Chamber statement on new bill to raise minimum wage to $30/hour
On the Introduction of Int. 0757-2026, the New York City Minimum Wage Act
“The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce is deeply concerned by the introduction of Int. 0757-2026, which would nearly double New York City’s minimum wage to $30 per hour. This is a level no city in America has ever attempted. We urge the City Council to reject this legislation and pursue a serious, evidence-based approach to improving the lives of working New Yorkers.
There is a painful irony in the fact that today’s rally was held on the steps of City Hall, where more than 40 percent of the surrounding storefronts currently sit vacant. Those empty windows are not abstract statistics. They are the visible evidence of what happens when the cost of doing business in this city becomes unsustainable.
Let us be clear about what this bill proposes: a local minimum wage of $30 per hour for large employers by 2030, and $29 per hour for small businesses by 2031, with annual inflation-indexed increases and no ceiling thereafter. For a city that already carries among the highest commercial rents, energy costs, insurance premiums, and regulatory burdens in the country, this is not a raise for workers. It is a closing notice for businesses.
The Manhattan Chamber of Commerce represents more than 125,000 businesses, the vast majority of them small, immigrant-owned, minority-owned, and women-owned. These businesses do not have the capacity to absorb a 70 percent increase in their base labor cost over five years. They are the restaurant owners, dry cleaners, and shopkeepers who make up the actual fabric of our economy, operating on margins so thin that one bad quarter can mean permanent closure. This bill does not lift them up; it threatens to put them out of business and completely eliminate their employees’ jobs.
We share the goal of a city where working people can live with dignity. But the path to that goal requires a thriving private sector. A $30 minimum wage imposed by local fiat—without precedent, without a meaningful economic impact study, and without serious consultation with the business community—is not a policy. It is a dangerous gamble with the livelihoods of millions of New Yorkers.
New York City is already losing businesses at an alarming rate, and commercial vacancy rates remain stubbornly high. The answer is not to add the single largest cost increase in the history of the city’s private sector. The answer is to make New York a place where businesses can afford to operate and where workers have an expanding universe of opportunity.
We call on the City Council to slow down, commission an independent economic impact analysis, and engage the full spectrum of stakeholders before advancing legislation of this magnitude. New York City deserves better than gesture politics. It deserves governance that actually protects its economic future.”