Introducing the Thursday Throughline, a new weekly feature from NYCETC.

A throughline is the thread that runs through a story and ties it together. New York’s workforce story spans reports, budgets, hearings, and the experiences of workers and providers. Each Thursday, we’ll pull one thread: a report, data point, or policy development. We’ll show how it connects to the issues our coalition works on every day and to the voices we’ve featured on The NYC Workforce Drop. Every edition ends with a concrete recommendation for policymakers, employers, or our field.

Our first Throughline looks at NYCETC member United Neighborhood Houses’ new report, Building a Strong Foundation, and what it tells us about the people who make child care expansion possible.

New York’s child care expansion is an economic investment. It lets parents work, helps employers keep talent, and creates jobs in an essential industry. Its success depends on whether child care providers can afford to stay in the field. Right now, many cannot: in 2023, New York City child care workers had a median income of just $25,000, the lowest of any care workers in the city and 45% of the median for all other workers.

United Neighborhood Houses’ Building a Strong Foundation finds that the community providers it surveyed receive, on average, 36% less per child than the cost of high-quality care, as estimated by UNH’s cost model. Expanding access means funding the workforce and the full cost of running these programs. That is the argument behind NYCETC’s statement, Universal Childcare Is Free. The Workers Aren’t, and our conversation with Lauren Melodia of the Center for New York City Affairs on The NYC Workforce Drop: care workers are our city’s most essential infrastructure.

Other cities and states offer forward-thinking approaches to paying early childhood educators more. Washington, D.C., and New Mexico use dedicated public funding to support higher child care wages, with New Mexico pairing long-term investment with targeted wage supplements. Approaches vary, but the lesson is consistent: government can raise the revenue, set compensation expectations, and ensure the money reaches the people providing care.

NYC should establish a recurring city-state compensation equity fund, built into early childhood contracts, with salary progression, benefits, annual adjustments, and a separate formula for home-based providers. Dedicated progressive revenue, such as a high-income surcharge or a payroll assessment on large employers, should be evaluated to sustain it. The proposed Early Learning Child Care Act, which would fund care through an employer payroll tax, is one starting point for that discussion.

New York has already shown what temporary support can accomplish and what happens when it ends. The Schuyler Center documents a decline in full-time educator bonuses from $3,000 in 2023 to $2,250 in 2024. Two subsequent state budgets provided no dedicated child care workforce funding, and the FY2027 budget omitted the proposed compensation fund. The state’s separate employer cost-sharing pilot helps some working families afford care, but it does not close educators’ wage gaps. Making care affordable for parents and making care work financially sustainable for educators require investment on both sides.

New America’s history of employer-sponsored benefits shows why a lasting public commitment matters. Employers should help build community care capacity, and families should keep their access to care when they change jobs. Fund compensation parity as an explicit part of early childhood expansion. A teacher’s path to a decent wage should not depend on which building houses the classroom or on how old the children are.

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: the fourth and final installment, which proposes ways to grow and better integrate workforce funding streams.

As Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su has described, a bridge is only as strong as the strands that hold it up. New York City’s workforce system has plenty of strands, including programs, funders, agencies, and employers, but too few are woven together. The result is a system weaker than the sum of its parts. This final installment of NYCETC’s “Four Days, Four Big Workforce Ideas” looks at how to better connect them.

With slow job growth, AI disruption, federal immigration crackdowns, and rising demand for talent in sectors from care to advanced manufacturing, there is growing consensus that NYC needs to do more to meet its labor market challenges. But two major barriers stand in the way of meaningful action for jobseekers, workers seeking advancement, and businesses in need of skilled talent.

The first is that, despite significant investment, particularly in programs for young people, NYC still lacks the funding needed to pursue a truly transformational workforce agenda. The second is that the stakeholders who control the purse strings, above all government and philanthropy, are not on the same page about priorities, metrics, and overall strategy. So long as this is true, we will struggle collectively to take big swings at the most intractable problems, even with ample resources. 

What follows are our ideas for how New York City can grow its pot of workforce funds, derive more value from each dollar, and shift what those dollars buy us, from low-wage job placements toward real economic mobility. 

Part One: Gridlock: Too Little Money or Too Little Alignment?

Funding decisions play out in countless negotiations, from budget debates in Congress to family foundation boardrooms. Ultimately, dollars will follow political pressure and the flow of events. At the local level, as NYCETC detailed in its 2025 report, Putting Our Dollars to Work, New York City has significantly increased support for workforce programming that serves youth and young adults, but city investments in most other populations, above all working adults, have not kept pace. Federally, investment might be best described as “uncertain, and under threat.”  

