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After months of citywide debate, amended bills and two lengthy legislative hearings, city council members officially passed the so-called living wage bill by a 45 to 5 vote. But not before one final bit of drama.

The city council is expected to pass a living wage bill Monday. The measure would require some developers doing city-subsidized projects, to pay their workers at least $10 an hour, plus benefits.

What do you think is a livable wage for NYC?

As expected, Mayor Bloomberg vetoed the "prevailing wage" bill passed by the City Council last month. And he declared his intent to veto the so-called living wage bill that will likely pass the City Council next week. The City Council, meanwhile, says it will override the mayor's vetoes on both counts.

This week, the Partnership for New York City, a prominent business group pulled its support for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's living wage bill. The group and the speaker evidently didn't see eye-to-eye on granting the mayor latitude (known as an "executive waiver") to exempt some projects from the higher wage requirement.

Letitia James, City Council Member from District 35 in Brooklyn, discusses the living wage bill, paid sick leave and other City Council issues. 

Below are the Speaker's remarks announcing the agreement. Additional reactions are included after:

For the past year, we have had a debate in the City Council about how to bring more jobs to New York in a way that raises salaries and does not stagnate job growth.

Some have said we should do that by letting the market run its course. Some have said that we should do it by replicating what many major cities in America have done: place a wage requirement on any jobs that are developed through public subsidies. Others have said we should go a step further and put that same requirement on tenants of developments that are built with public subsidies.

I want to thank everyone who has offered support, opposition, data, agreement and disagreement on all three of these perspectives. This has been a worthy debate.

There is nothing more important for government right now than the work of creating and retaining the best jobs we can.

A City Council stalemate over a so-called living wage bill has ended with a deal that could raise the pay for several hundred workers a year at city-subsidized developments.

We'll have details as they come in.

Colby Hamilton / WNYC

After Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City speech at Morris High School auditorium this afternoon, elected officials began giving their post-speech reaction on the floor of the emptying auditorium. The mayor’s hard-charging education plans, a new chance for developing the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, and the Mayor’s support for a minimum wage increase were at the top of lawmaker’s minds.

Most of the likely mayoral candidates on hand lined up against the Mayor's educational plans. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was the exception.

“I think the mayor's five point educational plan is very aggressive,” said Quinn. Education dominated the speech, even as the tone of the Mayor’s speech also turned aggressive towards the teacher’s union. The Speaker went on to say that it's clear this will be a "signature issue over the next 12 months."

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio saw the Mayor’s aggressiveness towards teachers was more like picking a fight.

“A lot of the content he raised was worth looking at and talking about,” de Blasio said. “It’s right to talk about how we make evaluations better, how we make the tenure system better. But why not talk about doing it cooperatively?”

Comptroller John Liu also took issue with the Mayor’s tone towards teachers.

“It was apt that he spent such a large amount of time at the beginning talking about the challenges we still face in our public schools,” Liu said. “[It was] somewhat surprising he spent a good deal of time criticizing teachers and almost throwing down the gauntlet against our teachers.”

The mayor’s education comments weren’t the only hot topics after the speech. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said the Mayor’s support of a state proposal to increase the minimum wage was a step in the right direction.

“The minimum wage proposal is not enough to solve the problems of working families in New York City, but it's a good start,” Stringer said. The minimum wage support and the restart of plans for the Kingsbridge Armory left some with the impression the Mayor was undercutting arguments in the living wage fight. The Borough President said he hoped that wasn’t the case.

“I hope this is a larger strategy to give relief to working people in this city,” Stringer said. “There has to be much more of a concerted effort to deal with the fundamental issues impacting working people.”

Another Borough President, Bronx BP Ruben Diaz, Jr., who had been central to the living wage fight that scuttled the first Kingsbridge development plan, said he didn’t see, nor support, a Kingsbridge proposal that didn’t contain a living wage.

“If you're a developer and you know of the history of the Armory, are you really going to put in a proposal on this [request for proposal] without a living wage,” Diaz asked. “It probably wouldn't be the smartest thing to do."

Updated with additional statements below.

As the New York Times reported today, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has thrown his support behind the contentious living wage bill sitting stalled in the City Council. In a letter to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio said the legislation was need because "we have not done enough to grow the prospects of all New Yorkers."

"Our city is in the midst of a prolonged economic crisis that has battered the middle class, driven down wages and led to unacceptably high rates of unemployment. Underlying these problems is a rising income inequality that threatens our social fabric and economic future," de Blasio said in the letter. "New York City must move aggressively to address rising income inequality—and I firmly believe that the Living Wage bill represents one of the most immediate and important steps our City can take to do this."

The move puts de Blasio on firm ground in the debate over the bill--and on the side of labor, whose backing he courts in the coming mayoral race--while further boxing in Speaker Quinn, who has not taken a position on the bill. However, the legislation cannot move to the floor without her consent, where it will likely pass. The Speaker has positioned herself as the candidate friendly to business interests in the city, which observers believe are pressuring her to keep the bill from becoming law.

Political consultant Michael Tobman, of the New York City-based firm Hudson TG, saw the letter reflecting three current political realities in the early stages of the 2013 mayoral battle.

On more quick Quinnipiac poll finding.

By a ratio of nearly 3-to-1, voters across all political affiliations support the passage of the living wage bill that's been proposed in the City Council.

"True to its image as a liberal town, New York gives big support to the City Council plan to require a 'Living Wage' by companies that do business with the city. Does the government have an obligation to mandate a living wage?  Overwhelmingly, voters say yes,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, in the release about the poll.

