Q&A
Suggestions for city support to help smaller contractors with compliance and wage tracking
0:43:01
·
91 sec
Council Member De La Rosa suggests that the city should provide support to smaller contractors for compliance and wage tracking. Lucy Joffe and Ahmed Tigani discuss existing efforts and challenges in implementing such support.
- The importance of supporting smaller contractors with back-end operations is emphasized.
- Existing efforts by the Department of Small Business Services are mentioned.
- Recent improvements in worker protection and construction safety legislation are highlighted.
- The ongoing challenges and costs associated with providing support are acknowledged.
Carmen N. De La Rosa
0:43:01
Yeah.
0:43:02
I I would think that we, as a city, could come up with ways to support smaller contractors in getting some of the support that they need to do the back end because I think that that's where we will see, you know, people's wages being played with.
0:43:17
Right?
0:43:17
It's not fair also for workers to to spend you know, hours on a job site, working, you know, excruciating weather conditions, etcetera, to build up our city and then have no way of actually tracking, you know, how how they've been exploited if wage theft does occur.
Lucy Joffe
0:43:34
Building out that support, our colleagues in the Department of Small Business Services, there are efforts to do that, and that's something that we are very committed to.
0:43:41
It's just also something else that costs additional money on each of these projects and something that we then think about in the context of trade offs and overall, where is the limited budget going to?
Ahmed Tigani
0:43:54
There has been a number of, I think, important and good steps forward to protecting workers and queens safer job sites just over the last couple of years.
0:44:03
When I was at the OB, we were involved with local law 196.
0:44:07
There was construction safety legislation that's been passed since then.
0:44:11
Those are examples of both, like, the positive and trials positive elements in the trials of working through this.
0:44:18
So I agree that we can always do have examples of and should come up with more examples to support these businesses, but it doesn't take away from the initial cost impact and their ability, you know, barrier to entry questions that come up.
