In June 2025, Zohran Mamdani shocked the political establishment when he, as a little-known state assemblymember, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Mamdani executed a brilliant campaign powered by tens of thousands of inspired volunteers and a platform centered on making the city affordable for all. Despite his laser focus on the cost-of-living concerns of the working class, Mamdani could not count on the support of the labor movement. Most city unions endorsed former governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary or declined an endorsement altogether. Going into election night, Mamdani had the official backing of only a handful of unions. The United Auto Workers (UAW) stood out as his only endorsement by a major international union and Region 9A as the first union to endorse him.¹

To his credit, Mamdani immediately recognized after his victory that in the most union-dense city in the United States, his affordability platform would benefit from the institutional support of unions and over 700,000 workers they represent. In the days and weeks following the primary, one by one, the major labor unions in the city began to announce their endorsements: the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council, 32BJ (Service Employees International Union) SEIU, 1199SEIU, New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Central Labor Council (CLC), and so on.

New York City unions are veteran practitioners of the art of political deal-making, for better or worse. Politicians, including progressive ones, usually know that they need to court labor. But too often, our endorsements are met with their future betrayal or prioritization of other partisan issues over the policy that will strengthen labor and directly improve the lives of working-class families. Even the best of progressives often struggle to understand how to govern in labor’s interest.

Mamdani’s electoral campaign already contains the seeds of an organizing boom. Zohran for NYC operated like an organizing drive. . .

Mamdani’s statement went beyond platitudes toward labor, which voters have come to expect of purportedly pro-worker Democratic politicians. Rather than mere gratitude for an endorsement or repeating once again the truism that “unions built the middle class,” Mamdani used the words of an organizer: “union density.” At a campaign event held with the CLC, Mamdani declared that “to take on inequality, we know that the most effective tool is union density.” His statement signaled that he knows that unions need to be the key to his affordability agenda. There is a direct link between unionization and tackling the cost-of-living crisis. Moreover, he has potentially no greater partner in the mission to redistribute wealth and power from the billionaires to the working class than the labor movement.

Mamdani’s electoral campaign already contains the seeds of an organizing boom. Zohran for NYC operated like an organizing drive, with a sophisticated understanding of power, leadership development, and persuasion through differences. The campaign says it has recruited close to 100,000 volunteers as of this writing and potentially developed thousands of leaders. New Yorkers, so many of them young workers struggling to make ends meet, have learned how to talk to their neighbors, family members, and complete strangers about politics. There is no reason this momentum could not move from an electoral campaign toward workplace organizing. This is where labor comes in. We need to step up to give this army of multiracial, multigenerational volunteers an anchoring in the labor movement with opportunities to organize if they are already unionized and the tools to unionize their coworkers if they are not.

New York’s political establishment and their donor base are the same people who lord over us at work. They are our bosses. They are on our companies’ board of directors. And they are the ones who prevent our politics from being rooted in the working class. A labor movement that is serious about changing this state of affairs understands that Zohran Mamdani’s leadership is the opportunity to course correct in New York City.

Mamdani has been a staple of picket lines at UAW-represented city employers such as Mercedes-Benz, Columbia University, Sony Alamo, and the Legal Aid Society since he took office as an assembly member in 2021. He has also taken part in a hunger strike alongside the New York Taxi Workers Alliance demanding debt relief for yellow cab drivers. But Zohran Mamdani’s statement in support of organizing for increased density went beyond showing up and statements of solidarity. It revealed a sophisticated theory of change rarely seen from elected officials, let alone the mayor of a major American city. This is a theory that Shawn Fain, as the UAW president, has been espousing to the labor movement and the millions of workers who want to join a union.

