As the Mamdani administration surpasses its first 100 days in office, New Yorkers are taking stock of what has been prioritized and what has not.
The Mayor deserves high marks for prioritizing everyday quality-of-life issues, the kind of “pothole socialism” that treats governing as customer service. It’s a model that delivers, and it works. But it leads me to wonder: when does the underlying plumbing get its turn? Behind every pothole is a capital budget. Behind every delayed 311 response is a workforce. And behind every New Yorker struggling to make rent, find childcare, and pay for groceries is a stagnant economy — one that the previous administration consistently oversold as a recovery.
The post-COVID rebound was never as strong as it was presented. Now growth has stalled, population is declining, and the business closures accelerating across Manhattan’s commercial corridors suggest the trend is getting worse, not better. And the World Cup is not likely to pull us out of the slump.
With a $5 billion budget gap that worsens in the outyears, what is the theory of the case for how covered trash bins and dedicated bus lanes will meaningfully stabilize the City in the short term? I’ll assume, having never served in city government, that there’s no extra money hidden under the seat cushions. State support can buy breathing room, but it’s not a strategy.
And that’s the point: stabilization doesn’t come from surface-level fixes alone. It comes from how the city generates opportunity and income at scale.
A reliance on economic justice and corporate responsibility in New York City—while important and marked by real, meaningful wins for New Yorkers—remains incomplete without addressing how people access work and what that work actually pays. Gains in wages, protections, and accountability matter, but they don’t, on their own, build a functioning pathway into stable employment at scale.
At what point does that responsibility shift back to the City itself?
As the largest employer in New York, City government is not just a regulator of the labor market; it is a central actor within it. Yet it remains understaffed and stretched, with persistent vacancies that limit its ability to deliver services, implement policy, and model the kind of workforce system the broader economy needs. At the same time, the City’s contracting practices—how it pays nonprofit providers and workforce partners—continue to strain the organizations responsible for delivering these outcomes, with delayed payments, insufficient rates, and a failure to consistently cover the true cost of delivering services.
Because at the end of the day, affordability, racial equity, corporate responsibility, and education outcomes all rise or fall on access to quality jobs—this is fundamentally about work, wages, and pathways into the sectors that sustain this city, whether we name it that way or not.
I’m intentionally not using the term “workforce development” in line with this administration’s shift away from it in its most senior roles. Instead, I’m focusing on skill acquisition, talent development, career advancement, upskilling and reskilling, and a 360-degree approach to retention and advancement.
None of that photographs well. But it’s the work that actually moves the needle on affordability, mobility, and who this city is for.
The City’s own workforce data infrastructure does not track wages. It does not allow the public—or policymakers—to understand whether training programs are leading to jobs that can sustain a life in New York. And while demographic data may be collected, it is rarely connected to outcomes in a way that shows whether opportunity is truly being distributed equitably.
That stands in tension with the City’s own commitments. The recently released Preliminary Racial Equity Plan calls for disaggregated data, pay equity, and clearer indicators to track progress across systems—but without linking wages, employment outcomes, and demographic data, those commitments remain incomplete.
In other words, we are talking about equity without fully measuring it. That’s a structural problem. Because if you don’t measure wages, you can’t measure mobility. And if you can’t measure mobility, you cannot claim success.
Others in this space are already doing this work. Through initiatives like the Workforce Benchmarking Network, organizations across New York City are embedding wage and demographic data into their operations—tracking not just who they serve, but whether participants secure quality jobs, experience wage growth, and advance over time. The City isn’t.
The City’s data portal is a good start—it tracks who is served and what programs are completed. But without wage data, job quality indicators, and meaningful equity measures, it falls short of what’s needed. It cannot tell us whether people are earning enough to live in New York, whether jobs lead to advancement, or whether outcomes are improving across communities.
Without that, it undercuts any serious conversation about the true cost of living. It limits our ability to assess whether public investments are actually driving economic mobility—or simply cycling people through programs. A system that measures activity but not outcomes cannot guide policy, inform investment, or build public trust.
The contradiction is hard to ignore. City officials are actively engaged in debates about raising wages to $30 an hour — a legitimate and necessary conversation. But the overwhelming majority of publicly funded job training and workforce programs are not placing people into jobs anywhere near that wage level. We are subsidizing a system that, by its own outcomes, falls well short of the standard we’re simultaneously demanding of employers.
So when does the City commit to closing that gap—within the next hundred days, or the hundred after that? That’s another 12 weeks lost that could be spent on the highest quality and most promising training models that earn credits and credentials, activating social networks to support job seekers with and without degrees to make the connections to jobs that pay.
When do the problem, policy, and political streams finally align? And when does economic justice start showing up in actual earnings for actual New Yorkers?
The urgency of this moment is only increasing. New Yorkers are about to face a wave of new pressures—from federal work requirements tied to SNAP to broader shifts in healthcare coverage that will require thousands more people to engage with the labor market.
The City is not yet prepared for what’s coming next. But it’s also the opportunity to align the New York City Office of Talent and Workforce Development, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Workforce Development Board, and partners like NYCETC around a clear, forward-looking strategy for where jobs are created and how industries grow.
That alignment must fully leverage SUNY and CUNY as core engines of talent development, pair education with earning through tools like Workforce Pell, and engage unions—still the most reliable pathway into the middle class—as central partners in building and sustaining that pipeline. And it has to be built as a business solution, because if businesses aren’t expanding, we’re further undercutting the impact of these investments before they even begin.
Everything this administration is advancing depends on people to do the work. If the goal is to manufacture bins to get garbage off the street, build and maintain housing, expand child care, support community mental health, and keep the city running—from mom-and-pop shops and neighborhood grocery stores to life sciences labs and tech hubs—then the question isn’t just about policy design. It’s about the workforce.
Where are the workers coming from? How are they being trained, supported, and retained?
If you want a legacy like LaGuardia’s—who built the infrastructure for where New Yorkers live—this is the moment to build the infrastructure for how New Yorkers work, creating real, scalable pathways into jobs that shape the city for generations.