Testimony submitted by Gregory J. Morris, Chief Executive Officer of New York City Employment & Training Coalition on October 27, 2026
Good afternoon, Chair Won and members of the Committee on Workforce Development. I am Gregory Morris, CEO of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition. Thank you for examining whether Community Hiring is delivering on its promise.
NYCETC helped fight for this policy. Our members advocated for community hiring authority across administrations. We joined labor, employers, and community leaders in pressing Albany to act. NYCETC was among the 135 organizations that signed the 2021 support letter calling for the City’s purchasing power to open access to good jobs and apprenticeships for residents of communities too often excluded from opportunity.
We supported it because public spending should help New Yorkers build a more secure life. A construction project should create a route into a trade. A service contract should open a door into a career. The people living with economic insecurity should have a meaningful chance to benefit from the economy their tax dollars help sustain.
That support comes with an obligation to ask hard questions about implementation.
When the City asked Albany for this authority in May 2023, it projected that Community Hiring would connect 36,000 New Yorkers to jobs and apprenticeships each year. Those were projections, not results. But they communicated the policy’s ambition. Since then, the target has shifted: by November 2024, the City described the goal as “thousands of jobs and over a billion dollars in salaries annually.” The Council should ask which target the administration is accountable to today, how it now measures progress against it, what assumptions have changed, and what outcomes New Yorkers can reasonably expect.
Our review of the City’s quarterly reports through the fiscal year 2026 fourth-quarter report shows covered contract value reaching approximately $2.96 billion by the end of fiscal year 2026. That is contract value—not verified spending, wages paid, or jobs secured. We need to keep those distinctions clear.
This program is still young. Albany authorized Community Hiring in June 2023; the law took effect on May 15, 2024, and the City reported no contracts registered with a Community Hiring goal through March 2025. Early timing can explain slow hiring. It does not explain missing information.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, only eight of 83 construction contracts and 41 of 94 services contracts showed a progress figure. Missing information does not establish that hiring failed. Some contracts may be early in implementation. But the public needs to know whether a blank means work has not started, a report is overdue, or a contractor is falling short.
The City’s own goals make expected results calculable. For professional, human, and standard services, the goal is one income-based Community Hire for every $500,000 in contract value.
Nearly $3 billion in covered contracts should clearly account for who benefits. How many unique New Yorkers were hired? At what wages? How many contractors met their goals? What happens when they do not? What remedies do the contracts actually contain, and have any been used? Those should be routine answers.
First, make accountability follow the worker.
Community Hiring, Workforce1, and Jobs NYC should operate with shared responsibility for getting people into sustained employment. A New Yorker should not need to understand the City’s organizational chart to find a job. An employer should know whom to call, what help is available, and what the City expects in return.
The City should track the path from referral to interview, offer, start date, and retention. A conditional offer is encouraging. It is not yet a paycheck. Attendance at a hiring event tells us something about demand for opportunity; it does not tell us whether that opportunity materialized. Someone must be accountable for what happens after people leave the room.
Reporting also needs to distinguish workers newly hired through this effort from existing employees assigned to a covered contract. It should also distinguish access to an existing vacancy from creating an additional job. Both matter. They tell different stories about economic impact.
Second, give community workforce organizations a funded role in delivery.
The original 2021 support letter explicitly identified community-based workforce programs as a source of qualified candidates, including returning citizens, immigrants, people with disabilities, and public school and CUNY graduates. These organizations were part of the implementation vision from the beginning.
Our members recruit, prepare, and support job seekers. They build relationships with employers and help workers navigate the transportation, child care, credential, and scheduling challenges that can derail a new job. That work requires staff, expertise, and resources.
We cannot build a policy around community connections and leave the organizations holding those connections outside the budget. Bring providers into planning before vacancies open. Share occupations, qualifications, wages, and hiring timelines. Fund preparation and support after placement. Establish direct relationships among contractors, unions, training providers, and sector intermediaries.
A referral to Workforce1 may be a useful step. It should connect employers with qualified candidates and give workers a fair opportunity to be hired. If that connection fails, the system needs to identify why and respond.
Third, make apprenticeship commitments real.
Our review finds zero apprenticeship progress in contracts reporting against an apprenticeship goal. The Council should establish whether that reflects project timing, reporting gaps, or a failure to connect residents with apprenticeship opportunities. Each explanation calls for a different response. Publish the applicable goals clearly, explain the barriers, and require a plan to address them. The promise of entering a skilled trade deserves more than an unexplained zero.
Fourth, make the opportunity visible across industries.
Construction is central to Community Hiring, but the original case for this authority also included technology, manufacturing, and healthcare careers. Our review identifies substantial supportive housing, mental health, nursing, and care management contracts already within the program. Healthcare-related work is present, even when the reporting categories make it difficult to see.
The City should identify the occupations in these contracts and align hiring obligations with actual employer demand. What credentials are needed? Which openings can become accessible with funded preparation? Where do jobs offer a credible route to higher earnings? We should also examine opportunities involving hospitals, universities, and their contractors, clearly accounting for the authority and partnerships needed to expand access.
Different sectors use different hiring measures. Construction is largely measured through labor hours, while many services contracts use qualifying hires relative to contract value. Keep those measures distinct, and pair them with information everyone can understand: actual workers hired, compensation, retention, and advancement.
Fifth, make economic mobility part of the definition of success.
Publish wages, benefits, hours, and retention at six and twelve months. Track entry into apprenticeships, credentials earned, and movement into better-paying positions. Report outcomes by industry, geography, race, ethnicity, gender, and referral source, with appropriate privacy protections. That will help us see who is gaining access, who remains excluded, and where the process needs to change.
Much of this the City has already promised. In November 2024, the Office of Community Hiring committed to quarterly reports that include vendor-specific progress toward goals and information about the placements and demographics of Community Hires.
The Council should hold the administration to that commitment.
The Council can also make this durable. Section 3502(c) of the City Charter already requires quarterly Community Hiring reports. We urge the Committee to amend it by local law to require, for each covered contract: the applicable goal; unique Community Hires, separating new hires from existing employees; wages and hours; retention at six and twelve months; apprenticeship placements; referral source; and any corrective action taken.
The City should set a timetable for closing reporting gaps, explain contractor performance, and describe corrective action when goals are missed. Seattle’s Priority Hire program and San Francisco’s Local Hiring Policy for Construction show how to link hiring policies with apprenticeship and preparation. Boston’s Residents Jobs Policy illustrates the value of transparent reporting. Los Angeles’s targeted local hire approach offers a model for formally involving community organizations. These approaches differ, but each gives New York practical questions to ask about its own implementation.
Chair Won, we are here as supporters who want this policy to work. We helped make the case for the authority. Now we need the partnerships, resources, and public accountability to turn that authority into opportunity.
New Yorkers are completing training, submitting applications, and showing up at hiring events because they believe they have a place in this economy. Their effort deserves an equally serious commitment from the institutions asking them to participate.
Community Hiring should make it possible to follow a public dollar all the way to a worker’s paycheck—and then ask whether that worker has a better chance to stay, advance, and afford a life here.
That is the promise worth delivering. Thank you.