Accusing it of authorizing illegally low wages for
construction workers on Roosevelt Island, the New York City District Council of
Carpenters has filed a lawsuit against the state Department of Labor.
The suit, filed Aug. 22 in state Supreme Court, alleges that
the department wrongly classified the Riverwalk 7 building on the island as a
private project where contractors don’t have to pay the prevailing wage. It
also names as defendants the developers, the Hudson Companies and the Related
Companies; the contractor, Monadnock Construction; and the Roosevelt Island
Operating Corporation.
“Traditionally, all the projects that were there before this
one were good. They paid prevailing wage,” says Carpenters political director
Daniel Walcott. “Every piece of paper that we’ve looked at comes back to the
same thing—it should be prevailing wage.”
Riverwalk 7 is a 22-story building, the seventh in a
development just north of the tramway and the Queensboro Bridge, and the first
of three buildings slated for the Queens side of the island. About two-thirds
of its 266 apartments will rent for market rate, and the rest will be reserved
for staffers at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. Construction started last
fall, and it’s expected to open in 2015.
In April, Walcott complained to Christopher Alund, director
of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Public Work, that the workers weren’t being
paid union scale. On Apr. 24, Alund responded that the building was being
constructed “by private developers to be owned and operated by private
entities.” He wrote that even though the developers got tax breaks and the
building was on publicly owned land, that wasn’t enough to make it “a public
housing project” that was subject to prevailing- wage laws.
The Carpenters counter that Riverwalk 7 is “an integral part
of a massive public-works project,” the state-directed plan to redevelop Roosevelt
Island that began in 1969, so the Department of Labor is therefore failing to
enforce the law. The building is part of the current phase of that plan, the
lawsuit contends. The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is a “public
benefit” corporation established in 1984, succeeding the state Urban
Development Corporation. A 2000 development agreement between it, Related, and
Hudson says that all construction workers should get prevailing wage. That
agreement exempted the developers from paying property taxes, sales tax on
construction materials, and the mortgage-recording tax. The state Department of
Taxation approved those exemptions in 2001, because the development was
“property utilized in the public interest.” And the 2013 lease to Riverwalk for
Building 7 incorporates that development agreement, including the
prevailing-wage clause.
Walcott is optimistic that a judge reading this history will
wonder what happened that made this building different from previous ones on
the island. The workers erecting the planned Cornell Tech campus will get
prevailing wage, he notes. Yet the Carpenters fear that letting one developer
get away with paying less could “open the way for future attacks on the right
of workers to be paid prevailing wages and benefits when employed on public
works,” especially in public-private operations such as Brooklyn Bridge Park
and so-called affordable housing.
A lot of components go into the “public interest” on a
project, Walcott says: It includes buying supplies from local businesses and
workers being able to support themselves, “not just the lowest price.”
Source: Labor
Press
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