Amazon and more than a dozen of its subcontractors in New York City and the suburbs face union allegations they flouted a state law that protects employees from mass layoffs or closures.

A complaint submitted to the state Labor Department on Tuesday by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters charges that Amazon and 13 subcontractors violated the state’s WARN Act by failing to give the megaretailer’s delivery drivers at least 90 days’ notice of their impending terminations.

The complaints were filed on behalf of former workers who claim their shops were shut down with no warning between September 2023 and October 2025. The Teamsters estimate more than 1,300 workers were impacted by the closures.

The union also identified cases where Amazon subcontractors allegedly sent layoff notices after the layoff or closure date.

The move comes amid growing support in the City Council for a bill that would force Amazon to directly employ the army of drivers and depot workers who currently work for local subcontractors to deliver an estimated 2 million packages each day across the five boroughs. Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently came out in support of the bill, which Amazon and business groups vehemently oppose.

Among fired workers covered by the Tuesday complaint are Latrice Johnson, who said she was laid off from a job she “loved” as a delivery driver servicing Queens and Brooklyn in August 2025. She said she was at home on her day off when a group chat of her coworkers began blowing up: Managers had apparently told people who clocked in at the sprawling Amazon garage in Maspeth, Queens, known as DBK4 that the company would be shutting down immediately. 

Official word of the mass layoff came several days later, when Johnson received a boilerplate letter from Cornucopia Logistics, the Amazon subcontractor where she worked for two years. The state Labor Department’s WARN notice portal lists Aug. 20, 2025 as the garage’s closure date, but Aug. 26 as the notice date.

“It was devastating. I was looking forward to going back in and making next week’s paycheck,” Johnson, a single mother, told The City Reporter. “You call me a top driver two months ago, and now you’re giving me the boot?”

The Teamsters’ complaint lists Johnson’s former employer and a dozen others, as well as Amazon itself, among the companies it alleges flouted the WARN Act. The union estimates affected workers could be owed up to $11 million in back pay.

MORE: UPS Tops List of Bus-Lane Blockers Caught on Camera Last Year

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Steve Kelly dismissed the complaint as bluster from the Teamsters. He reiterated that the impacted drivers were not Amazon employees, and that the tech giant bears no responsibility for its subcontractors’ operations, including “decisions about whether to close their businesses.”

The subcontractors, Kelly said, “are independent small businesses. They make their own decisions when it comes to hiring, fleet management, capacity planning and route assignments — and whether they want to work with other companies besides Amazon.”

Kelly noted it is the subcontractors’ responsibility “to comply with all applicable WARN laws” when they close their doors — and to give Amazon a heads-up, too.

In Amazon’s parlance, the subcontractors are known as “delivery service partners,” or DSPs.

“We ask DSPs to keep us informed so that if they do cease operations, we’re able to connect impacted individuals with other DSPs in the area who may be hiring and to ensure continuity of delivery services for customers,” Kelly said.

Spokespeople for Cornucopia and other subcontractors did not respond to requests for comment.

New York’s 90-Day Rule

In New York, private businesses with 50 or more full-time employees must give 90 days’ notice of closures or mass layoffs to employees and the state Department of Labor. Businesses that do not provide notice may be required to pay back wages and benefits to employees and pay a civil penalty.

Last year, the shuttered news outlet The Messenger agreed to pay $4.5 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of nearly 300 staff who claimed they’d been laid off without warning. 

Amazon has for years insisted the workers delivering its packages for the company — who drive Amazon-branded vehicles, wear Amazon-branded vests and rely on Amazon for roadside support — are not actually its employees. In New York, Amazon’s delivery fleet is subcontracted by more than 40 delivery service partners, an arrangement critics say shields the tech giant from liability in case of accidents, wage theft complaints and collective bargaining.

In a six-page letter affixed to the complaint, Randy Korgan, the director of the Teamsters’ Amazon division, and the president of the union’s New York council, Thomas Gesualdi, urged the state Labor Department and the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to investigate Amazon and the workers’ direct employers for the alleged WARN Act violations and to “open enforcement proceedings where appropriate.”

A spokesperson for the state Labor Department said the complaint was being reviewed.

City Hall spokesperson Cassio Mendoza said in a statement that the Teamsters’ allegations “underscore the fact that subcontracting by companies like Amazon has become a way to outsource labor and accountability, leaving last-mile delivery drivers with unstable incomes and dangerous working conditions while making our streets less safe.”

The union is the leading force pushing the City Council to pass a bill that would force Amazon to directly hire delivery workers.

Amazon and business groups claim the bill, known as the Delivery Protection Act, will kneecap small businesses and lead to thousands of lost jobs. Representatives for Amazon have said the company may consider pulling out of New York entirely if the law passes.

The bill, introduced by Councilmember Tiffany Cabán of Queens, is backed by 34 lawmakers and Mamdani but has yet to be brought to a full vote.

Records show Amazon has bankrolled a campaign against the bill to the tune of more than $5 million, New York Focus reported.

“New Yorkers should not be forced to subsidize corporate profits with less safe streets and more precarious jobs,” Mamdani said in a statement last week formally throwing his support behind Cabán’s bill. “It’s time to end the subcontracting model that puts profits over people and build an economy that works for working New Yorkers.”

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Millionaires who captured more than half of all of New York City’s income growth since the pandemic.

A poverty rate that keeps climbing and is much higher than the nation as a whole.

Stratospheric Wall Street profits.

Record numbers of New Yorkers receiving cash assistance and SNAP benefits.

