Gov. Hochul Prioritizes Profits Over People

In the past month, Gov. Kathy Hochul has shown Black, Indigenous and working immigrant communities that her leadership of New York State will resemble the corrupt politics of her predecessor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The reality is far from the “new era for New York” that the governor spoke about in January. Rather, Gov. Hochul has clarified her support for wealthy donors and multi-billionaires like Buffalo Bills owner Terry
Pegula. 

Instead of allocating money to meet people’s needs, the governor has closed a deal to spend close to $600 million in public funds on multi-billionaire Pegula's sports stadium for the Buffalo Bills. A vanity project funded with money collected after freezing the bank accounts of the Seneca Nation. It’s also recently come out that Gov. Hochul’s husband, Bill Hochul, is an executive of the company which has concession rights to the Bills’ current stadium.

Gov. Hochul is positioning her legacy to be one of personal profit over working people’s needs—having rolled back bail reforms, interfered with the Seneca Nation’s sovereignty, excluded undocumented young people from childcare coverage, excluded immigrants under 65 from health care coverage, and reaffirming her anti-immigrant history. 

Despite Gov. Hochul and the state legislature’s praise of working class immigrant communities’ contributions to New York, she and other state lawmakers have not allocated a cent to the Excluded Workers Fund in this year’s New York State budget, leaving behind 175,000+ excluded, essential immigrant workers who have survived more than two years of constant crises with little to no relief.

There has been no substantial recovery from this pandemic. To this day, thousands of workers have been left behind by New York State without any access to reliable financial relief. These are the same workers who in 2020 risked their health and wellbeing to survive because there was no social safety net in place. 

Domestic workers, restaurant workers, street vendors, delivery workers, construction workers are still risking their lives everyday. With new waves of COVID every few months, they are the first workers to fall ill before a spike. Black, brown, indigenous, immigrant and working class women, girls and families bear a disproportionate impact of these crises. Gov. Hochul has disregarded all of these communities despite her claims to champion a “new era of
change.”

Workers have not settled for symbolic gestures. In the past year and a half people have organized and fought for their survival, dignity, and to have their basic human needs met. South Asian and Indo Caribbean working class immigrant communities took to the streets alongside our Black and brown immigrant siblings to shut down bridges, march from NYC to Albany, and engaged directly with elected officials to make our demands heard! 

Yet, Gov. Hochul and the majority of New York legislators not only neglected the interest of working class communities but actively sold us out. The budget includes some funds for Coverage for All, which was supposed to create a state-funded health care option for undocumented New Yorkers. However, the governor initially posed Coverage for All, the Excluded Workers Fund, and housing vouchers as competing interests. And in the end, she ended up gutting the proposals and excluding most
immigrants from the health plan anyway. In other words, she and other elected officials failed to respond to calls to fill major gaps in our social safety net, and maliciously pitched proposals against each other. Consequently, our state leaders have  failed to ensure the full recovery and survival of our communities. 

Excluded Workers have put their bodies on the line to make the need of an entire population of people visible. Now, we make the neglect visible. Working class lives are not pawns for political games. And though those who benefit from our labor may treat us as such, we are neither disposable nor invisible. We are fighting for what is rightfully ours. 

We’ll continue to fight in the face of Gov. Hochul’s intentional neglect of our working immigrant communities. Join excluded workers in the fight to fully #FundExcludedWorkers and pass #ExcludedNoMore! Get organized, join an organization, and build the power we need to win.