Can Zohran Mamdani make New York City a union town again?
Organized labor here is stronger than in the rest of the country. But this isn’t saying much. The unionization rate of the city’s private sector is only 13.5 percent, almost half of what it was in the 1980s. And while 61.1 percent of public sector workers remain unionized, only one in five New York City workers belongs to a union — a significant drop from the one-in-three unionization rate of the 1970s.
Turning around labor’s decline is crucial for achieving Mamdani’s overarching goal of an affordable New York. In a state with thehighest income inequality in the nation, millions of workers urgently need the wage boost and job protections that only a union can provide. Moreover, it will take a huge increase in grassroots power to force Albany and Governor Kathy Hochul to fund Mamdani’s core policy planks for childcare, transport, and housing. Union resurgence could both feed into and feed off of a broader bottom-up movement for an affordable New York.
Moving in this direction will not be easy. Donald Trump has kneecapped the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), making it even harder than before for workers to act upon their federally guaranteed right to unionize. And most unions remain myopically focused on servicing their shrinking membership base. Despite a post-pandemic uptick in grassroots workplace organizing, unprecedented public support for unions, and the urgency of combating authoritarian Trumpism, most unions are still investing almost nothing into growth.
The good news is that city hall has a surprisingly high number of political and legal tools at its disposal, even though labor law in the United States is for the most part (but not exclusively) a federal…
Auteur: Eric Blanc
