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.

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 1 of 3: on building AI infrastructure for the public good.

The debate over artificial intelligence in New York City is, at its core, a debate about infrastructure: the digital infrastructure that determines who gets access to new tools, the workforce infrastructure that helps people adapt as jobs change, the physical infrastructure of energy, water, and data centers that makes AI possible, and the civic infrastructure that ensures the transformation serves the public good.

New York City’s infrastructure is already under great strain, fragmented, and characterized by deep inequalities. Black and Brown communities that lack adequate resources and have historically been denied access to digital tools, good employment opportunities, and public investment tend to fall further behind during periods of transformative change and are also often required to bear the environmental costs of the infrastructure that generates wealth and opportunity elsewhere.

That cannot be the story of AI in New York City.

The city is right to create guardrails around how AI is used in our public schools. But caution in the classroom cannot become caution about preparing New Yorkers for an economy already being reshaped by this technology. AI is advancing, the labor market is changing, and New York still lacks a broader strategy to ensure workers and communities are prepared for what comes next.

Caution is necessary. Disengagement is not a strategy.

The New York City Employment and Training Coalition, together with its members, has already begun taking action. To promote the ethical, responsible, and meaningful use of AI, we have collaborated with the Workforce Professionals Training Institute and JobsFirstNYC to create an 18-point AI guide for nonprofits. Among our members, organizations are introducing AI into schools, community programs, and workforce services, while also preparing to address how AI is changing jobs, altering employers’ expectations, and affecting the skills New Yorkers need to succeed.

But individual initiatives will not be enough. New York City needs a coherent AI agenda built around four essential forms of infrastructure: physical, digital, workforce, and civic.

Digital infrastructure

Support equitable access to AI tools. 

If AI becomes essential to learning, working, and navigating public life, access to it cannot depend on income, race, neighborhood, or ZIP code. We cannot discuss AI’s effect on the labor market without confronting the practical barriers that prevent many New Yorkers from using it. Cost, devices, broadband connectivity, accessibility, language, and digital literacy all shape who can participate in this new economy. An AI access and equity assessment would help the city understand those barriers and direct resources where they are most needed.

Workforce infrastructure

Monitor AI’s impact on the labor market. 

We need real-time intelligence on AI’s impact on jobs, skills, wages, and hiring. What occupations are undergoing change? Which tasks are vanishing? Where are new opportunities appearing? Workforce organizations, educational institutions, employers, labor groups, and policymakers all need access to this information, not months or years after changes take place, but as they happen.

Support workers displaced by AI. 

The precise scale and pace of displacement remain debated, but workers are already feeling the effects. Those effects will not be limited neatly to either blue-collar or white-collar occupations. New York City needs an AI worker-transition playbook and policy agenda. We must identify the workers and occupations most exposed to disruption and make it easier for people to move from one career to another without falling into financial crisis. That means providing career navigation, skills training, income supports, benefits counseling, and clear pathways into occupations with real opportunity.

Create new pathways into careers enabled by AI. 

Even as we support workers facing displacement, we must confront what may be happening to the first rung of the career ladder. Traditional entry-level jobs are shrinking, changing, or disappearing as employers automate the tasks through which workers once gained experience.

How is a career supposed to start if the first rung is gone?

Answering that question will require employers, philanthropy, CUNY, labor, workforce organizations, and city government to work together. We must identify emerging entry points and intentionally build pathways into them, particularly for New Yorkers who have historically been excluded from technological change and the prosperity it can create.

Expand AI training for incumbent workers. 

New York City needs a comprehensive scan of the AI skills-training landscape: what programs exist, which models are succeeding elsewhere, what workers and employers need, and where the gaps remain. Training cannot be limited to people entering technology careers. Workers across healthcare, education, construction, human services, finance, transportation, government, and other industries will increasingly need the ability to work alongside AI systems.

Physical infrastructure

Confront the environmental and community consequences of AI infrastructure. 

AI does not exist in the cloud. It depends on physical facilities that consume massive amounts of land, energy, and water. Expanding data centers can put new pressure on communities already contending with environmental burdens, aging infrastructure, and insufficient investment in climate resilience.

Every community affected by this build-out must be resourced, compensated, protected, and meaningfully involved in the decisions being made. The city must establish strong standards for water and energy use, emissions, land use, transparency, and community benefits. The communities hosting the infrastructure should share directly in the economic opportunity it creates.

