‘Time to Seal the Deal,’ Struggling NYC Council Staffers Tell OLR
ALE President Matt Malloy [front row left] and Bargaining Committee member Natalie Meltzer [second from right] help lead a union rally on the steps of City Hall this week. Photos/Steve Wishnia
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By Steve Wishnia
Ninety-six staffers in the City Council’s central office who joined the Association of Legislative Employees late last year are in negotiations demanding that they be added to the union’s contract covering about 500 other Council staff.
The 96 include policy analysts, legislative counsels, data scientists, and web developers in the Council’s Legislative Division. They have received minimal or no pay increases for the past several years, ALE President Matt Malloy told a rally on the City Hall steps Sept. 15, while their supervisors got a 20% raise in 2024.
“It is time for the City Council and the Office of Labor Relations to deliver a fair contract for these workers,” he said.
“If we want all this talent to stay on the Council, we need to recognize the value of the work they do,” senior web developer Enan Rahman told the rally.
“I love my job. I don’t love watching my colleagues leave. What I really don’t love is making roughly 50 percent of what the people who directly supervise me make,” said legislative counsel Johari Frasier. He’s on the staff of the Council’s Government Operations and Criminal Justice committees, which oversee agencies such as the Department of Corrections and the Board of Elections.
“If we didn’t have these workers, the Council couldn’t do its job,” Councilmember Kayla Santosuosso (D-Brooklyn) told the rally. Like many other members, she previously worked as a Council staffer, in her case for Council Member Justin Brannan of Brooklyn.
Natalie Meltzer, a member of ALE’s bargaining committee, said her job as a policy analyst is to ensure that the Council’s policy initiatives are effective. As Councilmembers come and go—they’re term-limited to eight or ten years—it’s important to maintain that institutional knowledge, she added.
“If we want all this talent to stay on the Council, we need to recognize the value of the work they do,” senior web developer Enan Rahman told the rally.
The ALE’s current contract, the union’s first, was agreed to in April 2024, and covers about 500 people, mostly staff for individual members, and some financial analysts. Malloy told reporters after the rally that a first contract is a good time to win big increases for workers who have long had disproportionately low pay, as when the Office of Labor Relations renews contracts, it’s generally oriented toward having a similar pattern across city agencies. The 2024 ALE contract raised the minimum salary for legislative aides from $30,000 to $55,000 a year.
City Council members gave themselves a nearly 20% pay hike this past summer, boosting their annual salaries from $148,500 to $175,500. They last had a raise in 2016.
Malloy says he feels like the Council and OLR are negotiating in good faith, but “it’s time to wrap this up. We want to seal the deal.”
The next session is scheduled for October.