Council: Give 9/11 Sick Leave to All Afflicted (Free Article)

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson wants Mayor de Blasio to unconditionally extend unlimited sick leave to all city employees who are battling World Trade Center diseases they contracted as part of the lower Manhattan response and recovery effort.

The push for the extension of the benefit to the entire workforce came in the form of a “sense of the Council” resolution offered by Council Member I. Daneek Miller, chair of the Committee on Civil Service and Labor. That benefit has long existed for the city’s uniformed services—police, fire, sanitation and correction—for any work-related injury.

Mayor: Negotiate It

The Mayor has taken the position that the extension of the benefit should result from negotiations with the affected unions.

“We call upon the Mayor of New York to grant unlimited leave to all civilian officers and employees of this great city who are seeking treatment for qualifying WTC conditions like their uniformed colleagues,” Mr. Miller said before the vote on his resolution. “It is time for the city to take care of their own, and that includes those who risked their lives at Ground Zero.”

Council Member Andy King said before his vote it was “unconscionable” that any city employee “that helped New York get itself back together [shouldn’t] be struggling for health care or to have the time off” they need to recover.

Council Member Eric Ulrich, who is running for Public Advocate, said that both civilian and uniformed civil servants “who helped their fellow New Yorkers during our darkest hours” should all be entitled to unlimited sick time. “Frankly, we have not done enough to help those people tested and treated for the diseases they are now being diagnosed with,” he said.

Granted for State Workers

In 2017, Governor Cuomo and the State Legislature granted that benefit to all state workers who suffered from work-related WTC health conditions, as well as to similarly situated county and local public workers outside of the five boroughs.

Left out were as many as 4,000 city employees who played a role at Ground Zero, like Emergency Medical Service workers, represented by District Council 37’s Local 2507 and Local 3621, who only get 13 sick days a year.

At State Senate hearings legislators heard from active and retired New York City civilian servants battling WTC conditions for whom the lack of the unlimited sick time had created significant economic hardship, even as these workers dealt with serious ailments.

Late in the Legislature’s 2018 session a proposal that would have extended that same protection to the city’s municipal workforce passed the State Senate unanimously but died in the Assembly after the de Blasio administration circulated a memo raising concerns about it.

After months of negotiations, the administration reached an agreement Oct. 23 with DC 37 that was to act as a template for the rest of the city’s civilian workforce and its managers.

Growing Impatient

At a Dec. 17 City Council hearing, 9/11 WTC first-responder advocates blasted both the de Blasio administration and DC 37 for taking too long to implement the benefit, which they asserted was still not in effect.

Both the union and the de Blasio administration countered that, in addition to establishing a specific code in their CityTime payroll account designated for the WTC benefit, they were still working with groups like the World Trade Center Health Program on technical issues related to documenting how an enrollee’s medical condition might limit their ability to perform their work duties.

In an email last week, Vincent Variale, president of Local 3621, which represents EMS Officers, confirmed that his eligible members were waiting on the city to release the relevant Personnel Services Bulletin on the new benefit.

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