The image suggested by these data points and more in the charts below is a K. An upward-sloping line that shows the gains by the few. And a downward-sloping line showing the deteriorating financial well-being of so many others.

The K-shaped economy, a concept popularized in 2020 by William & Mary economist Peter Atwater, is a national issue. 

And as the election victories by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his fellow democratic socialists show, its impact goes far beyond the economy. 

The Rich ‘Feel Invulnerable’

“The reason the K-shaped economy matters isn’t because of what it says about wages or wealth, but what it says about how people feel and their life experience,” Atwater told The City Reporter. 

“Today, those at the top feel invulnerable. Moreover, they have an overabundance in everything that matters,” he said. “Meanwhile, those at the bottom feel increasingly powerless and uncertain. They see scarcity in every direction they turn.”

Top officials in the Trump administration dismiss the whole idea.

“I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last month, arguing that wages are growing fastest for low-paying jobs.

But even if that is more than a statistical blip, it’s not true for New York City. 

“The way finance and tech are growing today, coupled with wage stagnation for most workers, makes the post-pandemic NYC economy more polarized than ever,” James Parrott, senior advisor to the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, said in an email.

The data and charts in this story show that the K shape may be the defining symbol of the city’s economy.

What follows is a series of data charts that show New York City’s extreme K, with an emphasis on income, the rise in New Yorkers’ reliance on safety net benefits, and the divergence in real estate ownership.

Growing Income Inequality and Poverty 

The city’s top 1%, or some 40,700 millionaires, captured 53% of income growth over five years. Since 2019, the rate of income growth has ramped up for the city’s wealthiest, while it has slowed for the 99%.

Meanwhile, poverty has reached a record high for the third consecutive year in 2024, double the national rate.

More New Yorkers have turned to federal and state aid for health insurance and food, but many are losing access to the programs. Cash assistance enrollment has climbed steadily as more rely on the safety net, but thousands are losing benefits due to federal cuts to Medicaid and work requirement restrictions to SNAP.

“The cost of living in New York City, quite frankly, even if you had a full-time job and weren’t on SNAP benefits, it’s very challenging these days. Food inflation, the prices in grocery stores, people cannot afford [them] anymore,” said Lakisha Morris, division director for food and housing stability at Catholic Charities.

“You’re making decisions on whether three of us are going to eat tonight or I’m just going to feed my two kids. And these are true, hard facts,” she said. “There is no immediate relief. People are challenged. And the jobs that are paying a better living wage are hard to come by these days.”

The top 1%, meanwhile, are doing better than ever. Homeownership used to be the pinnacle of the American Dream. Now homeownership feels unreachable for younger Americans.

Speaking of Home Ownership…

The real estate market has seen signs of distress as more and more New Yorkers struggle to afford homes amid a booming luxury market. Manhattan is a prime example. Over the last year, the overall housing market saw an 8.2% loss, but contracts and listings for ultra-luxury homes have proliferated, with $5 million and $10 million+ homes dominating.

“I would expect to have an increase in home sales at that price point this year, even as the total number of sales in New York is flat,” said Mike Simonsen, chief economist at COMPASS, a real estate brokerage. 

“Those forces still seem to be underway, and there has to be some dramatic change in policy or macroeconomic conditions before that changes,” he said.

The vast majority of New Yorkers are renters — 69% of households rent their homes, according to a 2024 report from the city comptroller — but the cost of rent has steadily outpaced income growth.

This means more New Yorkers are falling into lower income brackets and becoming severely rent-burdened, spending half or more of their household income on rent.

‘You’re Either Poor or Rich’

Only high-wage industries, or the top 20% of workers, saw their hourly wage growth outpace inflation. Middle-wage workers saw their income stagnate or decline from 2024 to 2025 while top earners captured nearly all wage growth.

“It’s basically the almost-disappearance of the middle class. You’re either poor or rich,” said Mohamed Obaidy, economist and associate director of the Center for NYC Affairs.

“These are characteristics of developing countries… what this means for New York City is we’re coming backwards and becoming more of a developing country.”

The majority of jobs have also been low-wage labor, with exceptions in healthcare. High-wage industries grew slowly, adding comparatively fewer roles.

But in the last two years, higher-wage sectors like finance, tech, and consulting captured the largest wage and job growth.

The Price Tag For NYC Kids

This means that households must have working adults in higher-wage industries to exceed the living wage to support a child. Not a single industry’s average wage is enough to cover the cost of a child. In two-person households where only one adult is working, only those in management, professional, or tech industries can support a child. If two adults work, average wages for most industries pay enough, but some lower-wage industries do not.

Greg David and Kennedy Sessions contributed to this story.

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Brooklyn Cyclones concessions workers have been getting stiffed on some of their paychecks this season, as tips disappeared under new management, according to interviews and records obtained by The City Reporter. 

Summer frequently draws long lines of spectators buying hot dogs and beers to the city-owned Coney Island stadium, where customers are automatically prompted to tip after every purchase. Yet employees have not received any tips on some paychecks, according to 15 pay stubs obtained from a half dozen workers between May and August. Many of the workers, youths in their late teens and early 20s, said the missing tips have made it more difficult to cover their living expenses. 

“I had to get a second job just to pay for my tuition because I was counting on this job,” said one cashier. “With our pay being so low and not getting tips, it wasn’t going to be enough to get me through my semester.” 

Employees began noticing the missing tips after the team’s owner, Diamond Baseball Holdings, took over managing the concessions from a contractor at the start of the 2026 season. In previous years, workers could earn as much as $200 or more on a busy night. The concessions do not accept cash, so all tips are made via credit or debit cards. Some workers have put out tip jars in a mostly futile attempt to make up some of the difference, they said.

