Mayor Zohran Mamdani marked Labor Day by signing an executive order that creates a new taxpayer-funded city office devoted to helping private-sector employees unionize — with no disclosed budget, no disclosed headcount, and a mandate to investigate businesses that nobody has complained about.
The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will help workers “get informed, connected and organized” about forming unions at their workplaces, City Hall said in a press release reported by the New York Post.
The 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.”
Running it is Tony Perlstein, a former dockworker and union organizer who served as deputy director of communications for the national left-wing organizing group Center for Popular Democracy. He reports to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, previously a cabinet official under President Joe Biden. It is not clear whether anyone else will be hired, or what the office will cost.
The office is inspired by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint effort of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical Workers, according to The City Reporter, which first reported the announcement.
“It’s remarkable that the Mamdani administration conflates being forced to pay a union with being protected from exploitation,” said Manhattan Institute fellow Ken Girardin. “The city shouldn’t be putting its thumb on the scale to squeeze more dues out of workers.”
Ashley Ranslow, New York State director for the National Federation of Independent Business, called the new office “deeply concerning.” “Federal laws already protect workers rights to organize,” she noted.
Her larger worry is buried in the executive order itself, which directs 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.” Those probes are to focus on businesses with high concentrations of low-wage workers, previously documented labor violations or “other indicators of poor compliance with labor standards.” Those agencies have traditionally worked from complaints.
Small businesses, Ranslow said, fear the city is “now shifting to actively investigating small businesses even if there are no complaints filed against them.”
“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 announcement follows a broader push by the DSA-member mayor to raise “union density” across the Big Apple, according to The New York Times — despite a recent CUNY report finding that New York’s union density is already more than double the national rate of roughly 10%.
Source: nypost.com
