80,000 city-contracted nonprofit workers finally getting a long-awaited pay raise, Mayor and Speaker announce

Roughly 80,000 New York City human service workers employed by nonprofits contracted with the city will see their wages increase by 9% over the next three years, Mayor Eric Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced on Thursday.

The mayor, during a City Hall news conference on Thursday afternoon, said the move lifts up a sector that is overwhelmingly made up of women of color. 

“Today I’m proud to announce that our administration and the City Council is getting our human service workers the pay they deserve,” Adams said. “If you dedicate your life to serving New Yorkers, we should dedicate our life to making sure they get the pay they deserve.”

The sector includes nonprofit workers who do everything from supporting the city’s homeless population and providing child care, who are some of the lowest paid workers in the city, according to the Just Pay Coalition.

The 9% increase combined with a “workforce enhancement” included in the current fiscal year’s budget brings the total raises for human services workers close to 16% over three years, said Michelle Jackson, a representative of the Just Pay coalition that has been leading advocacy on boosting pay for the sector.

The raises, known as a cost of living adjustment (COLA), have been a key ask of the sector over the past couple of years. 

Autrice Wildman, a social case worker who attended the event, said that without the COLA, she had to make difficult decisions between what she could and could not buy for herself and her daughters.

“Without this COLA, we had to pick and choose,” she said. “Do we get pork chops or do we get canned Spam? Or do we get eggs or do we get broccoli? Which produce do we really need this week or this month? Now with this raise we can get all of those produce, we don’t have to pick and choose.”

The increase will bring human service workers’ pay more in line with that of city employees. The gap exists because most city workers are represented by powerful labor unions that routinely negotiate raises for them every few years, but human service workers have no such representation.

The Speaker, who has been a vocal advocate of giving city-contracted nonprofit workers a COLA, said wage increases the council fought for in the last budget cycle “laid the groundwork” for the more dramatic raises announced Thursday.

“This COLA is long overdue and it reflects the value of our human service workers,” the speaker said. “When we pay these workers what they deserve, we show them that our actions speak louder than words and we acknowledge the true importance of their work.”

The allocation marked an early agreement between the mayor and speaker as negotiations over the Fiscal Year 2025 budget are just getting underway.

Budget talks have become increasingly bitter between the two sides of City Hall over the past two years, especially over the mayor’s spending cuts. But the mayor expressed confidence that they would agree to a budget that satisfies both him and the speaker this year.

“The speaker has a role, we have a role, but at the end of the day our role is to help working class people in the city,” the mayor said. “We’re gonna settle our budgets, we’re gonna do what must be done.”