Failing to pay employees their tips violates state labor laws. Credit card tips must be paid out by the end of the same pay period. Employers who illegally retain tips can be prosecuted for wage theft and charged with grand larceny under the state’s penal code. Workers agreed to speak with the City Reporter on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. 

“The law, especially in New York, makes it very clear that tips are the property of employees,” said Mel Gonzalez, director of the Employment Law Project at the New York Legal Assistance Fund. “If I give someone some money and somebody else comes and takes it, that’s just stealing.”

In an interview, Elbert Sanders, the Cyclones’ food and beverage director, said that he learned of the issue after workers showed him that their pay stubs did not include tips. He gave conflicting information about when he learned about the withheld tips, and suggested that a recently-terminated manager was responsible. 

That manager was fired for allegedly adding tips to other people’s paychecks as well as their own, emails obtained by The City Reporter show. 

“I can’t tell you my level of disappointment that you would have a person leading people who wasn’t paying attention to the tips being paid out,” Sanders told The City Reporter. “It’s inexcusable.”

Sanders said he reported the problem to the Cyclones’ owner and fixed the issue himself. “I made sure each one of those people got tipped out for the time that they were there,” he said.

Still, pay stubs reviewed following the termination of the manager show that as recently as August 7, some employees have not received tips. In interviews, workers said they’ve heard nothing about back pay for lost gratuities from earlier in the season. Others received tips inconsistently — on some pay checks their wages included tips while others did not, records show. 

“Even if we’re getting our tips now, what about all of the other weeks?” one employee said, as she reviewed a pay stub on a recent afternoon in Coney Island.

The Brooklyn Cyclones, a minor league affiliate of the New York Mets, were purchased in 2024 by Diamond Baseball Holdings as part of an acquisition spree that saw the conglomerate snap up almost 50 minor league teams nationwide. The team’s home base is at Coney Island’s Maimonides Park. The company manages all aspects of the franchise, including ticketing and concessions.

“We take employee matters very seriously and have taken necessary steps to ensure employees have received their appropriate compensation in the wake of the transition between service providers,” said Lauren Flemming, a vice president of communications for Diamond Baseball Holdings. The company took over the concessions operation from a contractor in 2026. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has prioritized enforcing labor laws after campaigning on affordability issues. Last month, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reported that 70,000 delivery drivers have made an additional $104 million in tips this year after the city began enforcing a law that required delivery companies to present tip options at checkout. 

Minor League Spending Spree

Maimonides Park first opened in 2001 as part of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s pledge to bring professional baseball back to Brooklyn. After the park was built with $20 million in public funds, the Mets moved an affiliated minor league team from Massachusetts to Coney Island, renaming it the Cyclones after the famous rollercoaster nearby. The team has won six division titles and produced more than 30 MLB players.

A onetime part of Mets owner and billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen’s New York City empire, the team’s ownership changed hands in late 2024, when private equity firm Diamond Baseball Holdings acquired the Cyclones from Cohen Private Ventures. 

Established in 2021, the little-known firm has invested at least $2 billion in acquisitions and upgrades in the last five years, according to the Sports Business Journal. The company has picked up teams across the country including in San Jose, California; Corpus Christi, Texas; and Memphis, Tennessee. Diamond Baseball Holdings is in turn owned by Silver Lake Partners, a firm with a vast portfolio of technology and entertainment investments, including a share of Madison Square Garden and the WWE franchise.

The company’s strategy has included appealing to local governments to support renovations and new stadium constructions. Gov. Kathy Hochul allocated $6 million to Diamond Baseball Holdings in this year’s state budget to help rehabilitate the upstate stadium of another New York team, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies. 

The City Reporter reviewed public employment postings of the 49 teams acquired by Diamond Baseball Holdings. In many of its stadiums, the company still contracts with vendors to staff its concession stands, according to job posts. But in at least 15 of its stadiums, the company employs concession workers directly, the postings show. That includes Maimonides Park. 

Until last year, the park’s concession stands were operated by global food services company Aramark. Current workers said that while working for Aramark, they each had a unique login that allowed them to track the credit card tips earned during each shift. At the end of each week, employees knew exactly how much they had earned.

Tips make up a significant part of concessions workers’ earnings. One employee averaged more than $150 per week in additional tips under Aramark over a five-week period last year, worker bank statements show. The amount of tips the worker received last year was equal to more than 12 hours of hourly pay after taxes, or two to three shifts. 

Employees who worked at the stadium both last year and this year said that during a packed weekend game, their tips could sometimes reach hundreds of dollars in one night. A weeknight game may be sparsely attended but promotional nights — like Seinfeld night on August 1 that included a bobblehead giveaway and an Elaine Benes dance competition — can draw capacity crowds to the 7,000-seat stadium. 

Before the start of the 2026 season, Diamond Baseball Holdings emailed staff explaining that they would need to be rehired, since it was no longer contracting with Aramark. Returning workers described a cursory hiring process. Upon accepting the job, each worker signed an employment agreement that contained no mention of tips as well as an arbitration agreement, according to documents reviewed by the City Reporter. 

By signing the arbitration agreement, employees waived their right to a trial for any disputes over their employment, including their wages, the document shows. Instead, employees must settle any disputes individually and class action suits are prohibited. 

Labor advocates have repeatedly criticized these agreements as frequently exploitative of low-wage workers.

“Arbitration is never a worker-friendly forum,” said Carmela Huang, a senior attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. “It’s a way of really keeping workers from accessing their rights once they’ve been established.”

