We’re using the first four days of September to spotlight four big ideas shaping the future of New York’s workforce. Each day, we’ll share a new perspective on what it will take to create good jobs, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for every New Yorker. Then, right after Labor Day, we’ll release our calendar for the year ahead. Today: a three-part series on workforce as infrastructure. This is Part 3 of 3: on making city government the anchor green employer.
by Neil Padukone
Climate change is already reshaping daily life in New York. Extreme heat, smoke-filled summers, and storms that bring the city to a standstill are all the new normal. At the same time, the green economy the city once projected could reach 382,000 jobs by 2040 is facing real headwinds. Federal opposition to clean energy, corporate retreat from sustainability, and a slowdown in state ambition all point to the same conclusion. New York City cannot wait for someone else to lead. We need to use our city to green our city.
Fundamentally, the city needs to step into its role as the anchor green employer. As our recent report An Affordable Climate Economy details, the public sector was largely overlooked in the city’s Green Economy Action Plan despite being a foundational pillar of green jobs in New York. Delivering green space, mass transit, distributed energy resources, and denser development can reduce heat and flooding, decrease vehicle miles traveled, and lower per capita carbon emissions. These are mostly public sector functions that, when delivered effectively, can also lower household costs.
But to get this work done, we need the people who can do it. With municipal agencies facing upward of 17,000 vacancies, the city has an opportunity to fill critical public-sector roles by creating clearer pathways for New Yorkers into green careers. A “Full-Cycle Model” of green workforce development can connect education, training, hiring, and advancement to the jobs the city already needs to fill.
In this model, city government itself would be the proving ground for any hiring and workforce practice we would ask private sector green employers to adopt. The model would span a New Yorker’s full career trajectory, including career exploration, preparation, access, launch, and advancement.
Imagine a high school freshman thinking about her future. Through a class visit to a Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) wastewater treatment plant, she sees how her high school science lessons are applied to turn sewage into fertilizer and cooking gas. That exposure leads to a paid DEP internship, then an apprenticeship that earns her college credit at City College. With clearer civil service pathways, more frequent exams, and more transparent hiring timelines, she can quickly move into a job as a DEP environmental engineer. As her career advances, unions, nonprofits, and industry partners help her keep pace with emerging technologies and new green economy skills. Years later, after rising to Assistant Commissioner, she brings that experience to the private sector and helps inspire the next generation of New Yorkers entering the field.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Departments of Parks and Recreation, Transportation, and Sanitation and other government entities can do the same with railyards, municipal offices, power stations, garages, and every other piece of their fascinating operations and hiring apparatus. They can ensure that their bus and train operators, landscapers, mechanics, building operators, accountants, and other employees are educated by and sourced from New York, and that they remain at the forefront of their industry.
If this model can work inside the city’s own famously slow hiring bureaucracy, it becomes the most credible, battle-tested template we have for scaling the private sector green economy because it will have been proven on the hardest case first. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services that manages the city’s workforce is making important starts, including the “youth apprentice” civil service title that opens up paid learning opportunities to young New Yorkers, and it needs to keep going.
The city also needs to look beyond its own bureaucracy and better connect the workforce efforts already happening across New York. Nonprofits, labor unions, community colleges, community-based organizations, and small businesses from Hunts Point to Canarsie and the West Shore are already training New Yorkers in green economy skills and putting those skills to work.
To bring that expertise closer to City Hall, the Mayor should establish a “Climate Workforce Cabinet” that reports directly to him. The cabinet should include NYCETC, representing its 200 coalition members, as well as employers, labor unions, training organizations, educational institutions, city agencies, utilities, philanthropy, and the Green Economy Network. Its role should be to keep the city’s workforce strategy aligned with industry needs and grounded in the communities already doing this work.
That kind of cross-sector collaboration is already finding fruit at DEP itself. The Green Readiness Opportunities for the Workforce (GROW) pilot program partners with the Doe Fund to train a cohort of New Yorkers to maintain the critical infrastructure that reduces rainy day flooding in selected neighborhoods. To provide the workforce needed to do this vital work citywide, the city can continue to work with the civic sector to source and support candidates, as well as with unions to ensure that there is a promise of career growth beyond these transitional jobs.
Especially in this moment of federal uncertainty, we need to make sure that every local asset in the green economy is more efficiently coordinated. Educators must train students with the skills they need to be hired for work that is well-funded and executed by thriving businesses whose efforts increase the city’s sustainability and resiliency. At the same time, empowered workers, including those in unions, must have opportunities for career growth and wage mobility.
From within city government and across the five boroughs, we need to use our city to serve our city. The weather won’t wait.