A modest proposal for Mamdani's new Office of Labor Relations commissioner

On Nov. 6, the city's contract with District Council 37 expired, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, labor champion and democratic socialist, faces off with about 90,000 unionized city workers.

They aren’t happy.

Quoting Eugene Debs is easy. Filling potholes is nice. This negotiation for the city worker contract will brutally test his commitment to an affordable city for the people who keep it running.

Across DC 37's fragmented locals, discontent has compounded for years: concessionary contracts, privatization, deteriorating benefits and conditions, bully bosses; New York City’s public-sector workers are fed up.

The rank-and-file "Serve NYC, Afford NYC" campaign has been putting down roots in that discontent with a set of popular contract demands. Organizing city workers forced the city comptroller to divest from Israeli bonds. Meanwhile, entrenched union officials look increasingly clownish and disconnected, flailing at popular worker-leaders like Local 3005 president Meghan Peterson who wield power through inspiration and solidarity rather than patronage and intimidation.

The city's healthcare bill is eyewatering, with healthcare costs nearly doubling inflation. For-profit health insurance companies and layers of middlemen take their cut as costs rise.

Every dollar they skim is a dollar that never reaches a librarian, a parks worker, a school custodian. City officials propose to “find savings” by selling members' protected health information to insurance companies to fuel their AI algorithms. Then there is the insolvent Health Insurance Stabilization Fund.

Renee Campion looked at this rats nest and wisely bowed out. Her successor, Liz Vladeck, has her work cut out.

The New York Health Act is the key

Here’s some unsolicited advice from a city health worker with a front row seat to the city’s failing health system:

Vladeck should tell Henry Garrido plainly that the city will stonewall him. That his members will take pay cuts and concede on every demand.

That the only way out runs through Albany, where he and the Municipal Labor Committee will demand the New York Health Act be passed in 2027 to sustainably “find healthcare savings." City and State ranked him first on its Labor Power 100.

Whatever that ranking is worth, it implies juice. Time to squeeze.

Decades of reports by academics and think tanks agree: guaranteeing comprehensive healthcare to every New Yorker would save billions and 92 percent would pay less for drastically expanded care, largely by cutting out the administrative bloat and insurance middlemen who skim the difference.

Universal single-payer healthcare is not a liberal daydream. It is the cheapest option on the table.

This means the smart play is to take healthcare off the bargaining table altogether, for city workers and for the rest of us, who are paying the same middlemen through our premiums, our taxes, and our early deaths due to delayed and denied care. 

Improve wages and healthcare

The rank and file will not accept having their wages cut in exchange for "maintaining health benefits." New York City has seen public sector militancy and wildcat strikes before. If the status quo prevails, does Mamdani want to be the strike-breaker in chief?

Instead, Mamdani’s OLR commissioner can establish herself as a hard-as-nails but fair champion of the working class. Driving a hard bargain with entrenched business union officials and insurance companies, not with rank-and-file workers who keep the city’s lights on. Standing up for the rank and file while bargaining for the common good also happens to be smart politicking.

To the union officials who have built careers out of glad-handing in C-suites and Albany, now is your moment. Put those Pharma golf buddies, steak dinners and Democratic Party triangulations to work for the public good for once. 

Garrido may yet surprise everyone and do the right thing. Stranger things have happened in Albany.

But if he doesn't, Mamdani will have learned a lesson: labor officialdom is not the labor movement, and the mayor's loyalty belongs to the second one.

Mayor Mamdani and his new OLR commissioner have an answer to the corporate stooges maneuvering to maintain the rigged health insurance status quo: “It always seems impossible until it’s done."