Under Diamond Baseball Holdings, managers told employees, rather than earning tips individually, gratuities would be pooled and distributed between the employees of each concession stand, according to interviews and emails. But cashiers can’t track the amount of tips their stand earns because everyone uses the same login. 

Still, for weeks, cashiers earned no tips on their paychecks at all, paystubs show. Under New York labor laws, when tips are paid to employees on a credit card, they must be paid out by the next paycheck. 

Even with the shift to pooled tips, the company must be able to clearly account for how they are divided between staff, said Richard Blum, an employment attorney with the Legal Aid Society. 

“They should be indicating to people what the total amount of tips was, and then each person should know how much they’re getting,” he said. 

As frustration grew among employees, some workers resorted to putting out empty soda cups to earn some extra cash, the City Reporter observed at several games. Occasionally, employees have warned customers not to bother tipping on their credit card, since the money wasn’t going to concessions staff. 

But more often, amid the fast pace of the concessions counters, employees didn’t have the opportunity to say anything.

“People just usually tap their card and hit the tip button real fast,” said one worker. “I don’t want to tell them that we’re not getting it after they’ve paid.”

While tips have begun appearing on some paychecks, the payments have been inconsistent, workers said. The City Reporter reviewed pay stubs from throughout the season that did not include any notation for tips at all. Even when tips began appearing on some employees’ pay stubs, on some occasions they totaled as little as $30 after several shifts. 

Manager Fired

In early July, Diamond Baseball Holdings accused a manager of misappropriating employee tips and terminated her, according to emails obtained by the City Reporter. 

“We conducted a thorough investigation and found evidence that you distributed tips to employees who were not clocked in during the relevant shifts and added tips to your own paychecks,” wrote Tara Tillman, a human resources director at Diamond Baseball Holdings. The July 6 email continued that “this constitutes theft and a serious breach of fiduciary responsibility incompatible with continued employment.”

The employee disputed the outcome of the investigation in a follow-up email, offering documentation to support her account. Tillman did not respond to additional questions from the manager about her termination, according to the emails. 

Diamond Baseball Holdings did not respond to detailed questions from the City Reporter about whether the company conducted any wider investigation into how the tips are distributed among stadium workers. It said it did not comment on individual personnel matters when asked about the termination of the manager. 

After the manager was fired, employees continued to question whether their tips were correct. On July 17, a cashier wrote to Sanders, the Cyclones’ director of food and beverage, to inquire about how the tips were distributed, emails show. She discovered her tips were significantly lower than one of her friends working at the same stand, according to pay stubs and interviews.

The director responded that the tips were pooled daily among the workers at each concession stand and did not include managers. He encouraged the employee to offer better service. 

“The stands with the least amount of drama and conflict tend to have higher tip pools,”  he wrote. 

In an interview with the City Reporter, Sanders reiterated that all tips have been paid out. “I know that I did what was right,” he said. “Once I got there, I made sure that that was no longer an issue.”

Still, not all employees are receiving tips as part of their wages. Two workers shared copies of their most recent pay stubs with the City Reporter, dated August 7. Although both employees had worked multiple shifts during that pay period, neither received any tips, records show.

“If workers have not been getting their tips, that’s clearly illegal under the New York Labor Law,” said Louis Pechman, a labor attorney who teaches a course on wage theft at Fordham Law School. 

Even though tips have been included on some employees’ pay checks, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the company is in compliance with the law, Pechman said. “The obvious concern is whether the workers receive back pay for tips that were misappropriated by management,” he said.   

In a second interview, on Wednesday evening, Sanders insisted that all eligible employees had received their tips.

The Cyclones’ season ends on September 6, with a home game at Maimonides Park. Concessions employees said they were already applying to better paying stadium gigs. The base pay for a cashier working at the U.S. Open is about $23 per hour. 

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A leading organization representing retired New York City civil servants living across the country is reviving a push that would block any future effort to shift the city’s 250,000 retirees and their dependents to a privatized Medicare plan.

The bill, which is being re-introduced by Councilmember Christopher Marte of Chinatown on Thursday, would prohibit the city from establishing any health care program that would “diminish” retirees’ current access to care. It specifically bars the city from raising costs for premiums, deductibles, co-insurance and copays, and from “compelling enrollment in any privatized forms of Medicare or plans with limited provider networks.”

The refreshed proposal makes no direct reference to Medicare Advantage, the controversial public-private alternative to traditional Medicare reviled by retirees who claim it offers inferior care. But it tees up yet another potential fight between the retirees, their unions and Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall.

Marte’s bill marks the third attempt by lawmakers to block attempts to change retirees’ city-funded healthcare, following unsuccessful efforts by Marte in 2024 and former Councilmember Charles Barron in 2023. 

The revamped bill is a “monumental” step for retirees, said Marianne Pizzitola, the head of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees.

Pizzitola said that she’s made peace with the bill not mentioning Medicare Advantage directly: “You can see it alludes to Medicare Advantage. It describes what Medicare Advantage does.”

“We’re hoping that the stars are aligned and that this is our year,” she said.

How the Mamdani administration will deal with the coming showdown is to be determined. 

While Mamdani campaigned on rejecting Medicare Advantage, the key architect of that deal, Robert Linn, a former city labor relations commissioner, was an advisor to his transition team. Pizzitola, the head of the retirees’ group, has complained on social media for more than a year that Mamdani and his surrogates have allegedly ignored repeated requests for meetings on this issue and others impacting her members.