For context, in Fiscal Year 2024, New York City spent $589 million across its major workforce programs. Of that total, the city itself contributed approximately $363 million, or 62 percent. (New York State contributed just $11 million, or 2 percent.) But the impressive topline city figure obscures a significant imbalance. Most city funding is concentrated in youth programs, particularly the Summer Youth Employment Program. Programs serving working-age adults rely much more heavily on federal dollars and operate at a far smaller scale.

Of that $589 million total in FY24, federal funding accounted for about $215 million, or 37 percent. The largest single source comes through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), signed into law by President Obama in 2014. When WIOA passed, it ended a decade-plus of brutal cuts to federal workforce spending that hit New York City especially hard: In nominal dollars, the city’s annual federal workforce allocation under the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which preceded WIOA, plunged from nearly $97 million in Program Year 2002 to under $63 million in PY 2013. Adjusted to constant 2024 dollars, that represented a 50 percent cut. 

Annual WIOA funding to NYC has fluctuated substantially since then, with a sharp dip in 2017-18 and a relative peak in 2023-24. Since President Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration’s budget requests have proposed consolidating WIOA’s core Title I programs into a single block grant at roughly 30% below current funding, while eliminating WIOA Title II adult education and Job Corps entirely. Congress declined to adopt the consolidation for FY2026, though House appropriators have since advanced an FY2027 bill with deep cuts of their own.

In addition to local and federal funding, philanthropy is a third major source. New York City stands second to none in the depth and commitment of its foundations that support workforce development. In fact, based on a survey by the NYC Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF), collective annual philanthropic support for workforce programs and services is comparable to what the city gets each year under the WIOA. Philanthropic support totaled approximately $92 million in 2024, compared to $99.4 million in WIOA funding for the roughly contemporaneous Program Year 2024. Of course, that $92 million is the sum of dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller grants—each with its own objectives and milestones—to provider organizations, intermediaries, and other groups. 

Ask a dozen stakeholders in New York City’s workforce development ecosystem what the system is supposed to accomplish, and you might get a dozen different answers. The absence of a guiding principle or goal renders it almost impossible to attempt change at scale, a constraint that becomes more painful as labor market conditions deteriorate. Worse, government itself seems to be working at cross-purposes, as different agencies at both the federal and city levels follow the dictates of program design and funding restrictions, often with little coordination across them.

In Washington, the Trump administration has articulated a strategic vision for workforce policy but has undermined it through repeated proposed funding cuts and its broader attempt to reorganize the Cabinet, which has badly strained the U.S. Department of Labor’s capacity. Meanwhile, Congress appears to be punting on WIOA reauthorization altogether, likely delaying any meaningful reconsideration of the law until at least 2029.

Closer to home, multiple efforts across previous mayoral administrations to define a larger guiding vision never came to fruition. Bill de Blasio’s Jobs for New Yorkers Task Force, the Future of Workers Task Force, and Executive Order 22 during Eric Adams’s mayoralty all faltered after City Hall turned its attention elsewhere. Without shared objectives and a forceful mandate to work in concert, city agencies largely carried on as they traditionally have.  

The result, often lamented by workforce veterans, is that our field seems stuck in an endless loop of discussing how siloed the system remains, and what that costs us in terms of scale and service quality. 

Part Two: The Bridge – A New Compact for Mobility

Part of what makes that unending conversation so frustrating is that it has occasionally surfaced ideas with the potential to break the cycle. In its final report released in 2023, the Future of Workers Task Force proposed a Talent Investment Fund, in which leaders from philanthropy and government would blend resources to create a pool of dollars that they could jointly disburse through a grant process. The explicit justification was to create the Fund “as a vehicle for collaborative co-investment of public and private dollars based on shared criteria.” In theory, this vehicle could align objectives, standardize definitions, milestones, and metrics, and foster innovation.

The jump from report to reality is long and daunting, and the Talent Investment Fund proved unable to stick the landing. Government and philanthropic leaders were unable to resolve questions of ownership and administration, tricky city procurement and budgeting rules, philanthropy’s concern that it would not have an equal voice in strategy or investment decisions, and a failure to identify a clear guiding principle, such as a focus on economic mobility or apprenticeships. 

These obstacles are real, as are concerns on both sides about potential hostile federal audits, skeptical foundation board members, and resentment from organizations that see this potential change as a threat. They’re also all surmountable, if the parties decide that the benefits of a blended fund matter more. For system leaders, these benefits include greater strategic clarity and, vitally, a mechanism to force common ground on priorities and practices. For grantees, combining dollars would mean a lighter reporting burden and lower opportunity costs associated with scrambling to fill program budget gaps and then figuring out which funding streams can cover which services. With limited dollars, boosting the return on public and philanthropic investments is a significant win.  

