The bill would give “representative organizations” like labor unions, whistleblowers and directly affected employees the power to bring civil wage theft suits against employers, bypassing the swamped state Department of Labor process that is now the only way to seek redress. The Daily News supported the state’s higher minimum wage, so we want to ensure the people making the minimum actually get it.

The groups that have lined up against the measure mainly represent large corporate interests. They don’t defend the indefensible of stealing from employees, but claim that a new avenue for justice for the wronged would be the focus of constant litigation, and argue that the bill would encourage “lawyers to seek out prospective clients and pursue lucrative class action-style litigation,” which is another way of saying that they fear workers standing up for their rights.

The reason this is such a common offense is that so many workers lack the knowledge to know they’re being taken advantage of; giving attorneys an incentive to lay out workers’ rights will help. Ideally, the government would police such infractions, but it’s unable to do the job.

There’s no doubt that, as things stand, the DOL cannot properly handle the volume of potentially meritorious claims it receives. The issue is only going to get worse now as employment in low-paid sectors like home care soars and NYC receives tens of thousands of migrants hungry for work and without much knowledge of labor laws and available remedies. Any frivolous case will be properly dismissed like thousands of other frivolous attempts at litigation that happen in the state every year.

Wage theft is a crime, robbing people for the money they have rightfully earned. It is theft, no different than if an employer wrote a worker a rubber check or picked their pocket. Even when done inadvertently, it’s the result of an inexcusable failure to put in place the systems that would prevent it.

For a business engaged in wage theft, that might mean a few extra dollars on the balance sheet, but for a worker, it can be life-altering. It can mean that bills go unpaid, that children are not properly clothed and fed, that savings aren’t built for a rainy day — not because that person isn’t finding work, but because the work that they did find is stealing from them.

The idea that passing this bill will unleash some sort of onslaught of claims against well-meaning employers is bunk. Our neighbor to the west, New Jersey, enacted a tough wage theft law that included a private right of action in 2019, and the sky has not fallen. Virginia and Illinois have their own versions. It makes sense; you have a private right of action to sue in circumstances where an employer harmed you or broke a contract, why not when one steals from you?

Despite the celebratory announcement yesterday on the waterfront, this is a lose-lose-lose proposition as the PA is let off the (Red) Hook.

Says who? Jerry Nadler, the dean of the congressional delegation and the recognized expert on integrated transportation. And says a former Portocrat, who bemoans the agency giving up on New York.

Remember, maritime isn’t incidental to the PA’s raison d’etre, as it is called the “Port” Authority. Not the Bus Station Authority or the Airport Authority or the Hudson Bridge and Tunnel Authority or the PATH Train Authority or the World Trade Center Authority. And the maritime focus can’t just be can’t just be Port Newark and Port Elizabeth. At this point, New York has only 15% of the port’s trade. Are they trying to knock it down to zero and give Jersey everything?

Under the swap, the PA will surrender the Red Hook piers to the city and will get in exchange the Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island. Yes, yes, we know that Staten Island is in New York, but it is on the west side of the harbor. Brooklyn is the deep water port on the east side of the harbor.

The city’s Economic Development Corp. would be in charge of Red Hook and would look to redevelop the area with perhaps mixed use and parks and housing. Those are all terrific things, but are meant for former industrial tracts that need redevelopment into something else. Red Hook is not formerly industrial. It is still industrial and should stay industrial. This is a working waterfront. It’s not about parks and housing. That the PA has failed to invest in Red Hook shouldn’t mean that it gets taken off their hands.

The PA complains that Red Hook’s transportation modalities are challenging. Well, if the PA had ever built the cross harbor rail freight tunnel it was created to build, Brooklyn would be tied into the national rail network. The tunnel, which Nadler champions, is much more important than the wasteful Gateway passenger tunnel that gets some pols so excited. But unlike commuters, freight doesn’t vote. Freight does however clog up the roads with trucks, a congesting, polluting problem that rail and sea avoid.

New York doesn’t get enough of its goods from its port. Now that will drop even more.

