As New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani will have a range of options to encourage large numbers of workers to unionize — essential both for improving working-class living standards in an unaffordable city and building an organized force to win his agenda.

Can Zohran Mamdani make New York City a union town again?

Organized labor here is stronger than in the rest of the country. But this isn’t saying much. The unionization rate of the city’s private sector is only 13.5 percent, almost half of what it was in the 1980s. And while 61.1 percent of public sector workers remain unionized, only one in five New York City workers belongs to a union — a significant drop from the one-in-three unionization rate of the 1970s.

Turning around labor’s decline is crucial for achieving Mamdani’s overarching

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