With all this in mind, it’s time to try again. The good news is that the two biggest pieces are already in place. 

On the philanthropic side, the foundation already exists. The New York City Workforce Funders Collaborative (NYCWF) pools resources from 12 foundations and corporate philanthropies, establishes shared priorities, and makes collective grant decisions. Its 2026–2028 strategy focuses specifically on middle-wage careers and economic mobility through research, high-potential pilots, and public-private partnerships. NYCWF is strongly positioned to serve as the philanthropic partner, or even the initial fiscal and grantmaking home, for a broader Talent Investment Fund. That is precisely the role philanthropy can play: absorbing the risk of early experimentation so that government can invest with greater confidence and scale what works.

Meanwhile, the NYC Workforce Development Board has provided a public sector starting point. Its plan to utilize $1 million in WIOA funding for a Workforce Innovation Fund offers a practical seed-and-match model. The Talent Investment Fund could absorb or build upon that structure, enabling the combined capacity to both launch promising approaches and test, strengthen, and expand them. That public sector commitment could serve as the foundation for a broader investment architecture, drawing additional resources from economic development activity, publicly controlled assets, philanthropy, and employers.

These two ideas aren’t exactly the same, but it’s hard to believe they can’t be reconciled. Motivation to try should be particularly strong on the city side, given the restrictions on how WIOA dollars can be used. For instance, a proposal to expand high-quality sector training probably could not include a budget line to assist participants with wraparound supports such as childcare or transportation, leaving gaps that providers would then need to fill through other means. A Talent Investment Fund could remove that need, streamlining the process for providers while ensuring a higher share of the award goes to services for jobseekers, workers, and businesses.

The possibilities are already visible. New York City Economic Development Corporation’s (EDC) Economic Mobility Networks reflect a straightforward idea. When the city invests in major development projects, residents in the surrounding neighborhoods should be positioned to benefit from the growth those projects create. Its cruise terminal community funds offer another model, demonstrating how fees, leases, concessions, and publicly controlled assets can generate sustained community investment rather than one-time grants. And the Northwell School of Health Sciences, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, shows how the pieces fit together. Philanthropy creates room to innovate, government provides the infrastructure for scale, and an employer builds a talent pipeline around its own needs. That it is happening in a sector where demand is urgent and the careers on offer are durable makes the model all the more worth building on.

Through its first eight-plus months, the Mamdani administration has largely kept quiet on workforce issues. Given the mayor’s focus on affordability and commitment to working-class New Yorkers, this omission is puzzling. This administration has a specific economic justice lens, an affordability mandate, and new leadership at EDC with skills in value capture and operational expertise. Announcing a Talent Investment Fund would break the silence and align with the team’s vision for the city.

Deputy Mayor Julie Su has described the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables as a collection of individual wires that, when brought together, become strong enough to hold up the bridge. That is how we should think about workforce funding. Each investment may be valuable on its own, but if these investments remain standalone pieces, they will not hold up over time or get New Yorkers from point A to point B.

Doing that requires a complete vision, sufficient investment, and a clear understanding of what the investment is supposed to accomplish. The goal is not simply to spend workforce dollars, but to connect New Yorkers to opportunities across the city and move them toward genuine economic mobility.

The problem is not that we do not know what works. We do. Across this city, we can point to successful training programs, employer partnerships, apprenticeships, and career pathways that move New Yorkers into good jobs and help businesses find the talent they need.

Workforce investment should be part of the economic development deal from the start, not an add-on at the end. When public action creates economic value, whether through a subsidy, rezoning, major development, public contract, or other investment, the question of who gets access to the resulting opportunity should already have an answer. Businesses and developers that benefit should help build and finance the talent pipelines that make their growth possible, with public and private investment working toward the same goal of expanding economic mobility.

That compact cannot begin with employers. It has to begin at City Hall.

This mayoral administration has an opportunity to plant a flag and say clearly that this is how New York City will pursue economic success and economic justice together. This is what we will invest. This is what we will expect from those who benefit from public action. These are the outcomes we will measure. And this is how we will hold ourselves and our partners accountable for delivering them.

And accountability cannot end when the deal is announced. We should track commitments, measure outcomes, and publish results. Which investments created pathways into good jobs? Which employers hired, trained, and advanced New Yorkers? Which public investments produced economic mobility, and which did not? Transparency should allow government, employers, labor, philanthropy, and communities to see whether we are collectively delivering on the compact we made.