That includes jobs. Constructing, operating, maintaining, securing, and improving data centers and their related energy and water systems will require skilled workers. New York City should connect those investments to local hiring, apprenticeships, workforce training, and durable career pathways. We should not separate the infrastructure conversation from the talent conversation.

Civic infrastructure

Build AI capacity among nonprofits and small businesses. 

Although large institutions have the capital, staff, and infrastructure necessary to experiment with AI, most nonprofits and small businesses do not. Yet, these organizations employ New Yorkers, serve communities, and help sustain neighborhood economies.

They need readiness assessments, technical assistance, practical clinics, shared tools, and peer-learning opportunities. New York City should consider an AI civic engagement corps that can help community institutions understand the technology, adopt it responsibly, and use it to strengthen their work.

Promote responsible AI adoption among large employers. 

Adoption cannot be measured by speed or efficiency alone. Employers must also address bias, accessibility, worker voice, job quality, privacy, transparency, and the consequences of redesigning jobs around automated systems.

The city should establish clear standards for responsible AI use and a meaningful way for employers to demonstrate that their practices meet them. New Yorkers deserve confidence that these tools are being deployed ethically—not simply because they are available.

Advance effective municipal workforce AI use. 

City agencies are making progress, but not at the speed this moment requires. New York City is long overdue for a serious examination of how municipal work is organized, how technology can improve services, and how public employees can use AI responsibly. AI cannot justify indiscriminate cuts to the workforce. Instead, it should be a chance to invest more in public workers, reduce administrative burdens, address problems more effectively, and improve the way residents experience government.

Harnessing AI for the Public Good

AI is the most consequential and most dangerous technology of our lifetime. The same capacity that organizes information, expands knowledge, and supports problem-solving can also reproduce bias, erode privacy, spread misinformation, and reshape how we learn and think. We have never held a tool with this much power. But it will not produce equitable outcomes on its own. That takes public systems built deliberately to govern it.

In a recent Fast Company article, two scholars at Harvard and Johns Hopkins that realizing AI’s potential in local government will require strong leadership “to overcome gaps in imagination, skill deficits, and employee anxiety, compounded by the complexity of ensuring that AI changes comply with democratic values.” Their suggestion of a “systematic approach” is both sobering and sensible, especially for a mayor who has proven to be remarkably skilled at communication. Such an approach would require “a powerful narrative of the service benefits while using their political and legal skills to negotiate with the city council, union, and employee leaders.”

New York has enormous assets to build from, and limitations. But becoming a leader in AI cannot be measured only by the companies we attract, the technologies we develop, or the productivity gains we achieve. It must also be measured by whether workers benefit from that progress and whether technological change expands, rather than constrains, pathways to economic mobility, including by reimagining how government works.

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.

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: an open letter to the new EDC leadership. Stay tuned for more of our workforce ideas throughout the week.

September 1, 2026

Mr. Anthony Shorris and Ms. Lina Khan c/o NYC Economic Development Corporation

Dear President Shorris and Board Chair Khan,

On behalf of the more than 220 members of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC) — including businesses, community-based organizations, institutions of higher education, training providers, labor partners, and other organizations working across New York City’s workforce ecosystem — we offer our warmest congratulations on your recent appointments to lead the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).

We are encouraged by the vision you and Mayor Mamdani articulated when your appointments were announced: economic development must advance affordability and build an economy that, in the Mayor’s words, “can and must include the working class.” Today, 46 percent of working-age New York City households do not earn enough to meet the city’s true cost of living. As Mr. Shorris stated, this is “a moment when New York is asking… who [the city’s] economy is for.” The answer must be the New Yorkers who keep this city running but can no longer afford to live here.

That question has a long history in this city. In fact, Mr. Shorris has posed it before. In an October 1990 essay in the New York Times, written shortly after serving as Finance Commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch, he argued that the choices made when a city’s resources are constrained reveal what it actually values. The easy moves, such as raising taxes or cutting services, demand no imagination, while the harder and more important work requires government to make better use of the powers and assets already at its disposal. The essay’s provocative title asked, “What Kind of People Are We?,” urging readers to consider what those choices would say about the city’s collective values.

