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THIS WEEK AT CITY HALL: LABOR ON THE MARCH – THE WOLF IS AT THE
DOOR  
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Bob Hennelly
January 31, 2026
WBAI Pacifica Radio NYC [[link removed]]

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_ The first time since 1964 that New York City has set a minimum wage
standard for private sector workers and other top labor stories in New
York City. Mayor Mamdani addresses the $12 billion budget gap left by
his predecessor Mayor Adams. _

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NEW YORK CITY HALL-On Thursday, scores of members of the Taxi Workers
Alliance braved
[[link removed]]arctic
temperatures to rally on the steps of City Hall to celebrate passage
of landmark legislation to hold Uber and Lyft accountable for
capriciously deactivating drivers who in the past had no recourse. The
new law provides first in the nation legal protections for 100,000
drivers in New York City against the Wall Street backed Uber and Lyft.

It was just the latest success by the Taxi Workers Alliance for
drivers whose industry Mayor Mike Bloomberg decimated with the help of
some of his top aides who went on to work for Uber and Lyft even as
drivers committed suicide
[[link removed]]out
of despair, one at the gates of City Hall in 2018.

Hours later the City Council would also pass the Aland Etienne Safety
& Security Act
[[link removed]], named
for the 32 BJ SEIU
[[link removed]]member who was
murdered in the line of his duties protecting the public at a Park
Avenue office building back in July from an assault gun toting
shooter. An off-duty police officer was also killed.

The new legislation, like the Uber & Lyft legislation, had been vetoed
by Mayor Adams, would provide a living wage and benefits close to a
workforce of 82,000 private security guards who are predominantly
Black and Latino.

It is the first time since 1964 that New York City has set a minimum
wage standard for private sector workers. Advocates of the bill said
the legislation would help reduce the industry's 77 percent annual
turnover rate.

Meanwhile, 15,000 nurses with the New York State Nurses Association
[[link removed]]continued their three week
old strike against New York City's wealthiest hospitals Mount Sinai,
Montefiore, and New York-Presbyterian which paid its CEO $26 million.
At issue, holding on to staffing and benefit gains realized after the
COVID pandemic that killed 1.1 million Americans including 3,600
nurses in the first wave, including 500 in New York City.

Here in New York City, and around the nation, unions like 1199 SEIU
[[link removed]]were on the march
in the days after the broad daylight murder in Minneapolis of Alex
Jeffrey Pretti [[link removed]], an ICU
union nurse at the VA by federal immigration officers.

Not since the 1960s has there been such an earth shaking convergence
of resistance to a federal government. Back then it was to oppose a
war being fought on the other side of the world. Today, it was about
the attempted occupation by masked federal immigration agents of
Minneapolis looking to purge the nation of "suspect" people of color.

On this day, New York City City Hall was on the frontlines of an
increasingly bloody conflict between local and state governments in
places where the population was opposed to the Trump junta's forced
removal of tens of thousands of men, women and children it judged
deportable without due process.

On Wednesday, Mayor Mamdani told reporters in the Blue Room
[[link removed]]the City's fiscal
picture was bleak thanks to a $12 billion budget gap left to him by
his predecessor Mayor Adams. The former Mayor was last seen in Times
Square pitching a new cryptocurrency coin "that would also serve to
beat back antisemitism and anti-Americanism," according to the AP.

"The Adams administration dramatically and intentionally understated
the problem," Mayor Mamdani told reporters in the Blue Room on
Wednesday. "The budget gaps are twice as high year after year.
Notably, Mayor Adams underestimated known budget expenses so he could
show FY26 was balanced. These are not differences in opinion between
accountants. They are measured to the tune of more than $7 billion
beyond what he published."

Mayor Mamdani is slated to present his first proposed budget in
mid-February. He and City Council Speaker Menin have until the end of
June to reach a budget deal. Albany's budget deadline is April 1st,
although historically it has blown the date.

Mayor Mamdani likened the 2026 budget challenge as on a "scale greater
than the Great Recession" that would "require us to pursue every
single avenue. That means looking inward into savings and
efficiencies. That also means raising taxes on the wealthiest New
Yorkers and the most profitable corporations. And it means
recalibrating the relationship with the state."

As every Mayor before him has done, Mayor Mamdani reminded reporters
that New York City is the economic engine for not just New York State
but the nation, perennially sending billions more a year to Albany and
D.C. than it gets back in aid.

That's the equation the Mayor wants to change, noting that the annual
extraction of billions by the state and feds comes at a time when one
in four New York City residents lives below the poverty line.

In demanding a re-set with Albany, Mayor Mamdani also blamed former
Governor Andrew Cuomo for the city's fiscal duress.

"However, Eric Adams is not the only reason we are here," Mandani
said. "For over a decade, as he governed from Albany, former Governor
Andrew Cuomo extracted our City's resources, using our revenue to
address state-level holes, while withholding from the City what it was
owed. The result is a stunning fiscal imbalance. New Yorkers
contribute 54.5 percent of state revenue and receive only 40.5 percent
back."

