In 2026, New York still pays certain workers pennies an hour — and the system that allows it was designed in the shadow of slavery. It’s time for New York State to end these practices, once and for all.
After Emancipation, newly freed Black workers were locked into no-wage and low-wage labor. In the hospitality industry, employers refused to guarantee wages, shifting responsibility to tips from white customers. The subminimum wage for tipped workers was not an oversight — it was a deliberate structure, designed to deny Black workers a guaranteed wage at all.
Similarly, the line from slavery to today’s brutal and exploitative prison labor system is direct and clear. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery with one exception: for those convicted of crimes. Even as New York was gradually abolishing slavery, it was building a replacement. The “Auburn System,” pioneered at Auburn Prison more than 200 years ago, forced incarcerated New Yorkers to work for little or no pay to produce goods sold for profit.
Fast-forward to today where, of the 32,000 people currently incarcerated in New York, more than three in four are people of color and half are Black. Incarcerated workers make furniture, eyeglasses, and other goods sold to state and local government entities. Between 2010 and 2021, New York’s prison manufacturing enterprise sold more than $545 million worth of goods and services. The workers who produced that value earned, at most, 65 cents an hour — with the vast majority earning less than 33 cents. Wages for New York’s incarcerated workers have not increased in more than 30 years.
One of us knows this system from the inside. When Donna was incarcerated, she earned 25 cents an hour. That was not a wage — it was a reminder that her labor had no value. She could not send money home to her daughter. She could not afford basic hygiene products — the small necessities that preserve a sense of self. That 26 cents an hour made it impossible to be a provider, a parent, a person with responsibilities beyond the walls.
If we expect incarcerated people to take responsibility, learn skills, and prepare for reentry, then we must also value their labor. A living wage inside facilities is not charity — it is a commitment to dignity, family stability, and true rehabilitation. That commitment should not disappear because someone is serving time.
In the same vein, tipped workers can be paid a subminimum base wage and told to rely on customer generosity to survive. According to One Fair Wage research, nearly 318,000 tipped restaurant workers in New York earn just 67 percent of the state minimum wage before tips — between $10.35 and $11 an hour. Most make roughly $18,625 a year. Over a third of tipped workers in New York City live at or near the poverty line — more than twice the rate for non-tipped workers. Nearly one in five relies on food stamps.
This causes real harm to Black New Yorkers. One Fair Wage’s February 2026 report found that Black women in tipped jobs earn just 63 cents for every dollar white men in the same industry make. In New York, Black women tipped workers earn nearly $8 per hour less than their white male counterparts, a disparity 60 percent larger than the national average.
When Black women — who are disproportionately primary earners and caregivers — are paid less by design, family stability is undermined. The result is that full-time work produces and continues poverty — by design, not by accident.
In prisons, the harm compounds. The state’s prison industry program, Corcraft, generates roughly $50 million a year in revenue. During COVID-19, incarcerated workers produced 11 million bottles of hand sanitizer — without protective equipment, and barred from using the product they made. Families on the outside absorb the cost: One in three is driven into debt by supporting an incarcerated loved one, while commissary prices have surged and wages remain frozen at rates set in 1993.
New York likes to see itself as a leader on racial justice, but the consequences of these subminimum wages are not symbolic — they are measurable. Workers with disabilities can still be paid less than the minimum wage under outdated carve-outs that assume diminished value.
These systems look different, but they share a common logic inherited from the same source: Some people’s labor does not deserve full pay. It’s time to get rid of all of these subminimum wages in New York, because no human is subhuman.
We are not asking New York to remember slavery as history. We are asking New York to stop profiting from its design.
That is why Senator Jackson has introduced the One Fair Wage Act (S.415A) in the State Senate: to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers and ensure every worker in New York receives the full minimum wage, with tips on top. In the Assembly, Assemblymember Demond Meeks has introduced the Living Wage For All Act (A.10507), which would raise New York’s minimum wage to $30, end all subminimum wages — including for incarcerated workers and workers with disabilities, and index wages to inflation. Together, these bills would dismantle a pay structure rooted in slavery and replace it with one grounded in dignity.
Along with 13th Forward, the NAACP, One Fair Wage, and the growing statewide Living Wage For All coalition, we are calling on the New York Legislature to eliminate all subminimum wages. Not gradually. Not with carve-outs. For all workers.
New York cannot lead on racial justice while maintaining pay structures that were built to deny it.
Donna Hylton is a criminal justice reform advocate, author of “A Little Piece of Light,” and founder of A Little Piece of Light, a nonprofit serving women and girls affected by incarceration.
State Sen. Robert Jackson represents the 31st Senate District in Manhattan and is the lead sponsor of the One Fair Wage Act.