Mamdani fails to boost employment in New York: He expands public payroll while limiting private sector to Medicaid-funded support staff

Socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has based his administration on an agenda of greater government intervention, including rent freezes in regulated housing, progress toward universal child care, subsidized municipal grocery stores, and tax hikes on high incomes and luxury second homes, the latter, in part, pending approval from Albany. After running into a nearly stagnant private-sector job market, he is now presenting his latest solution to revive it: hiring more public employees.

New public job placement center

The Mamdani administration announced on Monday the opening of a permanent location for the Jobs NYC Center, a program that has been in place since 2024. It is a municipal office designed to guide New Yorkers toward job openings at City Hall and throughout the rest of the public sector, and to streamline those hiring processes.

The center, located in a vacant municipal space at 2 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, has already helped bring on board 17 new municipal employees during its pilot phase in August. These are members of the BEST team, which assists small businesses with permits and licenses. The mayor swore them in at the official opening and has pledged to "accelerate hiring across public service roles." Walk-in service is scheduled to begin on Oct. 5.

Private-sector employment stifled by taxes

While the city government is expanding its workforce, the private sector is creating hardly any jobs. According to an op-ed in The New York Post, over the past year, the city added only 27,600 jobs to a private workforce of about 4.2 million, a private employment figure confirmed by data from both the New York Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The newspaper adds that nearly all of these new jobs are for home health aides. In the statistics, these are counted as private-sector jobs because they are hired by agencies, not City Hall, but the bill is largely paid by Medicaid. Local analysts agree that healthcare and social services account for the little growth that appears as "private." The exact breakdown of those 27,600 jobs is not published in an official statement accompanying that figure.

The financial sector, historically the city's main source of tax revenue, has been creating few jobs in New York for years. Growth has shifted primarily to Dallas-Fort Worth, Charlotte, Austin and Miami, markets with lower taxes and lower costs. Manhattan remains the hub in terms of volume, but it no longer accounts for the majority of new jobs.

Expanding public sector

Mamdani's socialist administration has resumed the expansion of public spending by lifting the hiring freeze inherited from Adams, having already brought on board more than 1,100 new civil servants and creating a job center to continue expanding the municipal workforce. Although the city has not yet reached the 320,000 employees seen at the peak of the de Blasio era, the trend is clearly upward, with nearly 14,400 vacancies that the mayor seeks to fill with more taxpayer money, rather than promoting private-sector employment.

If agencies such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the public health system NYC Health + Hospitals and the City University of New York (CUNY) are included, the number of public employees approaches 570,000, according to The New York Post. That figure does not apply only to the workforce under the mayor's direct control. Added to this are thousands of workers at municipally funded social service agencies.