and 19.1% work in service occupations. All of these rates are higher in the disabled community than in the nondisabled community (16%, 6.1%, and 15.9% respectively). People with disabilities may also feel an added pressure to say yes when their bosses make unreasonable demands, given the barriers people with disabilities face in obtaining employment in the first place, coupled with a potentially higher dependence on work-related medical benefits which they might be afraid to lose. This bill would make it more difficult for employers to “dissipate their assets or dissolve their business” during the process of an employee pursuing a wage theft claim to avoid repaying wages. This would increase the likelihood that employees who are the victims of wage theft will eventually secure repayment from their employers, and it also removes several barriers to the actual process of pursuing a claim, both of which are invaluable services to the employees who seek them, and who are disproportionately likely to be disabled.
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