We know how to build successful pathways. What we have lacked is the joint commitment to connect them, invest in them, and hold ourselves accountable for whether New Yorkers can actually reach them. City Hall should set that expectation, demonstrate it through its own investments, require it of those who benefit from public action, and show New Yorkers the results.

This is what economic mobility looks like: connecting New York’s strongest ideas into a bridge from precarity to prosperity. The alternative is a city that keeps generating extraordinary wealth on one side of the bridge, while leaving working New Yorkers stranded on the other.

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.

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 2 of 3: on redesigning work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together.

by Mary Beth Williams

For generations, entry-level jobs have been where young people learn how to work, where they build skills, relationships, confidence, and the experience that unlocks the next opportunity. As AI changes the tasks traditionally performed by junior workers, we risk weakening that first rung of the career ladder just as young New Yorkers are trying to get their footing.

​That outcome is not inevitable.

​New York should be asking a more ambitious question than how we train young people for the jobs that remain: How do we redesign work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together?

Singapore offers one model for what that could look like. The comparison is instructive. Like New York City, Singapore is a dense, global economic center with a diverse workforce, a population measured in the millions, and a government managing a budget of more than $115 billion annually. Both have also made ambitious commitments to harness AI as a driver of economic opportunity. 

But Singapore has paired its recent investments in AI with something New York has not yet developed at the same scale: a deliberate strategy to anticipate how technology will change work and help employers and workers adapt before disruption occurs.

Singapore’s Jobs Transformation Maps examine how technology—including generative AI—is expected to reshape jobs and skills across 19 industries. The government is also putting substantial resources behind workforce transformation initiatives and job redesign, offering employers public support to rethink roles, work processes, and responsibilities as technology changes how work gets done. Employers can now receive public subsidies covering up to 70% of the cost of job-redesign projects.

New York City has made promising investments of its own, positioning itself as the “Applied AI Capital of the World” and investing in the infrastructure, business incubators, and innovation challenges that can make that ambition real. But we have not yet articulated an equally ambitious strategy for the workers whose jobs will change along the way. 

We should start with the jobs that serve as the first rung of our career ladder.

Instead of waiting to see which entry-level roles quietly disappear, New York should work with employers now to identify where AI is changing junior-level work and test how those jobs can be redesigned. That means asking which tasks can technology take on, which human capabilities become more valuable, and what new responsibilities can give young workers meaningful opportunities to learn, contribute, and advance?

This isn’t about preserving jobs or tasks that no longer make sense. It’s about preserving pathways. When AI eliminates the tasks through which generations of workers learned a profession, we need to be intentional about creating new ways into that profession, or new pathways to opportunity altogether.

What would that look like in practice?

Start small. A philanthropic partner could provide the risk capital and convening power to bring together employers, CUNY, workforce organizations, and—critically—young workers themselves. The group could identify a handful of occupations where AI is rapidly changing the work traditionally assigned to junior employees and recruit employers willing to redesign those roles rather than simply eliminate them.

Then examine the work itself. What does an entry-level employee do today? Which tasks can AI automate or accelerate? Which responsibilities that once required more experience could now move down the career ladder? And what training, supervision, or workplace supports would allow a young worker to take them on successfully?

Public and philanthropic dollars could help employers answer those questions in practice—funding job-design technical assistance, training, implementation, and evaluation so individual businesses are not asked to shoulder the full cost and risk of experimentation.

And we should be clear about what success means. The test is not simply whether AI makes an employer or worker more productive. It is whether the redesigned job still functions as a genuine first rung of a career ladder. Are young workers gaining skills and meaningful responsibility? Are they staying, advancing, and earning more? And does the redesigned role create enough value for employers to ensure the model can be sustained and expanded?

If it works, New York would have something far more valuable than another report, advisory council, or working group conversation about the future of work. We would have a model employers can adopt, workforce organizations can support, and government can help bring to scale.

Making this happen will require employers willing to experiment, funders willing to invest before all the answers are known, and workforce and education partners willing to build and learn alongside them. New York already has the essential ingredients, including world-class employers and civic institutions, an extraordinary workforce ecosystem, and a city actively investing in AI and its economic potential.

What we need now is the same level of ambition for economic mobility. AI will reshape how we work and how careers begin. The question is whether we redesign the first rung of the career ladder with intention, or let technology redesign it for us.

Let’s make sure every young New Yorker still has a path to opportunity in the economy AI creates.