The leaders of the city’s two largest public sector unions — District Council 37 and the United Federation of Teachers — fiercely opposed prior efforts by the retirees and the Council to stop the switch. The unions argued that any efforts by lawmakers to dictate the terms of their healthcare infringed on their collective bargaining rights.

Scorched Earth

Healthcare — both for retirees and working civil servants — is negotiated between the city and the Municipal Labor Committee, the consortium of the city’s 102 public sector unions. The group has been operating without an elected leader since its former head, Harry Nespoli of the sanitation workers union, retired May 2025. Henry Garrido, DC 37’s executive director, has been its de facto leader ever since.  

Marte told The City Reporter he’s been working closely with the council’s bill drafting unit on language that looks beyond the Medicare Advantage question to lock in retirees’ health benefits.

“We are being really careful about how we define ‘diminished’ healthcare,” Marte said. “And forcing someone to pay a higher copay, for example, could potentially make it more difficult for someone to get the care they need and that they were previously promised.”

“We need to make sure that the promise that was made to these retirees” — city-funded traditional Medicare and supplemental coverage — “stays forever,” added Marte.

The major unions are also poised to put up a fight. Last year, with Marte and other sponsors of the bill up for re-election, the UFT and DC 37 went scorched earth, rescinding endorsements for and campaigning against incumbents over their support for Marte’s bill. 

The Missing $600 Million 

Spokespersons for DC 37 and the UFT could not be immediately reached for comment about Marte’s new bill. 

The Medicare Advantage dates back to two mayoral administrations ago. In 2021, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and the Municipal Labor Committee announced a plan to switch the city’s 250,000 retirees to Medicare Advantage, a measure that was slated to save $600 million annually to help pay for other health benefits.

The plan prompted immediate and intense backlash from retirees and some rank-and-file union members who were near retirement, who claimed the program has a smaller network and higher out-of-pocket costs than traditional Medicare. 

After successfully defending the plan from the retirees’ legal challenges, then-Mayor Eric Adams ditched the effort last summer. The health fund the Medicare Advantage savings were meant to replenish is now insolvent, and the city Comptroller’s office recommended dissolving it entirely in a December 2025 audit.

Neither Mamdani nor city Comptroller Mark Levine, who was sworn in on January 1, have said how they plan to deal with the issue of health costs going forward. 

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The teachers union said it is considering a legal challenge on behalf of more than 180 retired paraprofessionals whose disability pensions were slashed after the city’s pension system found their payments had been miscalculated for years. 

Earlier this summer, the retirees received letters from the city’s Teachers’ Retirement System informing them of the mistake — and that, in addition to dramatically lowering their monthly payments, the pension system would claw back 1% from their checks going forward to make up for the error.

For some retired paraprofessionals, teacher aides who work with students with disabilities and special needs, that amounts to tens of thousands of dollars that many say they are simply unable to pay. The pension mishap has impacted 185 retirees so far, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

“To do this to us now, going after older people, it’s inhumane, it’s horrible and it’s cruel,” said Sheri Principato, 64, who retired in 2008 after she was attacked by a student.

Principato said her pension dropped to less than $10,000 a year. “Now my checks started bouncing. I had to dip into my savings.”

The teachers union threatened to sue. 

“We are currently exploring a legal challenge as well as changes through the legislature. TRS made the error and it went unchecked for 20 years,” Michael Sill, the UFT secretary, said in a statement. “Our paraprofessionals are the victims here and should not be the ones to pay for the agency’s error.”

The union has been dealing directly with TRS to address the pension reversal, which comes as the City Council approved a controversial $10,000 yearly supplemental payment for working paraprofessionals, who earn some of the lowest salaries in the Education Department. 

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Wednesday that his administration is monitoring the situation.

“The city is one of many parties when it comes to the stewarding of these pensions and, to my knowledge, the Law Department has come forward and identified this as a mistake that took place over many, many years,” Mamdani said at an unrelated press conference. “We are going to keep a close eye on it and make sure that we are following up.”

A Law Department spokesperson did not elaborate on Mamdani’s remarks. A spokesperson for city Comptroller Mark Levine, the steward of the city’s pension funds, referred questions to the Teachers’ Retirement System. 

After the publication of this story, TRS spokesperson Matt Laskowski said the miscalculations resulted from a “statutory misinterpretation.”

“We are required by law to correct calculation errors including the amount of future retirement benefit payments for these retirees,” he said. “TRS is doing everything possible within our legal responsibilities and fiduciary obligations to reduce the impact on our members.”

 The TRS affixed an appeal form to the letters they sent to affected retirees. 

The controversy dates to mid-June, when the retired paraprofessionals began receiving the letters from TRS informing them of their reduced payments. The Staten Island Advance first reported on the pension reversal.

“We understand that this news may be upsetting and that any reduction in monthly income can create financial concerns,” TRS wrote in a June 18 letter to Principato. “We sincerely apologize for our error and for the impact this correction may have on you.”

TRS informed Principato and others that their pensions would only be charged for overpayments made in the last three years instead of the full amount. “Like they’re doing me a favor,” she said. 

Anthony Delgardio, 50, retired from his job in a special education high school in Brooklyn more than 12 years ago after he was attacked by a student. He suffered a concussion and broken bones and continues to struggle with memory loss and mobility issues. 

His pension has been reduced to less than $1,000 a month — half of what he earned prior to the reversal — with TRS saying he now owes more than $38,000 in overpayments. Delgardio, who was living in Florida, says he moved in with his sister on Long Island to cut back on expenses and is contemplating selling his home. “I can’t even buy a toothbrush right now,” said Delgardio.

“I loved teaching, I felt like I had so much to offer,” he said. “And I lost everything.”

