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MAMDANI’S PLAN FOR NYC COULD BE A MODEL FOR HOW TO TRANSFORM CHILD
CARE  
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Simon Black
November 5, 2025
The Conversation
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_ Of all of Mamdani’s campaign commitments, free high-quality child
care for every New Yorker from 6 weeks to 5 years old – while
boosting child care workers’ wages to match that of the city’s
public school teachers – could be the most transformative. _

Assembly member Zohran Mamdani attends a news conference on universal
child care at Columbus Park Playground on Nov. 19, 2024, in New York
City, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

 

Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old New York State Assembly member and
democratic socialist, was elected New York City’s mayor
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on Nov. 4, 2025, after pledging to make the city more affordable
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freezing rents, providing free public buses and a network of
city-owned grocery stores.

During his campaign, Mamdani’s promises clearly resonated with New
Yorkers struggling with the high cost of living
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Of all of Mamdani’s campaign commitments, free high-quality child
care [[link removed]] for every New Yorker from
6 weeks to 5 years old – while boosting child care workers’ wages
to match that of the city’s public school teachers – could be the
most transformative.

The cost of child care in New York City is expensive. More than 80% of
families
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with young children cannot afford the average annual cost of US$26,000
for center-based care. A recent study
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found that families with young children are twice as likely to leave
the city as those without children. The study identified housing and
child care costs as key drivers of migration out of the city.

New York’s child care problem mirrors a nationwide system that is
seen by many experts as broken. U.S. families spend
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between 8.9% and 16% of their median income on full-day care for one
child. And prices have been rising
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Between 1990 and 2024, the cost of day care and preschool rose 263%
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much faster than overall inflation.

Despite high prices, child care workers are poorly paid
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In 2024, the median pay for child care workers, who are mostly women
and often women of color, was $15.41 an hour, or $32,050 a year.
That’s nearly at the bottom of all occupations when ranked by annual
pay. Additionally, child care programs face high turnover
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and it’s difficult for them to recruit and retain qualified staff.
Program quality suffers as a result.

As a feminist scholar
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who has written extensively about child care
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I believe Mamdani’s promise of free universal child care, with
decent pay for child care staff, could transform the politics and the
reality of child care in New York and beyond.

An example to the nation

During the Great Depression, the Works Projects Administration
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a New Deal agency created to combat unemployment, established 14
emergency nursery schools
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in New York. Opened between 1933 and 1934, these schools were
primarily intended to offer employment opportunities to unemployed
teachers, but they also became a form of de facto child care for
parents employed on various work-relief projects.

With the onset of World War II, rising numbers of women took up jobs
in the city’s war industries
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In 1941, the lack of adequate child care prompted the administration
of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to fund a handful of already existing
nursery schools, including the New Deal nurseries whose federal
funding had dried up. New York became the only U.S. city to provide
publicly subsidized child care services
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New York provided an example to the nation, and between 1943 and 1945,
wartime child care centers were established in hundreds of cities
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under the federal government’s Lanham Act of 1941
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It’s the closest the U.S. has come to establishing a universal child
care system.

While most wartime child care centers were shuttered at war’s end,
in New York a citywide grassroots mobilization of parents
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the city to keep its centers operating. It marked the first peacetime
allocation of municipal tax dollars for child care programs.

[People hold signs at a news conference.]
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People hold signs as they attend a news conference at Columbus Park
Playground, Nov. 19, 2024, in New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty
Images
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Building blocks

In the 1960s, under the liberal administration of Mayor John Lindsay,
public child care in New York City was expanded, and in 1967 child
care workers organized a union
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AFSCME Local 205 Day Care Employees.

After a bitter three-week strike in 1969 to protest low wages and poor
working conditions, child care workers won a contract that included a
wage scale comparable to that of elementary school teachers in the
city’s public school system. The contract also included a training
program that allowed them to upgrade their skills and get credit for
it.

When President Richard Nixon vetoed federal child care legislation
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1971 that would have provided federal funding for child care programs
across the nation, New York’s child care movement took to the
streets to demand universal child care
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even if the federal government refused to fund it. Groups like the Day
Care Forum and the Committee for Community Controlled Child Care
staged demonstrations on the city’s Triborough Bridge – since
renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge – and set up a one-day “model
day care center” on the lawn of City Hall.

Public child care services survived the city’s fiscal crisis of 1975
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largely due to the activism of working-class communities who fought
against day care closures
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Though far from universal, the child care system in New York today
boasts the largest publicly supported system
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in the country, and can serve as the building blocks for Mamdani’s
plan.

Transformative beyond New York

Mamdani’s campaign estimated that his universal child care plan
would cost $6 billion annually
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To fund his policies, Mamdani has proposed an increase of the
state’s corporate tax rate and raising the city’s income tax by 2
percentage points on New Yorkers earning more than $1 million a year.
While Mamdani will need the assistance of Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise
taxes, Hochul supports universal child care
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even if she disagrees on how to pay for it.

Universal child care has positive economic impacts
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including more women in the workforce and more money in the pockets of
parents to spend in the economy. Research from the liberal Center for
American Progress
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concluded that the availability of affordable high-quality child care
would lead 51% of stay-at-home parents to find work, and about a third
of employed parents to work more hours.

In New York, the disposable income of families could increase by up to
$1.9 billion
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due to the avoidance of child care costs.

One year from the U.S. midterms, Americans remain worried about the
cost of basic needs
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And majorities of both Democrat and Republican voters
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say the cost of child care is a major problem, and they want
government to prioritize helping families pay for it.

If he can find the money to pay for it, with universal child care,
Mamdani could blaze a trail that other policymakers follow.[The
Conversation]

_Simon Black_
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Associate Professor of Labour Studies, __Brock University_
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_This article is republished from __The Conversation_
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the __original article_
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Child Care
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* Child Care Workers
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* New York City
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