New York City Comptroller Brad Lander protests the Trump administration’s decision to freeze of public funding for science research on February 19, 2025.(Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images)
Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and a mayoral candidate, is releasing a workers’ rights platform today that he shared exclusively with The Nation.
Just the fact that he’s putting forth such a plan is notable, said James Parrott, a fellow at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs who has been watching New York City mayoral races for decades. He said he has “never seen or heard any candidate ever who had a labor platform at all.” The plan, he added, is “very ambitious, comprehensive, and thoughtful.”
In an interview, Lander tied his proposal to his campaign’s focus on affordability: “It is so expensive right now, and that is really crushing people.” His campaign’s major proposals have thus far been aimed at making the city more affordable by, for instance, tackling housing and childcare. But, he said, “helping workers earn more, have more job stability, and be able to organize is a big part of addressing the cost-of-living crisis in New York City.”
The plan outlines measures that Lander says would make it easier to organize and would protect workers’ jobs and pay. He wants to extend the city’s “just cause” law, which he helped pass and protects fast-food workers from being arbitrarily let go, to all workers. Besides giving the city’s workers more job stability, it would also prevent them from being fired for organizing a union. The plan calls for severance pay in the case of layoffs, a financial cushion for unemployed workers, as well as a disincentive for employers to fire people in the first place. He would ban noncompete clauses that prohibit employees from working for similar businesses, freeing them from being locked into jobs and giving them more economic mobility, and would pursue more whistleblower claims on behalf of workers to get around any arbitration agreements that bar them from bringing their complaints of mistreatment to the court system. He proposes creating sectoral standards boards that have raised pay for fast-food workers in California and are in place for nursing-home and home-care workers in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada.
The plan also calls for New York City residents to be able to take paid time off for any reason, not just specifically when they get sick, seriously hurt, or ill, or welcome a new baby. Starting last summer, Chicago workers can now take five days of leave for any reason, making the city’s leave policies among the most expansive in the country. Such a law would raise New York City up to the standard set by Chicago, while potentially putting pressure on the state to do the same, just as Illinois has followed Chicago’s lead. New York’s paid sick leave, after all, started with a 2014 New York City law before the state adopted its own version in late 2020.
Lander also backs a plan to raise the city’s minimum wage to $19.25 this year and $21.25 next year, with increases after that to keep up with inflation. The current minimum wage is $16.50 an hour.
Lander has fought for the rights of app-based workers, pushing for a current law that guarantees a minimum wage for food delivery workers. “Because of Brad’s leadership on this issue, it’s no exaggeration to say New York City is the world’s leader in terms of regulating app-based work,” Parrott said. His platform proposes going even further, extending that law to other app-based workers while also ensuring more transparency around how they’re paid and tipped and protecting them from arbitrary deactivations, which are akin to being fired.
His platform also stresses using all the city’s powers to enforce and promote workers’ rights. Lander would create a new Mayor’s Office of Workers’ Rights, which would direct agencies across city government to protect and promote workers’ rights. “The city has so many tools,” Lander said, pointing to not just its budget but contracting, procurement, land use, economic development, permitting, and other powers. “You can look at every decision from the question, ‘Does this lift up New York’s workers and make it more possible for them to have the living wages they need to survive in this expensive city, good working conditions, good job security, and a fair opportunity to organize?’”
He has some experience using creative methods to achieve such results. As comptroller, he used the city’s pension fund investments to support unionizing workers at Starbucks and The Venetian, and he created an employer violations dashboard that he urged city agencies to refer to in the procurement process. “These are things that can materially benefit working people pretty quickly by making strategic use of tools we already have,” he said.
If he is elected mayor, many of Lander’s measures would require action from outside entities to become reality. Expansions of just cause, paid leave, app-based worker rights, and the implementation of severance pay and sectoral standards boards would all require the city council to pass legislation. The city’s minimum wage can only be increased with the cooperation of the state government, although Lander promises to fight for the city’s right to raise the wage on its own.
His platform comes at a time when the Trump administration is hollowing out federal agencies. Lander pointed to the “total eradication” of workers’ rights enforcement under Trump. Many pieces of his plan, he said, pick up where the federal government is stepping away, from enforcing civil rights to policing sexual harassment to protecting immigrant workers. He said, “It just feels like a really important time” for this.
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His plan also hits as the race for New York City mayor has heated up, particularly after former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo entered the fray and has been leading in the polls. Lander hopes his platform will draw a contrast with Cuomo in particular. “Andrew Cuomo has a long and sordid history in relationship to workers’ rights and unions,” Lander said. Even when Cuomo eventually made deals, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour or instituting paid family leave, it was “always kicking and screaming and after extracting an enormous amount of pain and tribute.”
There are some clear distinctions between the two candidates: Where Lander has backed regulations to curb gig companies like Uber, for example, Cuomo has often taken the company’s side. “While Andrew Cuomo was governor, he never showed the kind of leadership that was needed in order to really address and improve these safety-net programs,” Parrott said. Lander proposes not only increasing the minimum wage but ensuring that it automatically rises faster in future years; Cuomo fought adding a cost-of-living adjustment to the wage, which kept it languishing at $15 an hour until Governor Kathy Hochul struck a deal in 2023 to update it.
Will workers vote for “a corrupt chaos agent,” Lander asked, or “somebody who’s been in their corner time and time again?”
Bryce CovertTwitterBryce Covert is a contributing writer at The Nation and was a 2023 Reporter in Residence at Omidyar Network.