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The Mamdani administration and a major insurer agreed to pay up to $53 million to reimburse retired civil servants who said they’d been wrongly charged copays for medical visits. 

The settlement stems from a 2022 class-action lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan alleging the city improperly forced retirees to pay $15 copays for medical visits under EmblemHealth’s GHI Senior Care Plan, a supplemental benefit that covers costs that traditional Medicare does not pay.

In a phone interview Monday, the president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, which brought the lawsuit, praised the settlement — but said the retirees’ fight is far from over.

Marianne Pizzitola said her members are skipping oncology, occupational therapy and other treatments because of rising health costs. She invoked the image of a 100-year-old retired firefighter Dan Stromer, who lives on a $26,000 pension and whom she described as her organization’s oldest member.

“We need to roll back these regressive copays,” said Pizzitola. “I want what we had: traditional Medicare with the supplemental benefit.”

The settlement comes as Pizzitola’s group and its allies in the City Council seek to revive an effort to preserve traditional Medicare for the city’s retirees and block future efforts to raise their healthcare costs.

The agreement stems from copays that retirees were charged from Jan. 1, 2022 through Jan. 31, 2023.

Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the city Law Department, noted in a statement that the $15 copays were reinstated in January 2025. As part of what Paolucci called an “amicable settlement,” the Mamdani administration and EmblemHealth agreed not to increase the existing $15 Senior Care copay until 2028.

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A spokesperson for EmblemHealth said the insurer would inform its members about how to access their reimbursements. Up to 250,000 retirees could be eligible, according to the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees.

“We are pleased that a settlement has been reached that avoids litigation,” EmblemHealth spokesperson Alex Gomez said in a statement. “From this agreement, a process has been established to assist members with reimbursement and provide information on next steps.”

Pizzitola’s group first sued the city and EmblemHealth in November 2022, after the administration of then-Mayor Eric Adams for the first time implemented the $15 copay in January of that year. Retirees were previously not charged a copay.

In their original lawsuit, the retirees claimed the city was in violation of a 2022 court order not to impose additional costs on retirees for the supplemental benefit. That order also left the door open for the Adams administration to move forward with a controversial attempt to shift retirees to Medicare Advantage, so long as they could opt out of that switch and keep their current GHI Senior Care Plan.

The retirees’ organization engaged in a lengthy legal battle over the planned Medicare Advantage switchover anyway, arguing the privatized plan offered inferior care and the city was legally required to offer its retirees premium-free healthcare. Though the state’s highest court eventually sided with the Adams administration, he backed out of the switch last June. (As a candidate, Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to “reject” Medicare Advantage if elected.)

Mamdani has not said how he plans to address the botched Medicare Advantage plan, which was intended to help the taxpayers save $600 million annually. A December 2025 audit by the city comptroller’s office declared insolvent a key fund that paid insurance premiums for city workers, retirees and their dependents, in part due to the Medicare Advantage debacle.

Christopher Marte, a Democratic City Council member representing Manhattan’s Chinatown, cheered news of the settlement on Monday. He told The City Reporter he intends to revive a bill that would ban the city from forcing retirees to enroll in what he described as “diminished” privatized healthcare plans, including Medicare Advantage, or to increase their healthcare costs.

“We are being really careful on how we define ‘diminished’ healthcare,” Marte said. “Forcing someone to pay a higher copay potentially can make it more difficult for someone to get the care that they were previously promised, limiting how many times an individual goes to those appointments, what type of care they pursue.”

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New York’s courts are reckoning with a second consecutive summer of strikes by public defenders and legal staff at a constellation of private nonprofits who are represented by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325. 

The ongoing strikes at Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and Bronx Defenders are much smaller than the stoppages by seven organizations that rocked the court system last summer. But the strikes this summer have been markedly acrimonious, with no clear end in sight, and carry the potential to hobble criminal, family and housing courts in Manhattan and The Bronx. 

The nonprofits that provide free legal representation to low-income defendants rely significantly on taxpayer funds. This year, the City Council agreed to boost spending on organizations providing constitutionally mandated defense by approximately $32 million, an increase of about 12.5%. The union says that funding should more than cover its demands for raises and benefits at Neighborhood Defender Services and Bronx Defenders, but negotiations remain stalled.

This is familiar territory for staff at Bronx Defenders: They’re in the unprecedented position of going on strike for the second consecutive summer, after management proposed what the unions described as considerably higher raises for its staff attorneys than its social workers, some of whom are currently juggling caseloads of upwards of 50 clients.

On Tuesday, the Neighborhood Defender staff union filed formal charges to the National Labor Relations Board that, among other things, accused the organization’s leadership of offering “financial incentives” to employees who crossed the picket line. The organization’s unionized staff at its offices in San Marcos, Texas, and Detroit, Mich., who are also on strike, joined the complaint. 

Jesus Infante, NDS’ chief administrative officer, did not immediately respond to The City Reporter’s request for comment.

Talks resumed on Wednesday afternoon. Tony Chiarito, a Bronx Defenders spokesperson, said the organization is “hopeful that we can arrive at a fair and equitable contract that meets these realities.”

Though staff at both organizations share much of the same responsibilities and offer similar services, they have different issues at their respective bargaining tables. 

Key to the bargaining dispute at Neighborhood Defender Services is management’s proposal to for the first time force staff to contribute to healthcare costs; coupled with a proposal of yearly 1% cost-of-living increases, the union says management’s offer amounts to a pay cut.

The two sides have been bargaining regularly since their strike began on July 24, but are no closer to reaching a resolution on the issue of healthcare, said Jahnavi Bhaskar, a senior staff attorney and union member.