And it’s not even clear what the details are in the deal. Can someone please publish the memorandum of understanding before the boards of the Port and EDC vote on it, which could happen very soon?

Created by New York and its junior partner on the other side of the Hudson in 1921, the legal name of the bistate governmental entity remains the Port of New York Authority, d/b/a the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. After yesterday, why not just drop the “New York” part?

Ultimately, this policy will have limited impact, and it’s sure not to satisfy anyone, neither the hawks calling on President Biden to more fully adopt his predecessor’s extreme stance, nor the advocates who have been disappointed by the president’s refusal to fully step back from the Trump-era dynamics. Whatever the outcome, it should not be a system run through the whims of the current executive. Congress, having tried and failed to pass a limited border bill earlier this year, seems content to abdicate this responsibility, only to be pulled out as an electoral cudgel, never to be fixed.

Meanwhile we’re squandering time and talent, as businesses clamor for labor and innovation and migrants find their way to costly city shelters as opposed to being integrated into the economy and reversing population declines in towns and cities across the country. The can gets kicked down further, and everyone loses.

The most damaging thing is the persistent myth that this has to be all or nothing. Either we have some sort of immoral and illegal absolute border closure, abandoning our principles and obligations to the people so aptly described by the Statue of Liberty, or we have no process, no restrictions, no standards. This belief is both wrong and incredibly persistent, poisoning the dialogue and standing in the way of meaningful reform, which all parties claim to want.

We do not have to remake the wheel. The bipartisan border deal that collapsed in Congress in February had had a lot not to like, including the reinstatement of a version of the always misguided Title 42 restriction. However, there were worthwhile elements that should be resuscitated, notably an effort to take many new asylum claims out of the slow and confrontational setting of the immigration courts and place them in an internal agency process, where trained government personnel would evaluate the applications like they already do for countless other immigration matters.

Applicants would either quickly get approvals or quickly get denials, which could then be appealed to another panel of experts. Faster resolutions help everyone: those who qualify for protections can receive them expeditiously, giving them runway to begin their new lines in the United States without the unstable limbo of drawn-out removal proceedings. Those who do not aren’t left to start building lives here only to, in a year or two, have the rug pulled out from under them.

There are real questions to be hammered out around how to speed things up without infringing on due process, and there are structural obstacles like a widespread shortage of attorneys who can take on these often complicated cases. These considerations must be taken into account in order for us to avoid the worst-case scenario of sending people back to danger.

But these are not insurmountable obstacles, certainly not for a nation with the resources, breadth and ingenuity of the United States — the very qualities that many immigrants are both seeking and have contributed to. In all but giving up, Congress shows they have less grit than the immigrants they’re failing.

Yes, Cohen is a crook and a liar. But Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, who confessed to having a hand in 19 murders, cooperated with the federal prosecutors to testify against John Gotti. A Manhattan jury convicted Gotti and he died in prison.

The Donald is not anyway like the Dapper Don, a murderous Mob leader, and hapless Cohen is no bloodless killer like Gravano. But like henchman Gravano, henchman Cohen knows how his boss broke the law and will testify to it.

Cohen pleaded guilty to his part in the 2016 election interference scheme to pay off Daniels. Cohen told the judge he was guilty on Aug. 21, 2018, while Trump was in the White House, having successfully hidden the $130K payments to Daniels before the November 2016 national vote. It was Cohen who wrote the check to Daniels. That payment was one of the crimes that Cohen confessed to as an illegal campaign finance violation, along with other federal tax offenses. He was sentenced to prison in an agreement and did his time.

It wasn’t a crime for Trump to have sex with Daniels in 2006 and it wasn’t a crime to pay her hush money in 2016, even using Cohen as a middleman. Trump’s crime, as charged by Bragg, was that Trump faked his business records to further the larger felony that Cohen was convicted of. That’s why Cohen is much more important to the case than Daniels. It was Cohen’s crimes that Trump aided, which would make Trump guilty as well.

