The first new municipal union in New York in over 50 years just became the first legislative union in the city to ever ink a contract.
ALE, the Association of Legislative Employees, broke more historic ground when it reached a deal with the Council that will boost the pay of hundreds of Council staffers, provide job security enforcement and add paid time off for overtime hours. On April 13 its members approved the contract with a resounding 95% in favor.
“We’ve had to build a coalition of council staff, elected officials and labor unions to stand with us to say that we also deserve fair pay and rights on the job and a collective bargaining agreement. I think at the center of it is the collective democratic efforts of rank and file members,” said ALE President Daniel Kroop, a financial analyst for the City Council.
The contract is a powerful milestone for an independent labor union that many established unions initially did not think was possible. The members of ALE ultimately decided to create a new union from scratch in part because labor unions they approached in the early phases of their formation expressed reservations about its legality and about how advocating for legislative staff could cause tensions with the legislators whom they regularly lobby.
On the other hand, there are real incentives to this model: ALE’s independence means much lower dues and less bureaucracy for its members, Kroop said. Its ambition has paid off. The contract secures a starting salary for councilmember aides at $55,000, which will rise to $58,500 in August 2025 — a sharp increase from the current floor of $30,000.
One of the Council’s community liaisons, who was hired at a salary of $45,000, described how he realized how much he needed the increase in the contract when he was organizing an event to support constituents who are rent-burdened.
“That’s me. The person they said was rent-burdened was me,” said the staffer, who asked to remain anonymous. “This contract is really huge for someone like me who has a daughter who needs to move up in a bigger apartment space.”
Kroop said that he aims to push that salary up even further in future negotiations. “We need everybody to get higher wages to stop the exodus of people of color, black and brown workers from the city, who are being priced out, other workers who are being priced out and folks who are working multiple jobs,” he said
Another key part of the agreement establishes a “just cause” standard that stops staffers from being fired without a reason, and outsources enforcement of this new rule to an independent arbitrator, so that the Council is not adjudicating its own grievances.
The contract tackles unpaid overtime by creating a comp time policy, so that the time that staffers often work outside normal hours at community boards or precinct councils are transferable to up to 13 days of paid time off.
With its contract ratified, the union can focus on expanding a bargaining unit that now numbers just under 400. This past November, a supermajority of legislative staff signed union cards in favor of joining, and the union is hoping that the Council voluntarily recognizes them so that it can begin ushering in over 80 more members, and bargaining for them as well.
As they grow, Kroop wants to center the trajectory of the union on the concerns of its rank-and-file to avoid a top-down model of leadership that can come as a side effect of bureaucracy.
“I think this is a new frontier of union organizing,” Kroop said.
