* Service workers and cyclists biked from mid-Manhattan to Long Island City on Friday afternoon to call on developer Cornerstone TF to allow workers to unionize in its buildings across the city. The rally was organized by SEIU 32BJ, which claims Cornerstone is blocking workers from organizing in Long Island City. The bicycle ride, dubbed by organizers as the “Ride for the American Dream” was intended to emphasize the union’s efforts to go green and to shed light on all of the environmentally friendly training that workers were losing by being denied the right to organize, said Shirley Aldebol, 32 BJ’s New York’s commercial district leader. Joined by Council Members Letitia James, Gale Brewer and Steve Levin, activists rallied outside of Cornerstone’s Manhattan headquarters before the ride. Brewer, who said that a new Cornerstone building in her district should be a 32BJ building, noted that working with 32 BJ would benefit both workers and the developer. “Cornerstone, understand that if you participate and work with the union you have a better worker, a happier worker, a better trained worker,” she said. “It makes no sense not to work with 32BJ.” After Queens Community Board 2 passed a resolution supporting the workers at the Long Island City in May, a Cornerstone executive wrote a letter to the board saying that the developer offered better benefits to workers than the union would.
* In Brooklyn Supreme Court on Friday, a handwriting expert testified that Brooklyn Republican State Sen. David Storobin had personally gathered fraudulent petition signatures for his campaign. The “forensic document examiner,” Jeffrey Luber, said he compared the signatures of five people on Storobin’s petitions to those on “buff cards” and other documents signed by those people. Luber said he had found “inconclusively” that the Storobin-gathered signatures were frauds. Luber was paid to testify by the campaign of Storobin’s opponent, Democrat Simcha Felder, and Storobin’s lawyer suggested in questioning that Luber’s methods were faulty and biased. Whether the court finds Storobin to have personally committed fraud during petitioning efforts is key to the case, as Felder tries to knock Storobin off the Republican line in their race for the “Super-Jewish” seat. Felder’s attorney Lawrence Mandelker, citing several prior cases, said all of Storobin’s signatures could be invalidated if Storobin personally committed fraud, though Storobin’s attorney, Ezra Glaser, disputed this point. Glaser, meanwhile, often berated Luber during cross-examination. He suggested, for instance, that Luber had been compromised by the fact that Felder’s campaign is paying him more than $13,000 for his services.
