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Most labor unions had declined to negotiate with Bloomberg’s administration, which was bent on extracting concessions from workers.
Billionaire presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg released a labor platform on February 15 that aligns with the Democratic Party’s stance. It includes support for a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage by 2025, endorsement of the PRO Act recently passed by House Democrats, and paid family and sick leave for workers. But Bloomberg’s record as New York City mayor and comments made in several interviews since he left office demonstrate a clear antagonism toward workers and labor unions.
When Bloomberg left office in 2013, his relationship with labor unions representing New York City workers had degraded to the point that all 153 city bargaining contracts had expired before the end of his term. When Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2014, the entire city’s workforce was operating under expired contracts. Most labor unions had declined to negotiate with Bloomberg’s administration, which was bent on extracting concessions from workers.
In September 2013, the Municipal Labor Committee, a coalition of around 100 unions, filed a lawsuit to prevent Bloomberg from circumventing negotiations over employees’ health insurance coverage. Bloomberg unilaterally sought bids from health insurance companies that would overhaul the city health benefits plan and push premium costs onto workers.
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Over 8,000 school bus drivers in New York City went on strike in early 2013 as Bloomberg sought to lower costs by opening new bus contracts to competitive bidding. He also removed job security provisions from the contract with Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181. The city and bus companies filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board to deem the strike illegal, but the board ruled in favor of the union.
Bloomberg’s approach to dealing with New York City teachers’ unions also focused on cuts. Bloomberg explained during a 2011 talk at MIT, “If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones.” He also added he would double class sizes and use better teachers.
In 2013, he compared the New York City teachers’ union to NRA extremists. The same year, Bloomberg failed to reach a deal with the United Federation of Teachers over an evaluation system on which access to millions of dollars in federal and state funding for city schools depended.
During his final speech as mayor of New York City, Bloomberg warned of the “labor-electoral complex,” claiming that labor unions obstruct fiscal reforms in the form of cuts to pensions and benefits. “The next administration will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity for comprehensive benefit reform, which is essential to our long-term future,” he said.
His views toward labor did not change after he left office, right up until his presidential campaign.
Bloomberg has praised Republicans for their opposition to labor unions while donating significantly to their political campaigns. During an interview with Politico in 2014, Bloomberg called Rick Snyder, the former Republican governor of Michigan, “an extremely competent guy who took on the unions to get Detroit and Michigan going in the right direction. And he was re-elected despite being attacked by the unions.” Snyder made Michigan a right-to-work state. Bloomberg donated $3 million to his re-election campaign.
Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo
Thousands of city union workers protest Bloomberg’s cuts to essential city programs, June 2010.
As mayor, Bloomberg opposed several labor proposals aimed at increasing wages and benefits for workers. For example, he has consistently opposed minimum wage increases. In 2012, he vetoed a measure passed by the City Council to raise wages to $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour for workers of projects receiving city subsidies. Bloomberg compared the minimum wage laws to “soviet communism.” He later filed a lawsuit against the City Council for approving two laws to increase minimum wages for some city workers.
After leaving office, Bloomberg said in a 2015 interview on his channel, “I, for example, am not in favor, have never been in favor of raising the minimum wage.” In a 2018 talk with the International Monetary Fund, he criticized the existence of minimum wage laws, claiming that they destroy jobs. “What would go through an employer’s mind if they have to raise the amount of money they have to pay one of their employees?” he mused. “It is ‘Ah, can I do with fewer employees?’ ... In the interest of giving people a living wage, we are getting them to lose their jobs.”
Bloomberg’s successor, de Blasio, would eventually raise the minimum wage in New York City. It now sits at $15 an hour, and contrary to Bloomberg’s predictions, revenue and employment at low-wage local businesses have increased.
As mayor in 2013, Bloomberg vetoed paid sick leave legislation, claiming it would hurt businesses. He called it a “godawful law.” His veto was overrode by city council and passed into law. In 2018, Bloomberg’s media company was forced to revise its paid sick leave policy after anonymous whistleblower complaints revealed that his company was violating the law.
Over the past two decades, 64 employees have filed 40 sexual harassment or discrimination lawsuits against Bloomberg’s media company, with Bloomberg himself implicated in allegations of fostering a sexist workplace environment and making several sexually explicit comments to workers. Bloomberg has refused to release those workers from their non-disclosure agreements.
Even into his presidential campaign, Bloomberg has continued his record of abusing workers. In December 2019, The Intercept reported his presidential campaign was using a third-party vendor which relied on prison labor to make phone calls on behalf of the campaign.
His campaign staff has also yet to unionize, despite virtually every other Democratic presidential campaign doing so. Much like tech companies, Bloomberg has used perks like catered meals and free swag to keep workers from organizing. His own company Bloomberg is unionized, but it annually sends a note asking workers to drop membership with their union, the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.
Bloomberg’s record in opposing labor unions has reflected his views on poverty and workers, which has emphasized a trickle-down philosophy on economics. In a 2013 interview with The New Yorker, he said, “The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people. They are the ones that pay the bills.”
During a November 2016 at the University of Oxford, Bloomberg disparaged farmers by claiming their work requires less intelligence than the “information economy.”
“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn,” he said. Bloomberg compared it to the ‘information economy,’ where he claimed “you have to have a lot more grey matter.” The Bloomberg campaign argued the video of the comments did not include context that Bloomberg cited farming in terms of early agrarian society rather than modern farming.
The Bloomberg campaign did not comment on multiple inquiries into his labor record as mayor of New York City, including why all the city’s union contracts were allowed to expire under his administration. The campaign also did not comment on whether the campaign staff has any intention to unionize.
“Mike Bloomberg inherited a $5 billion deficit and left office with a $2.5 billion deficit, which proved to be more than enough to give wage increases to every city worker on top of the substantial increases they achieved under Mike Bloomberg—for example, teachers got a 43 percent raise during his time in office and the other unionized municipal employees got increases of 35 percent because of the solid, cooperative relationship with labor. He was also repeatedly endorsed by municipal and building trade unions while running for mayor,” said a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign.
Bloomberg’s changed stance in his latest labor platform mirrors other reversals in his presidential platform, including a financial reform plan at odds with everything Bloomberg has supported in his career as a financial executive and pro-Wall Street mayor of a global financial center.
It also signals the labor movement’s role in the 2020 elections. Labor unions have already hosted various town halls, forums, and calls on presidential candidates to support protests, strikes, and their platforms.
The number of workers who have gone on strike in the past two years increased by 257 percent from previous years and approval for labor unions is near a 50-year high with 64 percent of Americans supporting labor unions according to an August 2019 Gallup poll. Despite growing energy in the U.S. labor movement, union membership has continued to decline, reaching a historic low in 2019 at 10.3 percent of the U.S. workforce.
The labor movement is pushing for the Democratic nominee to address the needs of workers—to reverse long trends of declines in union membership, stagnant wages, and growing wealth and income inequality. Mike Bloomberg’s record offers little reassurance that he would begin to meaningfully address these issues as president.