So Trump’s lawyers will say that Cohen is a rat (like Gravano) and a cheat and liar and a convict (like Gravano). But Cohen’s crimes are what makes him central to this case.

It’s a shame that Bragg didn’t also pursue felony charges against Trump based on what Cohen exposed as Trump’s routine manner to lie and cheat on the valuation of his assets and holdings, hoodwinking insurers and lenders by inflating or deflating the actual numbers. There was a brewing phony valuation case assembled by his predecessor, Cy Vance, but Bragg decided against it.

It fell to state Attorney General Tish James to bring a civil suit against Trump on the bogus valuations. She won, spectacularly, with Trump fined a half billion dollars. While the standard of proof is steeper in a criminal case, Bragg should have gone for it.

As to the present case, who will the Manhattan jury believe, Trump or Cohen? When Trump ran for president in 2016 he only got 10% of the votes in Manhattan, while winning 12% in 2020. But we remember that in 2003 Cohen ran as a Republican for an East Side City Council seat against incumbent Democrat Eva Moskowitz. Cohen got creamed, but he scored 23% of the votes. Let’s hope that these dozen Manhattanites sitting in judgment also are twice as likely to side with him over Trump.

Like many people, we voted by mail during COVID and never want to go back. Just request the ballot online, get it delivered to your residence, fill it out at your convenience and mail it back. No need to worry about making a trip when polls are open, possible long lines of people waiting and even the weather. Voter participation goes up and representative democracy is strengthened.

More and more states are moving to vote by mail and New York should join them.

First, let us explain the difference between vote by mail and absentee voting. Vote by mail is a method of casting ballots that is open to all. Absentee voting is when a voter is unable to vote in the normal manner due to being out of town or being sick or having a disability.

Eliminating the need for a special reason for absentee voting is one way to permit everyone to get an absentee ballot. And that is what the Legislature tried to do at first in a thoroughly bipartisan effort.

In 2019, the Assembly voted 136 to 9 to put a constitutional amendment before the public to permit for universal absentee voting. The state Senate vote was 56 to 5. As we said, thoroughly bipartisan. Of 43 Republican assemblymembers, only eight voted no. Among the 24 GOP senators, only five opposed.

There was no partisan advantage, though, in fact many Republicans used to think that they had an edge among absentee voters. But in 2020, during COVID, when Donald Trump erratically started claiming that mail ballots were part of some Democratic plot (they are not, as rock-solid GOP Utah was a mail ballot pioneer), some Republicans meekly decided to follow their leader.

When the constitutional amendment was before New York voters in November 2021, the measure failed, largely because the Democratic Legislature also tried to push another very bad amendment, undermining fair redistricting. Absentee voting got weighed down and was defeated.

So the Legislature and Gov. Hochul then took the other route to the same outcome while leaving absentee voting alone and established vote by mail as another means for everyone to vote. This is exactly what the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania legislature did with a Democratic governor in 1999. The Pennsylvania constitution has the same exact wording about absentee voting as New York’s and so they created universal vote by mail.

When the Pennsylvania vote by mail law was challenged, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court let it stand as simply another to way vote, while retaining the constitution’s limits on reason for absentees.

New York now faces the same situation with the same language in our Constitution. The judges at trial and on appeal got it right. The state top court needs to agree. And then GOP should go find good candidates and run good campaigns.

Now that Gov. Hochul is supposedly righting the ship, and Albany has supposedly empowered New York City to clamp down on the illegal market, and the city is supposedly leaning into its responsibility — we say “supposedly” because we’ll believe all this when we see it — if you squint hard, a coherent strategy to make things right is finally coming into focus. Or not.

The headline finding in the report issued Friday by Commissioner Jeanette Moy of the state Office of General Services, ordered up by Hochul in March, is that despite a promise that reviews would be swift, approvals (or denials) have stretched on for months or years. Some 1,200 businesses are now bobbing around in limbo despite having poured lots of money into finding locations and navigating bureaucratic hurdles.

Why so slow going? In part, says Moy, because an understaffed OCM could only consider 75 applications at a time. In part because the inherent complexities of the process have thrown buckets of sand in the gears.