It turns out the current battle over a living wage bill that would raise the pay of workers in a select number of city-sponsored work environments is old hat. According to Doug Turetsky of the city's Independent Budget Office, New York already has living wage legislation on the books that, thanks to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, goes far beyond what's currently being proposed:

Amid the uproar during the past few weeks over the proposed living wage law there’s one important point that you might have missed: the city already has a living-wage law. Its rules cover thousands of workers employed under more than $1 billion worth of contracts with the city.

In fact, New York City had one of the first living-wage laws in the country, though the city’s first bill covered just a couple thousand workers. Passed in 1996, over the veto of then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the legislation was championed by advocacy organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation as well as local unions. It required that private firms contracting with the city to provide food services, security guards, cleaners, and temporary office workers pay their employees a living wage that ranged at the time from about $7.25 to $12 an hour.

The number and type of workers covered by the city’s living-wage rules expanded in 2002 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a law that extended living-wage provisions to home health care and child care workers whose agencies had contracts with the city. The Brennan Centerat New York University estimated that under the new requirements the pay of 50,000 home health care workers would rise immediately and later the pay of up to 9,000 child care workers. Shortly after the law went into effect, Steve Malanga wrote ruefully in City Journal, “Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, New York will now have the largest number of workers covered by any living-wage law in the nation.”

Read the rest of the blog entry here.

Friends and foes of a local living wage bill packed a New York City Council committee hearing Tuesday to examine the merits of a revised version of the legislation.

As the city council revives the debate over a living wage bill on Tuesday, more than a thousand people packed Riverside Church Monday night to show their support for the measure.

Note: I originally stated the hearing was being held today--it's being held tomorrow at 1 pm. My apologies.

As WNYC's Yasmeen Khan reports, the City Council today is holding a hearing on the revised living wage bill which would require certain city-connected work offer a starting wage of $10 an hour, with benefits.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and leaders in the business community have been vocal opponents of the bill, saying it will make business in the city prohibitively expensive. But proponents of the measure are making their voices heard ahead of today's hearings. Last Friday, one of the city's largest union, SEIU 1199, came out in support of the revised measure.

"There’s no denying that low-income people and the unemployed in New York City are hurting, and this legislation strikes the right balance between incentivizing growth and development in the hardest-hit communities and ensuring that the jobs created lift up people in those communities,” said George Gresham, the union's president, said in a statement.

But it's not just labor backing the bill. Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities, has been announced as a speaker at a rally in support of the bill tonight at Riverside Church in Manhattan.

The New York Times over the weekend spoke with Sullivan:

"We’re going to speak about how this economic crisis continues to hurt everybody in society, particularly the poor,” the monsignor said. “We need to make sure there are decent jobs with decent wages.”

The single biggest question surrounding the legislation is whether or not Council Speaker Christine Quinn will allow the bill to come to the floor for a vote where it would almost certainly pass.

The situation puts Quinn in a bind. Support the measure and risk losing the backing of the business community ahead of the 2013 mayoral contest. Deny labor the vote it wants on the legislation, and their support for her candidacy in the all-important Democratic primary would be in serious doubt. This could ultimately turn out to be the single most important action of Quinn's 2013 campaign.

Council Speaker Quinn, right, with members of the DUMBO BID (Courtesy of the NYC Council / William Alatriste)

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn stopped by WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show to talk about, among other things, the city’s economy. She had addressed the Association for a Better New York before coming on the show on the issue.

But listening to it, Quinn also sounded a lot like a candidate trying to provide a vision for the city she hopes to run. The big vision discussion tied Quinn’s view of how the city should help support job growth to Occupy Wall Street.

“The larger, more important issue is a loss of hope,” Quinn said, explaining the core of what she believes is driving the protestors.

She went on to say that hope, which had been fueled by the belief in the American Dream, was in danger. “People are worried, really on all sides of the political spectrum, that that is slipping away.”

Her solution: “[T]o do what we can to create employment opportunities at all different levels of the education and economic spectrum.”

The current mayor couldn’t have said it better himself. Her focus on bolstering technology growth in the city, through new educational opportunities and in fields once thought the domain of Silicon Valley, sounds like the blueprint Mayor Bloomberg has been following for years. “We have to work hard to make New York City the tech capital of the world,” Quinn said, sounding remarkably Bloombergian.

EDC released a statement in response to the criticism it's received over a new report on a proposed living wage bill. The statement:

It should come as no surprise that some stakeholders are disappointed with the findings, but the opponents seem to be denying the basic economic fact that when something -- even labor -- costs more, people buy less of it. Higher wages would mean fewer jobs, particularly in a down economy.

One of the main criticisms of the report doesn't reflect any of the proposed changes to the original legislation. So far, EDC hasn't responded specifically to those comments.

Comptroller John Liu is weighing in on what's amounting to a controversial report produced by the city's Economic Development Corporation that called the positive affects of a proposed mandatory wage bill for city-sponsored development projects "negligible."

The city council has supported a bill, with modifications, that labor allies are pushing for the council to pass. The mayor has steadfastly opposed any living wage legislation.

Today, labor supportive groups have been pushing back on the report, calling it flawed and dubious. So is Liu, who has close ties to labor:

This million dollar report is so flawed it’s not worth the bandwidth for a download. The EDC’s claim that a living wage kills jobs shows just how distorted the agency’s perspective has become. The proposed living wage would be a requirement on new projects that are heavily subsidized by taxpayers and would create new jobs that pay decent wages. The claim of job losses is rhetoric at its worst.