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.
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