Fain has revived the labor adage “density is destiny.” Following the Stand Up Strike in 2023² which produced record contracts at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, the UAW shifted its focus to unionizing the non-union Southern U.S. auto industry. The campaign, called Stand Up 2.0, began at Volkswagen where the workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted by 73 percent to join the UAW after over a decade of trying to form a union. President Fain made it clear: if we want to restore and expand on the standards set by unions in the twentieth century (cost-of-living adjustment [COLA], pensions, healthcare, work-life balance, etc.), we must rebuild union density. We bargain against our employers and in our industries from the position of maximum leverage when we represent all of the workers in that workplace and industry. Thus, it is labor’s prerogative not to settle for defensive battles representing its current membership, but to continuously strive to welcome more workers into the union movement, especially in the core industries a union represents. More than that, in order for the labor movement to make the transformative changes necessary for workers to take back control over their lives from the billionaires at our workplaces and in society, we have no other choice but to organize at scale.

Zohran Mamdani [possesses] a sophisticated theory of change rarely seen from elected officials, let alone the mayor of a major American city.

With the victory at Volkswagen, the UAW announced the end of its decades-long organizing slump. President Fain’s call to organize resonated with the thousands of UAW members in New York City across various sectors. UAW Region 9A, especially in New York City, over the past decade, has been on an organizing tear. If 9A’s example is scaled up across the labor movement and the various sectors it already does or could represent, it would be transformational for New York City’s political economy. 9A’s organizing has concentrated on a few industries: higher education and medical research; museums and cultural institutions; non-profits, especially at legal services and advocacy organizations; and auto technicians at local dealerships.³

In New York City’s higher education sector, the UAW led the fight that resulted in the landmark Columbia University National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decision in 2016 under President Obama which opened the floodgates of graduate worker organizing across the nation. A wave of organizing among postdoctoral researchers and senior scientists, as well as contingent non-tenure-track faculty followed. Since the mid-2010s, the UAW has successfully won recognition for over 10,000 academic workers across multiple bargaining units at Columbia University, New York University, the New School, Mt. Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, Weill Cornell School of Medicine, Rockefeller University, Einstein College of Medicine, School of Visual Arts, and the New York Film Academy.

If 9A’s example is scaled up across the labor movement and the various sectors it already does or could represent, it would be transformational for New York City’s political economy.

At legal services and non-profit organizations, UAW Local 2325 has been organizing at an extraordinary pace since 2017. In the last eight years, they have supported over 2,000 workers to win recognition at forty-three nonprofits. Local 2325 now represents attorneys and most staff at all of the city’s public defender agencies but one.⁴ Their density allowed them to coordinate bargaining around a common expiration date of July 2025 and pull off a sectoral strike strategy executed in Stand Up style in which Local 2325 did not strike all organizations at once, but the threat of further strikes meant that workers at all agencies raised the standard.

Local 2110 has long been a pioneering organizing union in New York City as one of the original locals of the independent union District 65 that ultimately joined the UAW in the 1990s. In recent years, Local 2110 has launched a massive organizing drive among unorganized workers at museums and cultural institutions. Having long represented staff at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 2110 can now claim to have among its membership the workers at the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Tenement Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Jewish Museum, Dia Art Foundation, Hispanic Society of America, and more. We are also currently bargaining for first contracts at the American Folk Art Museum, Noguchi Museum, and the South Street Seaport Museum. As of this summer, Metropolitan Museum of Art workers have made their unionization drive public.

UAW organizers and leaders built the foundation of this organizing boom for over a decade. When the pandemic hit and inflationary pressures raised the cost of living, New Yorkers in these sectors found the UAW ready to support them with the resources and coaching needed to form a union. Throughout the last few years, participants in the UAW organizing effort have yearned to see the rest of the labor movement commit itself to organizing the way New York UAW locals and other exemplary organizing unions like the NewsGuild of New York have. We believe that Zohran Mamdani as mayor is a new catalyst that can inspire a new moment of unionization.

We believe that Zohran Mamdani as mayor is a new catalyst that can inspire a new moment of unionization.

