Organized labor, though far less powerful than it used to be, still helps thousands of New Yorkers.
At an April 15, 2026, rally of thousands of building service workers threatening to strike at apartment buildings across the city, Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that “New York City is a union town.” “That means,” the mayor said, “that we stand with our neighbors when wages and benefits are on the line.” Just two days later, events seemed to confirm the mayor’s view when the doormen, janitors and other building service workers won a contract that continued their free family health insurance, raised pensions 15% and provided a modest wage increase.
The phrase “union town” suggests a high level of union membership and political and economic power. Compared to the rest of the country, the mayor is right: New York is a union town. Nationally, just 9.9% of workers belong to a union, while in New York, the figure is more than twice that, 20.5% (in 2024-2025). Few places in the country surpass that rate — only Honolulu and a handful of other midsize cities.
Compared to the past, however, union density and power in New York are diminished. In 2007, more than 1 in 4 workers carried a union card, rather than 1 in 5 today. As recently as 2017, 17% of private-sector workers in the city were unionized; in the most recent data, that figure is down to 13.7%. (Public-sector union membership has also declined, but it is at a much higher rate, 65.5%.) Mamdani’s victory in the June Democratic mayoral primary, over an opponent supported by many of the largest and most politically active private-sector unions, illuminated a political landscape in which organized labor simply does not matter as much as it once did. Both union boosters and critics too often overlook labor’s diminished power.
To be sure, unionization remains a major factor shaping the economic life of the city. Its most obvious impact is raising wages. At first glance, the effect does not seem great. In 2024-2025, across all jobs in the five boroughs, the median wage for unionized workers was just 10 cents an hour higher than for those without union membership. The previous year it was a more substantial 81 cents an hour, which translates to $1,684.80 a year for someone working a 40-hour week — not a trivial sum for families spending most of their money on necessities, but not a huge one.
But that significantly underestimates the pay premium unionized workers enjoy. For one thing, the baskets of union and nonunion jobs are different, distorting the comparison. If you compare wages within particular industries, the pay premium can be much higher: 40% in construction, 28% in wholesale and retail, and a whopping 58% in leisure and hospitality. (These data are for the metropolitan area as of 2019-2021, the most recent year available.) Under a just-signed agreement, housekeepers in unionized hotels will earn more than $100,000 a year starting in 2032. For another thing, unionized workers are more likely than nonunion ones to receive health insurance, pensions and other benefits through their job, delivering a sense of stability in unsettled times and freeing up money for other kinds of spending.
For workers and their families, the union pay premium can make an existential difference — between struggling economically all the time and having a bit of security and discretionary spending power; between being a renter forever and buying a home (maybe not in the city but in a lower-cost outer suburb); between having a serious sickness bring economic disaster and having health insurance and disability pay easing the burden. For the next generation, parental union membership might mean being able to go to college or trade school as a path to upward mobility rather than having to take the first available job after leaving school.
Employers often have a different perspective, seeing the higher wages and better benefits that come with unionization as a burden and a disincentive to investment. Historically, in some industries like garment manufacturing, when unionization drove up wages, New York employers relocated to cheaper parts of the country and eventually overseas. Today, that is less likely to happen because so many unionized jobs are in industries that are place-specific and cannot be relocated: construction, transportation and utilities, health care, education and government. Employers in some industries, including construction, have described union work rules that limit flexibility as more challenging and costly than union wage rates. (Workers see those same rules as protecting their jobs and health.) Some businesses and nonprofits claim that certain activities, like building affordable housing, are impossible using unionized workers due to high costs. Mayor Mamdani’s campaign pledge to create 200,000 units of affordable housing with union labor will be a test of whether this circle can be squared.
But economic fearmongering aside, unionization also provides real benefits to employers, even if they may not acknowledge them. Decent wages and pensions reduce turnover, meaning experienced workforces and lower costs for recruitment and training. In some industries, with jobs of limited duration, employers can go to unions when they need workers with specific skills, say a construction electrician or a set-builder for a movie or a stage show. Unions in construction, building services, health care and other industries run training and apprenticeship programs that provide the next generation of skilled workers as well as advancement opportunities for current employees. In short, unions help sustain a workforce with a vast range of skills and deep experience — a strength of the New York economy.
The presence of unionized workers benefits the city as a whole. Every additional dollar that goes to a worker is more likely to recirculate locally than a dollar going to a bond trader or real estate mogul, since there is only so much even a luxury-loving tycoon can spend. Unionized workers anchor many outer-borough neighborhoods, owning homes; patronizing local businesses; being active in their churches, mosques and synagogues; coaching youth sports; and volunteering in all sorts of community organizations.
While unions continue to buoy a significant sector of the New York workforce, they have been less effective in helping many of the low-wage workers who are so vital in keeping the city going: delivery and restaurant workers, child carers, taxi and hired car drivers, cleaners and landscapers, and day laborers of all kinds. With some minor exceptions, this vast stratum of New Yorkers — which happens to be disproportionately immigrants and, in many cases, undocumented immigrants — lacks union protection. That has contributed to a level of economic inequality in the city that is very high by national standards. In 2023, the average annual salary for employees in the securities industry was $471,370. That same year, a quarter of New Yorkers, including 420,000 children, lived below the poverty line of $47,190 a year for a family of four. Most of the recent gains for low-wage workers have come not through collective bargaining but government action: a higher minimum wage, scheduling rules, mandatory sick leave and the like. Union support for these measures helped push them through, but the workers themselves aren’t unionized. The “Fight for $15,” begun in 2012 by striking New York fast food workers, was meant to push up minimum wages and spur unionization of low-paid restaurant workers; it proved remarkably successful in the first regard but a flop in the second.
