On Labor Day, Mamdani Debuts ‘Worker Power’ Office to Support Union Organizing
Yves here. ZOMG, I hope Mamdani has good bodyguards1 Helping workers create unions or set up new “locals” is a frontal challenge to capitalists, and arguably a bigger deal than local rent control or city-owned grocers. Training laborers in how to organize is in the teaching someone how to fish, as opposed to giving them fish, category. It’s a much higher leverage initiative.
By Claudia Irizarry Aponte, Senior Reporter at The City Reporter, covering labor and work. Originally published at The City Reporter
Workers without unions will soon be able to leverage the resources of City Hall to help organize and have a voice on the job.
On Labor Day, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new executive order to create the new Office of Worker Power, which will help workers connect with union organizers and educational resources to learn about their rights and, if they choose, organize their workplaces. The new office will also help workers who want to report labor law violations.
The office, the first of its kind in the nation, will be led by Tony Perlstein, a former longshoreman who most recently led the United Auto Workers’ organizing department. Perlstein will report to Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice.
On a call with reporters ahead of Monday’s announcement, Su outlined why the Mamdani administration believes the new office is necessary and invoked recent headlines showing the vast chasm between the city’s wealthiest and its struggling middle class.
“When workers organize, when they can build lasting, durable power, power that lets them transform their work experience and, by extension, their lives, everything changes,” she said. “With the disappearance of good middle-class careers and the replacement with precarious part-time jobs in the gig economy, now is the time for the city government to take a stand on the side of workers.”
Su, a former acting labor secretary under President Joe Biden, said the new office will serve the most “vulnerable,” from construction and domestic workers to delivery drivers and others on the fringes of the city’s economy. The office will only support workers in the private sector, so as to avoid any potential legal conflict.
Monday’s announcement builds on Mamdani’s efforts to support private-sector workers and strengthen enforcement of labor law across the five boroughs.
In the first six months of his tenure, Mamdani’s administration reached settlements worth millions of dollars in back pay for workers in the gig and fast food sector. Last month, the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection announced a new partnership with the Manhattan district attorney’s office that will make it easier for both offices to investigate wage theft and other crimes.
Modeled on a DSA Effort
The new office is inspired by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint effort of the Democratic Socialists of America and United Electrical Workers that has since its 2020 inception helped thousands across the country organize unions in the workplace.
Created as an offshoot of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign, EWOC fields inquiries from workers and connects them with volunteers — many of them labor organizers themselves — to help them create unions. Those volunteers share legal resources, organizing tools and host virtual workshops to teach workers how to organize a union step by step. The group also cultivates undercover organizers known as “salts,” or people who take a job with the specific goal of unionizing a workplace.
Su stressed the new City Hall office will not be going into workplaces and directly organizing workers but will rather work as a middleman between workers and unions or workers centers in their industries.
“We’re not taking the place of unions of worker centers and others who do that work,” she said.
But workers in the public sector who need help organizing or strengthening their unions will not be able to use the new office for support. Public-sector workers are left out of the agency’s reach so as to avoid any legal conflicts arising from potential management interference, a City Hall spokesperson said.
Su was unable to provide details on the new office’s estimated budget and headcount. The executive order also instructs existing city agencies, including DCWP, the Taxi & Limousine Commission and the Commission on Human Rights, to develop “proactive” procedures for labor-related investigations.
From the Docks to City Hall
Perlstein is a legend within the region’s labor movement. As a young longshoreman on the Bayonne, New Jersey, docks at the turn of this century, he successfully led a reform effort to kick out mob-connected union leadership within Local 1588 of the International Longshoremen’s Association. He rose through the ranks to become the local’s secretary-treasurer in 2007, after it was placed under federal trusteeship to root out corruption.
He was most recently the organizing director of the United Auto Workers, and in April he was appointed to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. He told reporters on a call ahead of his appointment that he would resign from the fund.
Perlstein said he is looking forward to using the scale and reach of the new Office of Worker Power to continue organizing.
“I get very moved by being in the trenches with folks, but I think the opportunity here to reach so many people and to connect them to the things that they need to step up and speak up, that is what I see as the opportunity here,” he said.
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1 Huey Long’s were unable to prevent his assassination.
David Sirota has a nice but unsourced graphic on X, showing quite well why this is a life-threatening proposal.
He gives a link to the source immediately below the post.
Here’s the chart in the context of the Institute for New Economic Thinking report, “A Revolution of Falling Expectations: The Macroeconomic Roots of Popular Discontent.” (The report’s lead author is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Tom Ferguson, who’s been featured on occasion here on NC.)
That’s a meaningful plot, though I think that “pre-tax” might be more illuminating. US corporate profits tax rate has, per internet search (perhaps AI-corrupted), fallen by more than half since the ’50s. A significant part of that correlation, though certainly not all of it, may be due to changes in tax policy.
Weak workers and weak representation of voters — two key pillars of oligarchy in US.
Read the comments and that’s why I despair. The fact-free, they burn, as is so often true on X (and everywhere?). Lord, forgive them for they know not what they do!. And don’t do, Ugh!
However, compare the above with the below, about the already unionized home health care workers fighting against mandatory 24 hour shifts, which both Mamdani and council chair Menin ran on ending:
So I wouldn’t get my hopes up just yet. And no word on budget or headcount for the office doesn’t seem like a good sign. Hopefully my cynicism is misplaced.
May God and The People protect him.