The question facing the labor movement during Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty is whether or not we can rise to the occasion and commit the resources to seriously organize. The UAW will commit to doing everything we can to support thousands of workers who want to change their lives and build power on the job. But transforming the city’s non-union workforce will take more than the UAW and a small group of other organizing-minded unions. We must all meet the moment while we have a mayor that can creatively use his office and outsized presence in the mainstream to reach millions of workers.

Worker Struggles in Zohran Mamdani’s New York City
Organized labor here in New York is stronger than that in the rest of the country. But this is not saying much. The unionization rate of the city’s private sector is only 13.7 percent, almost half of what it was in the 1980s. And while 65.5 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 the highest 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 (MANY).

The question facing the labor movement during Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty is whether or not we can rise to the occasion and commit the resources to seriously organize.

Moving in this direction will not be easy. Trump has kneecapped the 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 purview. As mayor, Mamdani could leverage his platform as well as public policies to help turn New York back into a bastion of worker power—an affordable city with an organized working class strong enough to overcome the billionaires, Trump, and the Democratic establishment. What follows is an overview of some of the most powerful steps that a Mamdani administration could take to support workers’ struggles in New York City.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to mass unionization is simply that most workers do not realize that any job can be unionized if its employees start organizing. People assume that certain jobs are union and others are not, end of story. And even those individuals who realize that unionization is an option rarely act upon this insight, since they do not know how to begin unionizing.

Some of this began to change in the wake of the pandemic, as a growing number of left-leaning young workers—exactly the people who have rallied to Mamdani—fueled grassroots worker-to-worker campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, and beyond. But the momentum of this surge has stalled after Trump’s election. Mamdani could give this bottom-up movement a jumpstart. David Kim, a New York City Democratic Socialists of America labor activist, explains:

The main thing I hope a new [Mamdani] admin does, with its amazing communication reach, is to change the culture around unionization: to make it something not just good, but cool. Workers are more likely to organize if they see the union as something that both meets this crazy historical moment and their immediate needs. People need to understand that they don’t have to wait for change from above, or resign themselves to endless doomscrolling.⁵

Mamdani could use his social media prowess to launch a public campaign to educate New Yorkers about why they should unionize, how to do so, and where to get organizing support. To grab people’s attention and raise their ambitions, it might make sense to frame and tie together these initiatives under a memorable four-year goal like “100,000 New Union Jobs” or another transformative-yet-doable objective.

The new mayor could host big online unionization trainings with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee,⁶ as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have already done. If this led even a small fraction of Mamdani’s massive volunteer army and over 6 million social media followers to start organizing their own workplaces—or to take a strategic job to unionize it—this could potentially generate thousands of new unionization campaigns. And were Mamdani to act upon the proposal to launch a broad MANY, then the pool of new potential workplace organizers would grow significantly.

As mayor, Mamdani could leverage his platform as well as public policies to help turn New York back into a bastion of worker power. . .

Mamdani’s bully pulpit would be of equal importance for helping workers get past the finish line and win a first contract, which is normally the hardest part of any unionization drive. Organizing efforts often live or die based on how much public support they get, and the mayor’s megaphone would go a long way to ensuring New Yorkers learn about pivotal labor struggles and hear how they can stand in solidarity. He could call out all acts of illegal union-busting. And Mamdani could play a big role in boosting campaigns like Starbucks Workers United’s nationwide escalation to win a first contract. He could not only make viral videos about their struggle and show up at local actions but also call upon New Yorkers to take action in support.

The city itself could help educate the public about unionization and union campaigns. A Mamdani administration could direct city agencies to consistently inform constituents about their union rights, and it could make it easier for workplace organizing committees to book libraries and schools for meetings. Along the same lines, Mayor Mamdani would do well to adopt former city comptroller Brad Lander’s proposal to create an online know-your-rights hub for workers. Perhaps it would even be possible to add a 311 function for New Yorkers to call in requests for workplace organizing assistance. And to pressure companies to respect the unionization votes of their employees, New York City could publish online a list of companies where elections have taken place, but first contracts have not yet been reached.

