Thursday marked three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York. It also corresponded with a legislative budget hearing on workforce issues which revisited several of the state’s biggest failures from that time, including the billions of dollars lost to unemployment insurance fraud.

One of the issues that remains outstanding is how businesses, which have paid higher payroll taxes due to that fraud, will be made whole.  

According to the chair of the New York state Senate Labor Committee, Sen. Jessica Ramos, lawmakers are still discussing a remedy. 

“There is an opportunity for us to get creative about paying back what we owe, but also maintain financial solvency for the [unemployment insurance] fund since we do need to prepare, heaven forbid, for the worst, right?”

During the hearing, state Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon reiterated her position that there was $4 billion in unemployment insurance fraud rather than the $11 billion that the state comptroller’s office estimated there was. 

Ramos also discussed hiking the minimum wage.

“The governor in her executive budget proposed indexing the minimum wage to inflation, but doing so at where we are now, at $15 dollars an hour, which we know isn’t a living wage now, and actually wasn’t really a living wage when we finally won it 2019,” Ramos said.

Hochul’s proposal also includes a cap at 3% inflation. 

“We don’t see that as a good way to actually help workers make ends meet,” Ramos said.

Instead, Ramos and state Assemblymember Latoya Joyner have introduced a bill to hike the minimum wage to $21.25 an hour by 2026, and then start indexing it to inflation. 

“It has no caps or off-ramps. Just the way it’s been done in 17 other states. This isn’t actually a very radical idea. New York has been behind on this,” Ramos told Capital Tonight.

Ramos was also asked about including Good Cause Eviction in the budget. The bill, if passed, would prevent landlords from rent hikes that advocates consider extreme. It would also prevent them from kicking out tenants if they haven’t violated the lease. 

“I’ve always believed that Good Cause Eviction legislation is really the floor to enacting new housing policy for New York,” said Ramos. “I think for a long time we have been depending on tax breaks for big developers like 421a that have failed to actually create any affordable housing – true affordable housing.”

Ramos continued.

“I’m hoping that coming out of this budget environment this year, we’ll be able to pass legislation with housing advocates, also with the unions, that make this housing happen. There have to be labor standards; there have to be living standards. There has to be true affordability and it all starts with keeping tenants in their homes.”