OCM must get its act together. As the report makes clear, that means hiring more weedocrats, streamlining processes and providing a public dashboard showing the status of applications. Hochul hopefully helped things along Friday by waving goodbye to OCM Executive Director Chris Alexander and Chief Equity Officer Damian Fagon.

Finally, some heads are rolling. We never understood why Alexander still had a job. Perhaps, as Hochul said, he “was a key player in drafting the original legislation.” She fired him kindly, saying: “he agrees it’s time for a new direction at OCM and has graciously agreed to work with us for the remainder of his term to help implement those operational changes. He told us he intends to pursue other opportunities at the conclusion of that term, which is in September.” September can’t come soon enough.

There’s another thing that must happen to give legal dispensaries (about 60 of which are in New York) a fighting chance: shuttering the illegal shops, which number in the thousands in the city alone. Like cicadas, they keep emerging on seemingly every block.

They sell soda and candy alongside the drugs; legal shops can’t. They are often near schools and one another; those locations are verboten to legal shops. And because they illegally stock wares from outside New York State — and don’t pay their taxes — the illegals underprice the legals. Game, set, match.

As long as the illegals thrive, the legals have no chance to gain a true foothold in the marketplace, which makes a mockery of good governance and a special mockery of the state’s promise to give those harmed by the war on drugs a leg up in this new marketplace.

Tuesday, Mayor Adams stood with the New York City sheriff, the NYPD and the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to kick off “Operation Padlock to Protect.” The promise is that, empowered by new legal authorities in the state budget, the city will really now start shuttering illegal pot shops as it has promised to do multiple times before. No longer will an understaffed sheriff’s office shoulder the burden on its own. Now, police deputized by the sheriff will assist.

At the rollout of the new-and-improved enforcement push, Adams was careful to manage expectations: “The power is not ideal,” he said. “We would like ideally for police to do an analysis in each precinct, zero in on the shops in their precinct. We don’t have that…[Police] have to be deputized by sheriff, they have to put a couple teams in place and then after you close down the shop, there is a process that allows them to reopen after a certain period of time. There are a lot of layers to this.”

Our fingers are crossed, but that sounds a lot like the preamble of a future review about how yet another attempt to fix a broken system was doomed to fail.

But in uniform and on watch, the task of police is to preserve public safety and good order, irrespective of any personal political preferences. Doing otherwise is not only improper, it imperils their vital mission to keep all New Yorkers safe (including critics of the NYPD).

Thus the matter of in-your-face public comments, particularly on social media, that police brass, notably Chief of Patrol John Chell, have been issuing. It seems that he overstepped a bright line in using his official X (formerly Twitter) account to call Queens Councilmember Tiffany Caban’s stances “garbage” and cryptically urge his followers to vote her out. The Department of Investigation is now reviewing the situation.

The NYPD brass should focus on crimefighting — a task New Yorkers of all political stripes care deeply about. Leave the politics to Mayor Adams. The department leaders should cool down and a message from Adams could be helpful in guiding them. The tweet storms are weighing down the honorable force that the mayor served well for 22 years.

Weighing in as they have may feel right, but may actually hurt not only their credibility — but the men and women in Blue who face tough situations on the streets every day. Protesters, for example, might not be much predisposed towards officers to begin with, but will be much less willing to cooperate when you have NYPD leaders openly musing about how they should all be arrested.

We hope that the NYPD brass’ combative stance is reversed before the DOI even finishes its inquiry.

Thanks for having me.

Love,

Everyone

It would have been very easy here, and perhaps electorally helpful, for Democrats to simply have stood back and let the Republicans continue to devour each other, throwing the House into further chaos and tanking any possibility for the now-dominant MAGA wing to push through its dangerous and unpopular agenda items. But doing so would also tank any possibility of other legislation making it through — not just funding for Ukraine but things as basic as keeping the government open.

The objective was not to save Johnson, but to block Greene. We understand the urge to qualify this as a stalemate or even a loss for Democrats, who still don’t control the chamber and have saved a very right-wing speaker, but he is now perhaps the weakest and most malleable speaker in congressional history.