The constraint today is different in form, but not in character. New York’s K-shaped economy is widening the distance between those building wealth and those struggling simply to afford the city. Increasingly, the binding constraint is affordability, and the tools available to address it include the public assets the city controls, including land, leases, financing, incentives, and procurement.

That makes the underlying question much the same: deal by deal, investment by investment, what does the city’s economic development portfolio tell us about who gets to participate in growth — and, ultimately, who this economy is for?

Answering that question requires looking not only at what city government invests in, but at how it is organized to deliver on those investments.

For NYCEDC, that means starting with government itself: reducing fragmentation, moving away from the inefficient approach that asks every agency and every program to solve every problem, and elevating workforce development as core economic infrastructure — with a clear mandate to connect New Yorkers to opportunity, employers to talent, and economic growth to economic mobility.

What the Record Shows

Start with what NYCEDC was built to do. The agency emerged from two predecessors: the Public Development Corporation and the Financial Services Corporation. Their merger brought together two powerful tools: land and capital. Talent was not part of its remit—an oversight that still haunts us today. NYCEDC is formidable at assembling sites and structuring financing, but its institutional structure was not designed to build the citywide workforce infrastructure needed to help New Yorkers access and advance through the employment opportunities its economic development strategy creates.

To its credit, NYCEDC increasingly recognizes the importance of talent. At the Committee on Economic Development’s Preliminary Budget Hearing in March, Interim President Jeanny Pak described workforce development as one of the agency’s four “strategic pillars.” The instinct is right; the architecture is not. Workforce development should be a pillar of the city’s economic strategy, but that does not mean it should sit within its economic development agency. Land and capital have an institution built to deploy them. Talent requires the same — durable capacity, authority, resources, and accountability — organized as a partner to NYCEDC, not another function layered on top.

Three of the city’s most consequential economic priorities — the green economy, early childhood, and artificial intelligence — show why that distinction matters.

Green infrastructure and the green economy.

The 2024 Green Economy Action Plan may be NYCEDC’s clearest attempt to put talent alongside land and capital. It projected nearly 400,000 green jobs by 2040 and committed to more than 12,000 apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships and five borough-based workforce training centers. But the June NYC Council Workforce Development and Economic Development Committees oversight hearing on the State of the Green Economy Action Plan exposed the distance between ambition and execution: only one of the five centers was scheduled to open, roughly 375 New Yorkers had been connected to pre-apprenticeships, and the administration could not provide complete placement and employment outcomes or commit to annual reporting against the plan’s targets. Even the headline $600 million workforce commitment largely reflected a broader youth workforce initiative rather than dedicated green-economy spending. Meanwhile, physical development is advancing, including a $100 million climate innovation hub and workforce facility at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The City has durable machinery for assembling land and deploying capital; it still lacks comparable machinery to turn those investments into talent pipelines, jobs, and advancement.

Early childhood reveals the gap from another angle.

NYCEDC’s Childcare Innovation Lab explicitly reframed child care as an economic development issue, producing research that quantified billions of dollars in economic output and tax revenue lost when caregivers leave the workforce or reduce their hours. Yet, when asked in March how NYCEDC considers child care as a condition of workforce participation, officials agreed that child care “can’t be separated from economic development” but could not identify programs in the portfolio addressing access to safe, reliable, and affordable care. The analysis survived; the capacity to act on it did not.

Artificial intelligence makes the institutional gap especially visible.

NYCEDC helped secure OpenAI’s first East Coast office and establish the AI Nexus, while the workforce component centered largely on internships connecting CUNY students with AI-first startups. Meanwhile, concerns about AI’s impact on workers and young people have fueled calls for moratoriums and restrictions elsewhere in City government — with little visible NYCEDC voice in that debate. The City is simultaneously recruiting a game-changing technology and debating how to contain its effects, without a clear institution responsible for translating that change into skills, career pathways, and economic mobility. That is the missing middle: an economic strategy without an equivalent talent strategy.

