New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has established the Office of Worker Power, a first-in-the-nation initiative to connect workers with education, resources, and organizations to help them form a union or demand better working conditions on the job. The office will also allow workers more input into city labor policies and assist them in reporting violations by their employers, Mamdani wrote in an executive order.
Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice and a former acting U.S. labor secretary, will coordinate efforts on the office, and Tony Perlstein, a longtime union organizer most recently with the United Auto Workers, will become its first executive director. The staff head count of the office and its budget have yet to be determined.
Mamdani signed the executive order in front of workers in the construction, hotel, caregiving, and food service industries. It builds upon a series of efforts to empower workers in New York City, like backing delivery drivers in their fight with Amazon over employee misclassification that denies benefits. The Mamdani administration has secured $104 million in tips for delivery workers by enforcing the law on deceptive tipping practices, and recently partnered with New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg to enforce laws against wage theft.
The announcement also comes on the heels of a new report on inequality in New York City, showing that the top 0.1 percent received more than half of all New Yorkers’ income growth between 2019 and 2024, while real median incomes in the city fell.
City officials say the new Office of Worker Power is necessitated by the severe drop in union density over the past half-century.
“History has proven that worker power is the solution when an economy becomes too skewed,” said Deputy Mayor Su in a press briefing. “When workers can organize, everything changes. When they can build lasting, durable power, power that lets them transform their work experience, and by extension their lives, everything changes.”
The Office of Worker Power is intended to work across agencies to connect and inform workers. It will not engage in direct union organizing and will not replace any unions or worker centers. Its mission is to help workers who may want a union but don’t know how to go about it with the information they need to get started, as well as the contacts with groups that can assist them further. This, officials said, will give workers the knowledge and the courage to assert themselves on the job.
The Mamdani administration also envisions public hearings on worker rights issues and other convenings that bring workers together, along with research that highlights key topics and informs policy proposals for the city council.
The communication is intended to be two-way, with workers explaining their challenges to the office and having that lead to policy positions on things like workplace safety, misclassification, the use of new technology like artificial intelligence, or exploitation based on citizenship status.
“The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine,” Mayor Mamdani said in a statement.
Perlstein, who will run the office, is a former longshoreman at the Port of New York and New Jersey who became secretary-treasurer of the local longshore worker union. He has a background in organizing workers across several sectors, most recently as a director in the UAW’s organizing department.
“I’ve been part of many campaigns, some successful, some not,” Perlstein told reporters. “For me this is not just about the material gains that workers win, but it’s also the transformative process that workers go through as they learn to build together and struggle … through the process of organizing, people transform.”
The executive order also charges Deputy Mayor Su with establishing enforcement principles on worker protections across city agencies, signaling a strong push to hold employers who violate the law accountable. In particular, the order states that city agencies should investigate workplace violations even when no complaint has been filed. Traditionally, agencies have waited for a complaint to start investigating.
“Oftentimes the most vulnerable workers do not report,” Su said, citing reasons like fears of retaliation or a lack of understanding about their rights. “So it is not enough for government to simply wait until workers come forward.” The order stresses that companies with large numbers of low-wage workers and “a history of labor violations or other indicators of poor compliance with labor standards” should be prioritized for investigation.
In addition, the order seeks to protect workers from being targeted or discriminated against for any reason, but particularly for their immigration status. “The right to organize and … the right to be protected by New York City’s labor laws do not depend on immigration status,” Su said.
But the Office of Worker Power, putting the administration in New York City firmly on the side of worker organizing, is the showpiece. Considering that the administration also represents management in negotiations with public employees, it’s an unusual position for a city government, but it’s necessitated, officials say, by the severe drop in union density over the past half-century. New York City has union density among private-sector workers of around 12.5 percent, according to the School of Labor and Urban Studies at the City University of New York. This is far above the national average, but that number was double in the 1980s.
“There was a poll taken that 70 percent of Americans support unions,” Perlstein said. “And yet, even in this city, 13 percent are in a union. So there is a huge gap between what workers want and what workers have.”
Given the Trump administration’s assault on worker organizing through rulings at the National Labor Relations Board and cutbacks at the Labor Department, a counterweight in the nation’s largest city is vital but also may run into the stone wall that is federal labor law.
I asked Deputy Mayor Su about this. “For this mayor, he’s been very clear that we are going to do the right thing regardless of what the federal government does,” she said. “People are also watching what happens in New York City … What is possible when you have a strong municipal government doing the right thing and delivering for the people of a city?”