A significant number of New York City workers are already covered by this law. After decades of farming out what used to be public jobs—the city pays $23 billion in such contracts yearly—contracted human services alone employ about 80,000 people in occupations including “day care, foster care, home care, health or medical services, housing and shelter assistance, preventive services, youth services, the operation of senior centers, employment training and assistance, vocational and educational programs, legal services and recreation programs.”

This is a workforce, disproportionately non-white and female, that direly needs a union. The average income of New York City childcare workers, for example, was only $25,000 in 2023. Since it often pays better to work in fast food than to care for children, it is no surprise that childcare centers statewide are mired in staff shortages and high turnover—problems that significantly lower the quality of care. Since childcare expansion is one of his core campaign planks, Mamdani has a great opportunity to make the case that improving these jobs via unionization is an important step toward better care for our kids—a proof of concept that can already be seen in the (still too modest) number of unionized childcare centers in the city. In forthcoming funding negotiations in Albany for childcare expansion, Mamdani could push to include pro-worker incentives.

Mamdani should commit to doubling the staffing of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), from roughly 450 employees to 1,000.

Furthermore, in line with his campaign promise to expand LPA requirements, a Mamdani administration could strengthen the 2021 LPA law by more clearly defining neutrality requirements. Through an executive order, Mamdani could also replicate this law to cover all workers who work in establishments that receive city funding. This is a potentially huge pool of workers given that about 18 percent of workers in New York City are employed by non-profits, many of which receive city funding.

Overall, the non-profit industrial complex is ripe for unionization. Indeed, it has been a hub of recent union breakthroughs locally, from victories at hospitals by the NYSNA and the Service Employees International Union’s Committee of Interns and Residents to the UAW’s growth at cultural institutions like museums and nongovernmental organizations. Some organizations the UAW represents the legal staff at, such as the social service provider CAMBA, employ over 2,000 workers who are not yet UAW members but soon could be. These same organizations where the UAW may represent the highly educated and credentialed professional staff such as attorneys and paralegals, also employ hundreds if not thousands of workers in service-oriented roles who are just as in need of a union. These efforts can win many New Yorkers a living wage and incentivize the city to stop outsourcing so much of its workforce—a wasteful process that needlessly throws taxpayer dollars toward bloated executive salaries and blatant graft.

Making a concerted effort to support workers’ struggles in New York City is a low-risk, high-reward wager [for Mayor Zohran Mamdani].

Once workers understand that they cannot get fired for acting upon their legally mandated right to unionize, we can expect an uptick in grassroots organizing. And whereas federal labor law suffers from taking way too long to enforce, the city has already proven it can enforce workers’ rights more quickly. But the prerequisite for putting teeth on this law is that the city give itself sufficient enforcement capacity. This is particularly true at a moment when Trump’s administration has declared war on the administrative state. A Mamdani administration must fill in the vacuum as best as it can.

Building off his campaign pledge, Mamdani should commit to doubling the staffing of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), from roughly 450 employees to 1,000. Not only would this significantly grow the city’s ability to enforce workers’ rights, but in all likelihood, it would cost the city next to nothing, since the agency generally pays for itself through the fines and licenses it leverages from companies. In the last fiscal year, the DCWP brought in $21.5 million from its licensing and enforcement activities while only spending $17.5 million on staffing; and in fiscal year 2023, it raised $21.8 million while costing only $16.4 million. To celebrate May Day 2025, the agency announced it had wrested almost $4 million in fines and recoveries from Starbucks, Petco, Halal Guys, and a Pizza Hut franchise. And given that dozens of city agencies beyond DCWP are potentially implicated in enforcing workers’ rights, Mamdani should consider adopting Brad Lander’s proposal to create a Mayor’s Office of Workers’ Rights.