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“It is really the cost of living increase and the healthcare costs that they are trying to impose on our members that are the reason we are on strike,” she said. “All other issues are resolvable.”

Neighborhood Defender has said that its healthcare proposals are “highly competitive, both increase employee take-home pay, and both provide zero in-network deductibles and zero co-insurance healthcare options.”

Meanwhile, Bronx Defenders staff claim that management is proposing to decouple its attorney and social work staff into separate wage tiers — which would lock social work staff out of the substantial salary bump the organization is offering its lawyers.

Jessica Coffrin-St. Julien, an attorney with the organization’s immigration unit, said that Bronx Defenders’ offer amounted to a $10,000 starting salary bump for attorneys while cutting social workers out of the same perk. Under the current agreement, social workers and attorneys earn the same starting salary. Any changes to that arrangement, she said, is a nonstarter for the union.

“We understand the need to recruit and retain attorneys who can provide the best representation for our clients,” she said. “But we do not believe that should come at the expense of our social workers, who do life-saving work.”

The organization’s social workers, particularly in the immigration unit, work substantial case loads that are out of step with their legal peers. The immigration unit has more than two dozen attorneys on staff, each with about 10 to 12 cases; that same unit only has two social workers on staff, who each currently represent upwards of 50 of those clients. 

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Ashley Guzman and Denise Herrera, the immigration unit’s only two nonmanagement social workers, told The City Reporter that management’s proposal was demoralizing.

“I felt undervalued,” said Herrera. “It feels like management is trying to divide us, when we all deserve to be fully compensated.” Guzman added that among the organization’s total 30-plus social workers: “We’re all pretty united on the issue” of pay parity with attorneys. 

In a statement published when the strike began on July 27, Bronx Defenders executive director Juval Scott said the raises it proposed for social workers, which would bring their starting salaries to $88,100, would place those employees “well above the statewide average for their profession.” 

Scott also acknowledged the City Council’s funding boost, but said it “is not enough to meet every union demand.”

Leaders of Neighborhood Defender Services and Bronx Defenders have said senior, nonunion attorneys will pick up cases from striking attorneys. A spokesperson for the state Office of Court Administration said the agency is “closely” monitoring the situation.

“While we always hope that our courts and those they serve experience no disruptions, our entire judicial system remains committed to ensuring full operations should any arise,” the spokesperson, Al Baker, said in a statement. “For now, of course, the courts remain fully open.”

Two other legal organizations servicing low-income clients in Brooklyn and Queens courts ended a six-day strike last week after securing a deal on raises and benefits, capping a rocky two years.

The former head of Queens Defenders, Lori Zeno, on Tuesday was sentenced to 43 months in prison after pleading guilty in Brooklyn federal court in February to embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from the organization to fund luxury shopping sprees, vacations, and other freebies.

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The Justice Department announced a $3.85 million settlement with an embattled union and several of its affiliates over allegations they improperly pocketed millions in COVID-era hardship funds.

The International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades (IUJAT) and the Home Healthcare Workers of America (HHWA), as well as two other affiliates and the unions’ welfare fund, allegedly applied for millions in Paycheck Protection Program loans — even though they knew that their status as labor unions made them ineligible for the taxpayer-funded benefits, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York said Monday.

Many small businesses, including some nonprofit organizations, were eligible for the funds — but labor unions, despite their nonprofit status, were explicitly carved out of the program, which was meant to prevent widespread layoffs during the COVID lockdown.

But the journeymen’s union and its affiliates applied for the funds anyway, even over the objections of a federal representative who was in contact with their bank, according to DOJ. The unions unlocked more than $3.3 million in federal loans, which were eventually fully forgiven.

“The Paycheck Protection Program was created to help eligible small businesses weather the economic strain of the pandemic through forgivable loans,” U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement. “The defendants here applied for and received millions of dollars in taxpayer funds for which they were not eligible. This Office is committed to protecting taxpayer dollars and recovering public funds that flow to those who do not qualify.” 

Zachary Fink, a spokesperson for IUJAT and HHWA, said that the settlement “is not an admission of liability.”

“We chose to settle because it was the most responsible way to avoid the cost, distraction, and uncertainty of continued litigation,” Fink said. “We remain committed to preserving resources for our greatest asset, which is our membership.”

A Controversial Union

The Home Healthcare Workers of America is one of New York’s fastest-growing unions, its growth coinciding with a rapid expansion of Medicaid-funded care for the elderly and people with disabilities at home in New York.

A 2024 investigation by The City Reporter found that the organization circumvented union elections in order to fuel its massive growth; has direct ties with anti-regulation lobbying efforts; and that the family that controls it and its sister unions amassed substantial compensation packages off the dues of some of the lowest-paid workers in the city — with one union officer taking home $1.4 million a year. 

The Home Healthcare Workers’ parent union, the International Union of Journeymen and Allied Trades, and its affiliated unions are notorious within the labor movement for cutting in on other unions’ organizing drives and signing workers to management-friendly contracts. 

Established by Congress as part of a $5 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the Paycheck Protection Program, administered by the Small Business Administration, offered full forgiveness for eligible borrowers. The program has been rife with abuse and fraud since its inception in April 2020.

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More than a third of positions in the health department unit dedicated to testing the city’s water supply for the Legionella bacteria are unfilled, The City Reporter has learned, as health officials scramble to deal with a deadly Legionnaires’ outbreak that has so far killed three people and infected dozens. 

