Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent Labor Day announcing a new City Hall office built to do one thing: help private-sector New Yorkers organize unions, learn their workplace rights and report their bosses to the city. He signed the executive order creating the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power on Thursday, September 3, then formally rolled it out Monday, September 7, for the holiday.
The administration describes the office as the first of its kind in the nation. It will not organize workers itself, and it does not carry its own enforcement powers. It is set up as a middleman: educating workers about their legal right to organize, connecting them to unions, worker centers and community groups, holding public hearings, and feeding what it hears into city policy. The office will only serve private-sector workers. A City Hall spokesperson told The City Reporter that public-sector employees are left out to avoid legal conflicts over management interference in their unions.
Leading it is Tony Perlstein, a former longshoreman who most recently ran the organizing department of the United Auto Workers. He reports to Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, a former acting U.S. labor secretary under President Joe Biden. Perlstein is the office’s first and so far only announced hire. City Hall has not disclosed a budget or a staffing target, Su could not provide a budget or headcount when asked, The City Reporter and amNewYork reported.
“Every day, working New Yorkers show up, do their jobs, and keep this city running. Too often, they have no say in the conditions they work under,” Mamdani said in a statement. “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.”
The same executive order does something with sharper teeth than the office itself. It directs the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Commission on Human Rights to build procedures for proactively investigating workplace violations even when no worker has filed a complaint, according to the executive order. Those agencies have traditionally waited for complaints to come in. The order tells them to prioritize employers with histories of labor violations and companies that employ large numbers of low-wage workers, and to pursue money owed to every affected worker, not just the one who spoke up.
Su framed that shift as the point. “It is not enough for government to simply wait until workers come forward,” she told reporters during a briefing ahead of the announcement, amNewYork reported. She said the workers most vulnerable to exploitation are often the ones most afraid to report it, because they fear retaliation, losing their jobs or having their immigration status used against them. For employers who have decided it is cheaper to break labor law than to follow it, Su said, “those days are over.”
She was also blunt about the limits. The office will not send anyone into a workplace to run a union campaign. “This office will not be directly going into workplaces and organizing workers,” Su said. “We are not taking the place of unions or worker centers and others who do that work.” Whether the office ever serves public-sector workers is still unsettled; Su told amNewYork the administration was “not drawing such strict lines about that” yet.
The model comes from outside government. The City Reporter reported the office is inspired by the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of the Democratic Socialists of America and the United Electrical Workers that has helped workers around the country organize since 2020. Mamdani is a DSA member.
Perlstein’s own resume runs straight through the labor movement. Born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn, he worked the docks at the Port of New York and New Jersey, where, as The City Reporter has chronicled, he helped lead a reform slate that took over Local 1588 of the International Longshoremen’s Association in 2007 after the local had been put under federal trusteeship to root out mob corruption. Mamdani appointed him to the board of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City in April; Perlstein said he expects to step down from that board to take the new job. “There is a huge gap between what workers want and what workers would like to have, and the reality,” he said, according to amNewYork. “I think it’s our role and our job to help bridge that gap.”
The administration pitched the office as the next step in a labor record it has been building since Mamdani took office. Per the City Hall press release, its crackdown on deceptive tipping practices has delivered an estimated $104 million in additional tips to roughly 70,000 app-based delivery workers since January. In June, Mamdani signed an executive order protecting the 1.4 million New Yorkers who work outdoors from extreme heat, and the city recently paired the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office to go after wage theft.
City Hall is leaning on an inequality argument to justify all of it. The city comptroller found that real median income in New York fell 3.2 percent between 2019 and 2024, while nearly two-thirds of the city’s real income growth over that stretch went to the top 1 percent of tax units. At the April launch of the pro-union nonprofit Union Now, where Mamdani appeared with Sen. Bernie Sanders, he called increasing union density “the most effective tool” against income inequality.
Small-business advocates see a threat. Ashley Ranslow, the New York State director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, called the new office “deeply concerning,” telling the New York Post the worry is that the city will shift “to actively investigating small businesses even if there are no complaints filed against them.” “Federal laws already protect workers rights to organize,” she said. Ken Girardin, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told the paper the city “shouldn’t be putting its thumb on the scale to squeeze more dues out of workers.”
Featured image: Kara McCurdy / Mayoral Photography Office
