In 1909, Mayor George B. McClellan met with garment factory workers who had walked off their jobs sewing ready-to-wear blouses with high collars and buttons down the front.
In 1934, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia helped to negotiate the end of a taxi strike after saying that he sympathized with the drivers but would “tolerate no disorder.”
In 1946, when tugboat workers went on strike, Mayor William O’Dwyer met with labor leaders after condemning maritime crews for refusing to deliver fuel and other essential supplies to city docks.
More recently, though, mayors have largely avoided becoming publicly engaged in labor disputes that did not directly involve the city — until now.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has twice appeared with nurses on strike at some of the city’s top hospitals. And while some mayors might have tried to assume the role of an impartial mediator, Mr. Mamdani has backed the nurses even as he called on “every side to come back to that negotiating table” and settle quickly.
“There’s no question it’s unusual,” said Joshua Freeman, a labor historian. “A high-profile, very public statement by the mayor in support of striking workers — that is unusual.”
During the last major nurses’ strike in 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul called for binding arbitration, but Mayor Eric Adams did not. He focused mainly on the city’s readiness to cope with the consequences for patients who needed medical care. A decade earlier, Bill de Blasio was arrested on a picket line while he was the city’s public advocate — four months before he was elected mayor.
“God knows, Ed Koch took sides all the time,” said Ester Fuchs, referring to Mayor Edward I. Koch. She is a professor of international and public affairs and political science at Columbia University, and she also served as an adviser to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
Two years into Mr. Koch’s first term, in 1980, there was a citywide transit strike.
“He didn’t side with the union,” said Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party who is now a professor at Columbia. “He sided with the average New Yorker affected by the union’s action, in a way saying: ‘Look what the union is doing to us. I’m siding with the people.’”
Mr. Koch made his opposition personal, famously joining commuters on the first morning of the strike and asking, “How’m I doing?” as they walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
For Mr. Mamdani, Ms. Fuchs said, “taking the side of the nurses in this strike is good politics.”
“It may not have been a statesmanlike thing to do for a mayor who could have come in to negotiate a settlement, but what kind of experience does he have negotiating settlements?” she said. “That’s not his strong suit. He played his strong suit on the picket line, supporting workers.”
Ms. Hochul’s office said that the governor has had daily discussions with the nurses’ union and the hospitals. The union, the New York State Nurses Association, said it had received a message from Ms. Hochul and Mr. Mamdani early in the week asking union leaders to resume negotiations.
The hospitals — including NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia, Montefiore and three Mount Sinai hospitals — did not comment on whether they had gotten similar communication. But the two sides began bargaining again on Thursday, this time in separate rooms in the same building on the same day, not in separate sessions on different days. Mr. Mamdani’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
In heavily Democratic New York, mayors in the last 90 years have often had ties to labor. Mr. La Guardia ran for re-election as the candidate of the American Labor Party in 1937 and 1941. Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who took office in 1954, was the son of the U.S. Senator who had sponsored the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s.
But in the final weeks of 1965, as Mr. Wagner’s time in City Hall was winding down and a contract deadline was looming, he did not take part in negotiations with the transit workers’ union. His successor, John V. Lindsay, did not meet with the two sides until after Christmas. He and Mr. Wagner persuaded Theodore W. Kheel, the labor mediator who was once described as the “master locksmith of deadlock bargaining,” to lead a three-person mediation panel. But the union went on strike on Mr. Lindsay’s first day in office, Jan. 1, 1966.
It was the first of several crippling walkouts during his first term. After a teachers’ strike in 1968, The New York Times Magazine published an article with the headline “Why New York Is ‘Strike City.’” It said that “Lindsay’s golden-boy image has been a strike victim” after “almost continuous conflict on the municipal labor front.”
But Mr. Freeman, the historian, said that by the time Mr. Lindsay ran for re-election in 1969, he “had come to peace with the unions.”
“Maybe ‘surrender’ is too strong a word,” Mr. Freeman said, “but that’s kind of what happened.”
Times have changed, he said, citing a transit strike that shut down the subways and buses when Mr. Bloomberg was mayor.
“Bloomberg was strongly denunciatory of the strikers,” he said, “and weighed in very much on the side of the employer,” the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency.
“What Mamdani’s relationship with the hospitals will be going forward is hard to know,” Mr. Freeman said, adding, “We as a city and he as a mayor need well-functioning hospitals, but the hospitals need things from the city.”
James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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