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. Yesterday, we published an open letter to the new EDC leadership. Today: a response to the mayor’s recent announcement on creating a new Business Advisory Council. Stay tuned for more of our workforce ideas throughout the week.
If you missed it last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the establishment of a Business Advisory Council. Composed of 15 leaders from finance, technology, real estate, healthcare, sports, entertainment, and retail, this new council will meet quarterly with the mayor and Julie Su, the Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice, to help shape the city’s next stage of economic growth and innovation.
I welcome the initiative, and I have great respect for those who have agreed to serve. New York needs its business leaders engaged in shaping the city’s future, a conviction Mayor Mamdani voiced as Mayor-Elect and one that animated our work on his transition Committee on Economic Development and Workforce Development. That is what makes the roster puzzling. Not one member of that committee sits on the Business Advisory Council. A single council member served on the transition’s Housing Committee. The other sixteen committees are entirely unrepresented.
According to the announcement, the Council will “advise City Hall on the industries driving New York’s economy as well as the infrastructure, talent pipeline, and regulatory environment those industries need to grow.” Reasonable aims, but framed entirely around what industries need to grow, not what New Yorkers need to reach them. That is pothole work: important work, but no substitute for addressing the deeper structural problems beneath it. Our city’s structural failures have deepened the divides in our K-shaped economy and pushed affordability further out of reach for the New Yorkers already furthest from it.
If economic growth is the Council’s organizing objective, how will it advance this administration’s stated commitment to economic justice? And is this the business leadership best equipped to advance both? Dr. King asked: “Where do we go from here?” His answer began with a precondition: “We must first honestly recognize where we are now.”
The measure of the city’s economic strategy should be whether it creates good jobs, raises wages, and expands access to careers that can support a family, and whether those gains reach across communities and across racial and gender lines. That is possible only when equity is built into the platform itself. As Alicia Glen and James Patchett argued in Vital City, that platform rests on three pillars: “investing in infrastructure, incentivizing private sector investment and fostering talent pipelines to fuel high-growth industries.”
That broader vision of economic growth is largely absent from the announcement. It is not until the eleventh of fifteen member statements that anyone names it. Robert Wolf speaks of policies and partnerships that “create good-paying jobs, raise wages, and make New York a more affordable place to live, work, and build.”
It shouldn’t be a footnote. It should be the assignment.
Although New York is close to a record-high level of total employment, we are falling behind peer cities in creating many of the higher-wage jobs that support the middle class. While the unemployment rate as a whole has improved, Black and Latino New Yorkers still have considerably higher unemployment than white New Yorkers. Young adults face persistent barriers to employment. Many employed New Yorkers still cannot afford to live in the city where they work.
An administration committed to affordability and economic justice has to treat economic development and workforce development as one question, not two. Where will the jobs come from? What will they pay? Who will be able to reach them? What skills will workers need to get there? How does someone move from an entry-level position into a career? And who is accountable for building those pathways?
Nothing in the Council’s mandate suggests it will be tasked with answering any of these questions. That silence is not the members’ fault. Several of them already do this work.
In fact, several members bring experience that points toward what a stronger workforce strategy could look like. Healthcare is represented, and Northwell Health’s involvement is encouraging. Its investment in FutureReadyNYC and the Northwell School of Health Sciences shows the kind of long-term commitment we can and should see more employers make. Marcus Samuelsson’s work with the Careers through Culinary Arts Program offers another strong example, linking young people with culinary training, internships, and apprenticeships. Steiner Studios represents an industry that has a well-established record of workforce partnerships, such as the Made in NY Production Assistant Training Program.
These are important models, but individual examples have not yet added up to a citywide strategy.
The sectors that have seen the most recent growth in employment in New York, namely home care, child care, and human services, are not adequately represented. Neither is the broader nonprofit sector, even though community-based organizations are major employers and important engines of economic mobility across the city.
Education, organized labor, and clean energy and utilities are also missing. Small businesses need a clearer, more direct voice, as do the workforce development organizations that prepare, place, and support hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.
The same lack of connection is evident in the institutions and partnerships the city has already built.
The Workforce Development Board (WDB) oversees nearly $100 million in public workforce funding. Do the members of the new Business Advisory Council know what the WDB is responsible for, where it has invested, or what its priorities are? Will the Council work with the Board or simply alongside it? Not a single person sits on both bodies. Amalgamated Bank is the only organization with representation on both. Perhaps the distance is explained by the fact that the current Board is a holdover, with a roster largely unchanged from the Adams administration.
The city also has industry partnerships such as the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare and the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline. How will these partnerships interact with the new Council? Will their knowledge of employers, occupations, training requirements, and career pathways influence its work?
Will the Council build on the Adams administration’s Rebuild, Renew, Reinvent: A Blueprint for New York City’s Economic Recovery (2022)? Or its Pathways to an Inclusive Economy, the Future of Workers Task Force blueprint (2023)? Will it reach further back, to the Career Pathways report of the de Blasio years? Or will New York once again start from scratch?
Various administrations, different names, the same ambitions.
Every mayor wants to build a stronger public-private partnership. Each administration brings in respected leaders, sets up an advisory body, and promises a new phase of cooperation. Too often, the city then begins another discussion without having decided what to do with the structures, commitments, and lessons left by the previous administration.
In 2024, Mayor Adams launched a Workforce Development Council (WDC) to “unlock new job opportunities for New Yorkers.” Chaired by Rob Speyer, CEO of Tishman Speyer, it was charged with helping “build an economy with real pathways to family-sustaining careers,” in the Mayor’s words. Two years later, Mayor Mamdani has asked his Business Advisory Council to “double down on what makes this city the best place on Earth to start a company, grow a business, and build a career.”
A direct comparison will always be imperfect because the WDC’s full membership was never released publicly. But one contrast is unmistakable, and it runs against expectation. Adams, the moderate, framed the problem as a recovery that had failed working families. Mamdani, the democratic socialist, frames it as a city that has to prove it still works for business. Neither council’s stated mandate makes affordability or economic mobility the measure of success. The economic indicators can trend upward, as they are now, without answering the question both administrations say they are trying to answer.
Growth and equity can move together. I have less confidence that a council drawn this narrowly can determine how to achieve both, or agree on the tools and measures needed to get there. We will meet the future either way, prepared or not. The question is whether we are willing to name the crises we share, and whether we are thoughtful about whom we invite to help solve them. Mobility for all New Yorkers, not some, is the measure. It ought to be the mandate.