Children's Health Defense By
Members of the New York City Council’s Common Sense Caucus today introduced a resolution in support of state legislation to reinstate, with back pay and no legal restrictions, all city employees fired for not complying with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Hundreds of unvaccinated city workers rallied with the council members on the steps of New York’s City Hall under the banner, “Let Us Work.”
Cosponsored by New York City Council member Joann Ariola and minority leader Joseph Borelli, the resolution advocates for the passage of Senate Bill S7466A, which would make the job reinstatement for unvaccinated workers a matter of state law.
However, the resolution is nonbinding and unlikely to gain passage by the full Council, according to Michael Kane, founder of the advocacy group Teachers for Choice and co-organizer of the event.
Kane told The Defender, “We are calling on all New Yorkers to call their senators in the city committees where the bill is currently and ask them to cosponsor the bill.”
“We want to know who says yes and who says no,” he said. “Three years into this battle and after thousands of New Yorkers have left the city and state, we still have momentum with residents fighting against vaccine mandates in New York City,” he said.
The press conference drew about 200 people and was timed with the first anniversary of the end of the city’s vaccine mandate for public and private sector workers, which resulted in the termination or resignation of over 1,700 police officers, firefighters, EMTs, teachers and other city employees.
Ariola, chair of the city’s Committee on Fire and Emergency Management and member of the Common Sense Caucus, opened the press conference with a statement of support for city workers who lost “jobs that they loved all for refusing to take a vaccine … that is no longer mandated.”
Ariola lamented the fact that many of these workers are still unemployed when the city and state have spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars on litigation” to prevent certain members of the city’s fire, police, sanitation departments and New York City teachers, healthcare workers and other city workers from returning to work.
“Add it up,” she said. “It would be much less than having them return to the workforce and become the heroes that they were meant to be.”
The government is requiring former employees to sign a waiver forfeiting their civil service rights and rights to back pay to get their jobs back, Ariola said.
“For many who have unjustly been denied the opportunity to earn a living over the past two years, this is unacceptable,” Ariola said. Others in similar situations were permitted to return to work without signing the waiver, she added.
“They will not sign a waiver and they will continue to sue,” she added…
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