Mamdani continued. "No part of this state gives more and gets less in
return than New York City. While we did not create this crisis, we
will solve it. And we will do so, without balancing the budget on the
backs of working people."

In describing the City of New York's fiscal train wreck, Mayor Mamdani
made no reference to the current occupant of the White House,
President Trump, whose Office of Management and Budget has been
impounding billions of dollars of aid due Blue cities and states. In
fact, the Trump administration, in the waning days of the Adams
administration, seized $80 million dollars
[[link removed]]out
of the City of New York's coffers it had gotten to deal with the mass
influx of 200,000 migrants bused into the Big Apple by Texas Governor
Greg Abbott in hopes of destabilizing a city not fully recovered from
COVID.

He held out hope that he could reset the city's junior partner status
with Gov. Hochul, herself facing a spirited primary challenge on her
left flank from Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado. Earlier this
month, Governor Hochul and Mayor Mamdani came together
[[link removed]]to
announce the funding of universal childcare for New York City's
children under five.

"We will meet this crisis with the bold solutions it demands," Mayor
Mamdani said. "That means recalibrating the broken fiscal relationship
between the state and the city. And it means that the time has come to
tax the richest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations. This is
the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the
world, and yet we have allowed one in four New Yorkers to live in
poverty. It doesn't need to be that way."

What did not make it into Mayor Mamdani's fiscal retrospective was the
role of the twelve years of austerity under Mayor Bloomberg, who in
addition to leveling the taxi industry for Wall Street, did his best
to starve out the city's civil service unions by refusing to settle
contracts for years. Rather than tax his peer group, Mayor Bloomberg
insisted unions pay for any wage gains with give backs under the guise
of productivity gains.

Mayor Bloomberg just couldn't get over the idea that civil servants
not pay something for their healthcare "like everybody else." In 2009,
using the austerity he said was required by the Great Recession, he
got the Municipal Labor Committee to make major concessions
[[link removed]]that
would degrade the health benefits over a half-million retired and
active city workers requiring for the first time co-pays for
emergency-room, inpatient and ambulatory care.

After twelve years of being pummeled into submission by Mayor
Bloomberg, unions like DC 37 Local 2507 and Local 3621, which
represents the city's FDNY EMS workforce, saw their wages become
increasingly inadequate to support themselves and their families. At
the same time, a shadow workforce of tens of thousands of non-profit
workers
[[link removed]]doing
work with the homeless for poverty level wages grew exponentially.

That set the stage for Mayor de Blasio and the city's biggest public
unions to try and sell out 250,000 civil service retirees by trying to
force them on to a predatory Aetna Medicare Advantage plan that was
neither Medicare nor an advantage. Under the guise of getting a $600
million annual infusion, de Blasio and his successor Mayor Adams were
willing to betray a generation of retirees for whom life-long free
health care had been a major reason they committed their working life
to public service.

Ultimately, every budget story has to be a history lesson. The key
question is how far back do you go to explain the foundations of
something as grotesquely out of balance as New York City's economy
where the world's richest oligarchs speculate on multi-million dollar
apartments while over 100,000 are homeless.

You have to give Mayor Mamdani an incomplete on this week's budget
speech for not only omitting the Bloomberg years and the Trump junta's
confiscatory policies but the decision by Albany leadership in the
early 1980s to start rebating back the Stock Transfer Tax to Wall
Street
[[link removed]].

The dime per hundred dollar stock transaction amounts to billions no
matter if the market goes up or down because it's tied to the volume
of transactions.

The London Stock Exchange has had such a stock transfer tax since
1694, despite perennial complaints
[[link removed]]from
the investor class.

For her part, Gov. Hochul has resisted raising taxes because she
believes the revenues coming in from the current economy should be
sufficient to cover Albany's commitments to its people. It all depends
on how we define the economy.

There's the economy that's defined by the ability to make money with
money, that would be the economy of the major campaign donors. Then
there's the economy where the vast majority of us struggle to eke out
a living.

For over forty years, New York State rebated back hundreds of billions
BACK to Wall Street while it closed hospitals and psychiatric
facilities as well as shortchanged New York City's public schools.
Rather than pay as you go for MTA construction, it floated billions in
tax free bonds that the wealthy could use to shelter their ever
growing mountain of wealth from taxation.

Meanwhile, in Washington, year after year, both political parties in
Congress spent trillions on the military and further notice wars that
destabilized nations and set off the greatest refugee crisis since
WWII.

Now, almost a quarter century after 9/11, that massive federal
security apparatus under the Department of Homeland Security created
to "fight terrorists" is being turned on our civilian population.

This wealth pyramid has a lot of bricks.

_ROBERT "BOB" HENNELLY is an award-winning, print and broadcast
journalist for more than 30 years. Bob hosts a weekly radio talk show,
"What's Going On - Labor Monday," on WBAI-Pacifica Radio in New York
City, focusing on politics and labor. _

_WBAI is listener-supported radio. As a member of the __Pacifica_
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* Taxi Cab Drivers
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* Minimum Wage
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* Nurses' Unions
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Budget
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