Only 35 water ecologists — scientists who respond to positive tests for harmful bacteria including Legionella, which causes Legionnaire’s disease — are currently on staff despite an approved headcount of 56, according to the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. 

The health department has struggled to hire the highly skilled scientists despite a $13 million budget boost to help the agency hire 23 new water ecologists. But months later a majority of those positions are still vacant: Fourteen are currently in the onboarding process while the agency works to recruit seven more.

Water ecologists are tasked with ensuring that building owners are complying with city law that requires them to submit monthly tests showing their water and cooling systems are free of the Legionella bacteria. The specialists also inspect cooling towers that have been reported to have harmful levels of the bacteria.

Despite the vacancies, the health department has completed more cooling tower inspections this year than last, said agency spokesperson Chantal Gomez.

“In the first six months of this year, we completed 1,582 cooling tower inspections, a 35% increase compared to the same period last year,” said Gomez, noting that the agency has sampled more than 180 cooling towers.

Early Monday evening, Health Commissioner Alister Martin announced a fourth death in the outbreak of Legionnaires’, a severe form of pneumonia, on the Upper East Side. Seven people died during an outbreak in Central Harlem last year. Older adults, smokers, and people with compromised immune systems are the most vulnerable to the disease.

“We are now starting to see newly diagnosed patient cases come down associated to the Upper East Side Legionnaires’ disease community cluster,” Gomez said. “This suggests that the city’s aggressive remediation and enforcement is working as intended, and that the source of the exposure has likely been resolved.” 

The disclosure of unfilled water ecologist jobs from the health department appears to validate warnings from the union representing the city’s public health professionals that the agency’s Legionnaires’ testing unit is critically understaffed. 

Last week, Local 3005 of District Council 37 called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to speed up the department’s recruitment and hiring. Union local president Meghan Peterson told The City Reporter existing staff is burnt out from dealing with multiple public health emergencies this summer.

“There is a serious shortage of workers in this title due to low pay and poor working conditions,” the union wrote in a July 16 press release, referring to the water ecologists. “The worker shortage limits the city’s ability to adequately address this crisis.” 

Health department officials told the City Council last September that the agency needed more inspectors to strengthen oversight after the fatal Legionnaires’ outbreak in Central Harlem last year. In a hearing before the Council’s health committee on March 19, the head of the agency’s environmental health division testified that the headcount boost authorized in the city’s budget would help control the next outbreak.

“The additional staffing that we got will enable us to conduct the annual inspection and any follow-up that’s needed of every cooling tower in the city, which, as you know, has been our goal,” Corinne Schiff, the department’s deputy commissioner for environmental health, told lawmakers in March. “So, we’re very pleased about that… We are working very quickly to hire.”

Last week, The City Reporter revealed that hundreds of landlords and building managers had failed to submit required Legionella tests of their air conditioning cooling towers to the Department of Health since at least last year, and that 388 showed no record of submitting any test results at all.

New York’s staffing crisis is years in the making: the civil service exam process can add months or years to hiring new staff, and the city under Mayor Eric Adams bypassed an effort by Gov. Kathy Hochul that would help speed up hiring, New York Focus reported.

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The union representing the city’s public health professionals and scientists says that units dedicated to testing the city’s water supply are critically understaffed — complicating New York’s ability to control a Legionnaires’ outbreak that has so far killed three people and spread to the air conditioning cooling towers of at least 76 Manhattan buildings.

Members of Local 3005 blame the staff shortages on low salaries and burnout that make it difficult to recruit and retain specialists, such as water ecologists, who respond to positive tests for harmful bacteria including Legionella, which causes Legionnaire’s disease. The local represents 1,300 scientists and specialists across the city health department and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The current vacancy rate at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is 8.53%, which is higher than the overall rate of 5.79% across all city agencies, according to data from the city comptroller’s office. Four positions currently open on the health department’s jobs portal list salary ranges from $52,800 to $70,700 for “experienced” water ecologists. The health department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“There is a serious shortage of workers in this title due to low pay and poor working conditions,” the union wrote in a press release on July 16. “The worker shortage limits the city’s ability to adequately address this crisis.” 

By Sunday the health department had confirmed three deaths linked to the Legionnaire’s outbreak. The victims were not identified. 

Meghan Peterson, the president of Local 3005, says the union will call on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to fill the critical workforce gaps.

Disease, Smoke and Parasites

She said her members have been hammered this summer by multiple public health emergencies, from extreme heat and the Canadian wildfire smoke, to outbreaks of Legionnaires’ disease and the cyclosporiasis parasite.

“We have just been getting hit with thing after thing, and everyone is stretched thin and burnt out,” she said. 

The local is in the middle of negotiating its first agreement since 2017 governing quality-of-life and other issues specific to its workforce of scientists and engineers.

The collective bargaining agreement between the city and District Council 37 — which governs wages, benefits and other major issues impacting the union’s 100,000 members, including Local 3005 — expires in November. But DC 37’s individual locals are also covered by smaller agreements known as “unit contracts,” side deals that address unique needs of hundreds of different job titles across the city’s civil service.

Among the local’s demands: flexible work schedules, “safe and comfortable” office temperatures, and better overtime compensation to address backlogs at the medical examiners’ office. The union also wants the city to speed up its recruitment and hiring process; Peterson says it can take up to a year to hire at the health department. 

In a press release ahead of a rally and press conference scheduled for Monday, Local 3005 also referenced the poor state of the health department’s facilities across the city, such as broken A/C units amid the heat wave.

The agency’s headquarters at 125 Worth St. drew negative attention earlier this year by a mouse and roach infestation, but Peterson told The City Reporter that the pests are now under control.

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