Taken together, these examples point to the same structural problem. NYCEDC is increasingly identifying the workforce implications of the economy it helps build. What New York City lacks is a permanent counterpart that can turn those signals into a coordinated talent response. NYCETC’s 2025 analysis of nearly $640 million in annual city workforce spending, Putting Our Dollars to Work, identified no significant NYCEDC funding stream within the citywide workforce system. NYCEDC also does not hold a seat on the NYC Workforce Development Board, which exercises statutory oversight of nearly $90 million annually in workforce spending. A review of Board minutes since early 2023 indicates that NYCEDC has not led a substantive agenda item and has participated only intermittently.

NYCEDC’s real power lies in the tools it uses to shape where the city grows and which industries grow with it. The opportunity now is to use those tools to advance economic mobility for New York City’s working class.

A Shared Mandate, Written Into Every Deal

Your appointments create an opportunity to close these gaps and establish a new model of economic development — one in which workforce strategy is embedded from the beginning of every major investment, rather than added after development decisions have already been made.

The recommendations below follow a governing logic Ms. Khan has described in her own work: begin with a full accounting of the authorities you already hold and ask why some of them have gone unused for years; then prefer clear, administrable rules to elaborate procedural machinery that is hard to enforce and harder for the public to understand. Nothing that follows requires new legislation or new appropriations to begin. All of it requires the agency to use what it already controls.

1. Write job quality standards into the term sheet. NYCEDC’s real leverage is land, leases, bond financing, and tax incentives — tools the agency already controls and deploys every day. Every major deal should include wage floors, benefit requirements, local and community hiring commitments, advancement pathways, and enforceable clawback provisions if promised jobs and hiring outcomes are not delivered. Public subsidy should be proportional to public benefit: the more public value a project receives, the more it should return through quality jobs, opportunities for residents, and long-term economic mobility.

Enforceability is essential. Ms. Khan has been direct about the failure mode here: conditions attached to a transaction, with no clarity about whether anyone will enforce them, leave the public unable to tell what government actually did. Community hiring commitments that exist only as aspirational language in a press release create that same murky picture. Each standard should therefore carry a named trigger, a reporting obligation, and a consequence — so that a New Yorker reading the deal can tell what was promised and what happens if it is not delivered.

2. Put the city’s economic justice commitments on the record. If workforce development is a strategic pillar of the city’s economic development agenda, the city must hold itself accountable for upholding it, including within its own government. An annual Job Quality Report should document the workforce commitments made across publicly supported projects, city contracts, and municipal hiring initiatives, and assess whether those commitments were fulfilled. It should disclose wages at placement and after twelve months, retention rates, and advancement outcomes, disaggregated by project, agency, and demographic group, and be published with the same seriousness as the city’s financial reporting.

This is not a call for disclosure in place of substantive standards. As Ms. Khan has cautioned, policymakers can mistake additional reporting or administrative steps for meaningful change, leaving people’s lives more complicated but no better. The report should instead connect promises to performance: what the city committed to, what its agencies and partners delivered, who benefited, and where results fell short.

3. Build the infrastructure to unite workforce and economic development. A strategic pillar cannot stand on stated intentions alone; it needs an institutional structure that can deliver. If talent is essential to every NYCEDC project, workforce development deserves comparable standing: a corporation with a fiduciary board, the authority to hold and deploy capital, the ability to enter multiyear agreements with employers and training providers, and a seat at the table from the initial term sheet forward.

This would consolidate, not expand, functions and funding now distributed across multiple agencies. Building on the work of the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Workforce Development, a Workforce Development Corporation would clarify responsibilities, strengthen accountability, and better align workforce investments with the city’s economic development priorities.

The approach builds on a principle you have advanced before. In 1990, Mr. Shorris questioned whether the city could “afford to have four separate economic development agencies,” recognizing that the opportunity lay not in austerity but in bringing fragmented functions together to improve productivity. Today, that same logic applies even more urgently to workforce development, where fragmentation creates precisely the costs Ms. Khan has warned against: a Rube Goldberg structure that is difficult to administer, prone to failure, and confusing for the people it is meant to serve.

The 1990 essay ended with a question about solidarity: whether New Yorkers would meet the city’s challenges separately, each protecting a parochial interest, or together as one public. Today, the answer should be reflected in every public investment: who benefits, who gets hired, who has a genuine opportunity to get ahead, and how the city holds itself accountable for delivering on those commitments. NYCETC and its more than 220 members stand ready to help translate that vision into practice, and we look forward to seeing the results.

Sincerely,

New York City Employment and Training Coalition