His already slim partisan advantage keeps dropping as GOP legislators leave, and as the smoke settles on this ouster effort, it’s clear who’s left holding the cards: Hakeem Jeffries and his unified Democratic caucus. Without them, Johnson is on the chopping block, and he knows it, which is why he’s defending Jack Smith and saying Democrats aren’t enemies. That might be bare minimum stuff, but for a contemporary GOP speaker, that’s plenty.

Had Greene been successful in her efforts, who knows where things would be right now. Perhaps a beleaguered GOP moderate wing, sick of the dysfunction, would have caved and helped install an extremist like Jim Jordan, who absolutely would not shepherd through votes on foreign aid or probably anything beyond bad-faith investigations of political opponents.  This is not an ideal situation, but it’s certainly a far better one than having Greene as kingmaker.

Contrary to what some GOP congressmembers seem to believe, the purpose of the legislative body is not burnishing personal brands or grandstanding, but to write, debate and approve meaningful legislation that can improve people’s lives. The never-ending circus of leadership musical chairs and unreasonable MAGA demands puts that function on ice.

Not to say we should get ahead of ourselves and praise Johnson as some sort of smooth dealmaker or bipartisan operator. Just after being saved by his Democratic colleagues, the speaker announced legislation to prohibit the already-illegal practice of federal noncitizen voting, admitting even during that same press conference that this is not a real issue. This is all in service to Donald Trump and his obsession with claiming election fraud where there is none, along with a side serving of xenophobia. Johnson knows this is a dangerous game, given Trump’s contempt for fair elections.

Democrats should make clear that their shielding comes with heavy strings attached, and work to defeat Johnson in this year’s general election, just as they should endeavor to defeat every other MAGA Republican.

Obviously, jail space can’t exactly be made flexibly. A particular jail has a certain capacity, and that’s that; overcrowding is, in itself, a humanitarian issue, and we can’t fix the horror that is Rikers simply by stuffing people into other dangerous and unsanitary conditions.

The lawmakers who devised the Rikers closure plan years ago knew this, and knew they had to pick a date on the calendar and a target number for the new borough-based jails’ capacity. There’s nothing wrong with being a little optimistic about trends in criminal justice, but it seems clear now that it was not the right move to depend absolutely on a jail population dropping like a rock indefinitely, to 3,300 beds in a city of 8.6 million.

We can’t say that there’s a right number, per se, and the ideal capacity may well be below the 6,000 or so people currently held on Rikers. But the system needs some slack. The expansion of capacity to 4,160 bought some of that slack, but potentially not enough, and with additional time and expense.

It’s always frustrating when a public infrastructure project goes well beyond initial projections on cost and timeline, but this is substantively different than, say, a still-rutted road or a long-delayed school. The remoteness of Rikers Island keeps it farther away from prying eyes in a way that has contributed to the city’s failures to keep detainees safe and healthy.

Attorneys and families have a difficult time getting to the island, and the entire complex’s physical infrastructure is falling apart in a way that has been repeatedly found to actually endanger the people there. The current isolated and sprawling complex also gives DOC staff cover to neglect their duties, including by having set up a full clubhouse in a decommissioned building.

As short-sighted as the Council’s 2019 legislation might have been, it remains a legal requirement for the administration to do everything in its power to complete the closure of the facility and move detainees to the borough-based jails, which might entail strategies to thin out the jail population.

City Hall has intimated that this would jeopardize public safety, but we already know that a good chunk of people on Rikers should really be in a mental health care setting instead. The city is already planning on reducing the number of mental health units at the local jails in order to increase overall capacity, so it should double down on providing these services elsewhere.

We also understand that these are sizable and complicated projects, but large buildings get constructed on shorter timetables all the time, without these completions being mandated by law.

By all means, close down Rikers as fast as possible. But since it seems impossible to make the 2027 deadline, maybe the law with the date needs to be amended. It’s that or break the law.