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Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday announced a new taxpayer-funded office — with an undisclosed price tag — that will help New York City workers unionize.
The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, established through an executive order, will help employees in the private sector “get informed, connected and organized” about forming unions at their workplaces, City Hall said in a press release.
The new office “will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine,” Mamdani said in a statement.
“We’re connecting workers to their rights, to each other and to the organizations ready to stand with them.”
The office will hold hearings on “worker issues” and develop policy proposals based on testimony from employees. It will also give out information about workers’ rights and help connect employees interested in starting unions with organizations that can help them, City Hall said.
Tony Perlstein, a former dockworker, union organizer and deputy director of communications for the national lefty organizing group Center for Popular Democracy, will run the office. It’s not clear if anyone else will be hired to staff the office, or how much its budget will be.
Perlstein will report to Mamdani’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, previously a cabinet official under President Joe Biden.
“This office allows us to get ahead of exploitation instead of simply responding to it. By building relationships with workers, unions and worker centers, we can understand what is happening on the ground and act before problems become crises,” Su said in a statement.
The office is inspired by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint effort of the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical Workers, according to The City Reporter, which first reported on the announcement.
“It’s remarkable that the Mamdani administration conflates being forced to pay a union with being protected from exploitation. The city shouldn’t be putting its thumb on the scale to squeeze more dues out of workers,” fumed Manhattan Institute Fellow Ken Girardin.
Ashley Ranslow, the New York State Director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, likewise called the new office “deeply concerning.”
“Federal laws already protect workers rights to organize,” noted Ranslow, whose organization advocates for small and independent business owners.
Small businesses are concerned that Su’s stated aim of getting “ahead of exploitation” will result in the city “now shifting to actively investigating small businesses even if there are no complaints filed against them,” Ranslow said.
“City government should not be interfering with a process that is between employees and the employer,” she said. “Small businesses should be supported, especially in a place like New York City where it’s unaffordable to keep the doors open and lights on, instead of having the deck stacked against them.”
The executive order that created the office also directs certain agencies — like the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Commission on Human Rights — to develop “directed investigation procedures” for “workplace violations and other predatory practices when no complaint has been filed.”
The investigations would focus on businesses with high concentrations of low-wage workers, previous documented labor violations or “other indicators of poor compliance with labor standards,” according to the executive order.
The agencies tasked with the probes have traditionally relied of complaint-based models to investigate potential workplace violations.
The freshly announced office comes on the heels of DSA-member Mamdani pushing to increase “union density,” or the percentage of unionized workers, across the Big Apple, according to The New York Times.
That’s despite a recent CUNY report finding that New York’s union density was already more than double the national rate of around 10%.
