Forbes

New York City Council will introduce legislation Wednesday requiring bonuses for workers at hospitals, grocery stores and other essential businesses; if it passes, it will be the largest-scale effort in the country to provide hazard pay to frontline workers during the pandemic.

The bill will require essential businesses with at least 100 employees to pay workers premiums per shift based on how long they work.

If it becomes law, a frontline worker would get $75 per shift longer than eight hours, $60 for working between four and eight hours and $30 for shifts shorter than four hours.

The hazard pay measure is part of a package of legislation deemed the essential workers “bill of rights,” which also will require essential businesses of any size to provide just cause for firing employees.

The package also includes bills that would extend paid sick leave to gig workers and extend Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s moratorium on evictions, which is due to expire in June, as late as April, 2021.

After it is introduced at the Council’s meeting today, the legislation will have a hearing next week and could become law in May, says Council Member Ben Kallos, who sponsored the just cause bill.

VIPs from corporate business, politics, VC and academia spoke and were honored during the program, among them Sanford Weill, Andrew Tisch, Ronald Lauder, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, Benchmark venture partner Scott Belsky and NYC Council Member Ben Kallos (who coined the term Silicon Island for the new campus overlooking central Manhattan and Long Island City).

Now all it takes is critical mass for the new campus to take off and really become a Silicon Island!

At Cornell Tech (a joining of Cornell University and Technion in an initiative led by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to create the campus as a springboard by NYC tech), the focus was on how the institution's focus on research, entrepreneurship and intellectual rigor will have an economic impact on New York City. 

The Healthy Happy Meals bill, proposed by NYC council member Benjamin Kallos, would require that fast-food meals marketed with toys or other merchandise meant for kids include a serving of fruit, vegetables or whole grain, with no more than 35% of calories coming from fat. Furthermore, the meals must contain fewer than 10% of calories from saturated fat or added sugar, and they can’t have more than 600 milligrams of sodium.

To determine whether those changes would affect how children eat, a team of researchers from New York University analyzed receipts from 358 purchases made at McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s restaurants in the NYC area. The purchases included 422 meals for children. Not surprisingly, the NYU researchers found that 98% of the meals did not meet the proposed guidelines, according to the paper, published online by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. On average, adults purchased 600 calories per child, and 36% of those calories came from fat.