In Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s latest effort to burnish his reputation as a champion of working people, City Hall is planning to open an office devoted to supporting labor organizing and addressing workers’ rights violations.
Through an executive order set to be issued on Monday, the mayor is creating the city’s first Office of Worker Power to help workers “get informed, connected and organized,” the administration said in an announcement. The office will be led by Tony Perlstein, a longtime union organizer, who once worked on the docks in Bayonne, N.J.
“We’re going to be looking to provide opportunities to working-class New Yorkers to get educated on their rights to form unions and what it means to build power,” Mr. Perlstein said. “We’re going to work to connect workers to organizations that can help them build that power.”
Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice, who will oversee Mr. Perlstein’s efforts, said in a call with reporters that the office would not usurp the role of union organizers in pressing for workplaces to be unionized or targeting particular employers or industries for organization efforts. “Our work here is to support and amplify and coordinate with them, not to take their place,” Ms. Su said.
Mr. Mamdani used starker language in a statement, saying that the office would “make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine.”
The initiative follows repeated calls at labor rallies by Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, for increasing “union density,” the share of workers in the city who are members of labor unions.
That share is already higher in New York than in the rest of the country: An annual report released on Monday by the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies found that the rates of unionization in the city and the state remain more than double the national rate of about 10 percent.
But Ruth Milkman, a CUNY professor and co-author of the report, noted that the rate of unionization in the city’s private sector has fallen steadily in the last four decades, from more than 25 percent in 1986 to 14.3 percent now. The city’s public sector is much more organized, with about 65 percent of its workers belonging to unions — also about double the national rate — according to the CUNY report.
The announcement comes as Mr. Mamdani works to establish stronger ties within a business community skeptical of his democratic socialist views. Last month, he announced the first appointments to his fledgling business advisory council.
The mayor will face another test of his pro-labor stance beginning later this year, when his administration must negotiate a slew of expiring municipal contracts while coping with a projected $6.4 billion deficit for the 2028 fiscal year.
The public sector employees, who work for Mr. Mamdani’s government, are not the intended beneficiaries of the services of the new Mayor’s Office of Worker Power. Ms. Su did not rule out helping government employees, but she said “this office is really going to focus on vulnerable workers.”
She said that group would include the undocumented immigrants that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been detaining. “The right to organize and the right to have a say in your workplace and the right to be protected by New York City’s labor laws do not depend on immigration status,” she said.
The office will provide outreach and education to help people working “in places where they would really like their conditions to improve but they don’t know what they can do to make that happen,” Ms. Su said. She said the size of Mr. Perlstein’s staff had not yet been determined, and she did not provide a budget for the office.
Mr. Perlstein, 51, a Bronx native and graduate of Brown University, was a director in the organizing department of the United Auto Workers. Before that he was a longshoreman who served as secretary-treasurer of Local 1588 of the International Longshoremen’s Association in Bayonne.
In his executive order, Mr. Mamdani called for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Commission on Human Rights to conduct proactive investigations of employers that could be violating laws and engaging in “predatory practices,” rather than waiting for workers to file complaints.
Those coordinated efforts would prioritize investigating employers with a history of violating labor laws and failing to comply with labor standards, especially those with “large numbers of workers with low wages,” the order stated. The agencies would seek “monetary relief” for all workers who experienced the violations, regardless of whether they had filed complaints.
The post Mamdani to Create Workers’ Rights Office in Effort to Boost Union Power appeared first on New York Times.