Going forward, it is unclear how much influence organized labor will have over economic development policy, which, in any case, does not seem to be a priority for the Mamdani administration. The mayor is not indebted to the private-sector unions for winning office (though many of them, once Mamdani won the Democratic primary, abandoned Andrew Cuomo in the general — a demonstration of just how transactional their politics have become). Nonetheless, the mayor’s democratic socialism has led to a commitment by his administration to support workers in contract struggles, as Mamdani did with striking nurses as well as the building service workers, and to trying to increase private-sector union density. Perhaps the mayoral appointment most at odds with business-as-usual was the selection of former acting U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su to the newly created post of deputy mayor for economic justice. Su, an inventive longtime supporter of labor, has pledged to aggressively enforce labor laws, take into consideration the interests of working people in economic development decisions and use whatever power the City has to support unionization efforts.
Labor can use whatever help it can get. Though the past decade has seen greater efforts to bring new members into organized labor, the advances have been very modest. One area of success has been among professionals in higher education, museums, digital journalism and gaming, where unionization is beginning to lead to significant changes. Among other things, unions can provide some protection from AI diminishing or eliminating jobs, as the NewsGuild, the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild have done in recent contracts. Still, between January 2023 and June 2024, the United Automobile Workers, which has been at the forefront of organizing professionals, added only 1,571 new members through recognition elections or voluntary employer recognition, while the Service Employees International Union, whose giant New York affiliates represent health, building service and security workers, so gained just 1,134 new members. At this rate, there is no chance that organized labor will regain its former clout in the private sector.
Public-sector unions are much stronger and, in part for this reason, are more frequently the target for attacks blaming organized labor for driving up costs while resisting reform. Government workers, who are unionized at more than four times the rate of private-sector workers in the city, represent nearly half of all unionized workers in the metropolitan area. They are indeed a political force; many will point a finger at the United Federation of Teachers for spearheading a class-size law so expensive that the mayor had to ask for a delay in its implementation, or the Police Benevolent Association for resisting police accountability reforms, or the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association for preventing improvements at Rikers Island.
But the pay for City workers is often exaggerated in attacks on labor. A sanitation worker starts at a base salary of $44,821 per year for a difficult, dangerous, dirty job, and after five-and-a-half years reaches $92,093; a school lunch aide base salary tops out at $49,037, while a City architect makes between $76,262 and $137,501. In recent contracts, City salaries have barely kept up with inflation, and sometimes not even that.
While on some particular, parochial issues, unions representing City workers have considerable sway, for the most part they seem on autopilot, with few new ideas or ambitions. Arrangements that date back decades, like pattern bargaining (in which the City and one union come to an agreement that serves as a template for everyone else), have been kept in place even though they do not serve unions very well. The new administration could be an occasion for rethinking municipal labor relations, to get workers involved in developing more effective and less expensive ways of providing services. Former Transport Workers Union official Marc Kagan, who was on Mamdani’s transition team, suggested convening small groups of workers and midlevel managers to discuss such issues as scheduling, client interactions and wasteful practices, bringing feedback from the front lines to administrators often at a remove. So far, neither side seems interested. The mayor reappointed as head of the Office of Labor Relations Renee Campion, a competent professional first put in the post by Bill de Blasio and kept on by Eric Adams, seemingly a sign that no big changes in the relationship between the City and its employee unions are envisioned. At an event marking his first 100 days in office, the mayor indicated some interest in trying to move toward a more collaborative style of labor relations, but he has so far seemed not very engaged with managing the municipal workforce.
Like it or not, the City will need to make municipal labor relations a priority, as current contracts begin to expire in an unfavorable budgetary climate. Unions will want wages to at least keep up with inflation. Benefits may present an even greater challenge. Right now, health benefits alone for active and retired City workers make up nearly 13% of the City budget. With the federal government cutting back on health care spending and the State not eager to pick up the load, the City and its unions are facing very difficult circumstances.
When the City government asks its unions to partner with it, that usually has been a code word for making their members sacrifice in the face of fiscal challenges. It is not fair to ask modestly paid workers who keep the city going to take a hit as the stock market, real estate prices and inequality all soar. But the public-sector unions should join with the administration in looking for ways to improve service delivery and lower costs. Also, they can use their political influence (as some already do) to pressure Albany and Washington to provide New York City with the kind of support it once received. Stepping further out of the box, public-sector unions might use their large memberships and considerable assets to help with private-sector union organizing, something they have generally treated as none of their business. A shriveling labor movement in the private sector will ultimately make a robust public-sector labor movement unsustainable.
In the decades after World War II, organized labor played an enormous role in shaping life in New York City, not only elevating living standards for millions of workers and their family members but also shaping housing, health care and other aspects of city life. Those days are largely over, but unions still matter, and matter a lot. How much that will continue to be the case will depend to a large measure on their ability to reverse their decline in membership and more aggressively use the power they have. The Mamdani administration presents a moment of opportunity for organized labor. It remains to be seen if labor will seize it.
