Mamdani Solves the Problem of Too Much Liberty in New York City

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, August 13, 2026

 

Mamdani is trying to solve a problem, although not one that most New Yorkers would recognize as an issue. It’s the same conundrum that vexed Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden, both of whom failed in their attempt to remedy it. It’s the alleged problem of too few Americans voluntarily joining — or even just contributing to — organized labor organizations.

 

If the obdurate public won’t boost labor’s clout of their own accord, the American left has concluded, they must be forced into it.

 

This week, New York City’s socialist mayor endorsed a proposal introduced by his fellow socialists on the city council: the Delivery Protection Act. The bill would force big warehouse operators like Amazon and FedEx to obtain new licenses, with all the additional associated compliance costs, as well as hire thousands of city employees as couriers. “If the bill passes,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “New York could become the first city to require last-mile operators” — the delivery services that transport goods from truck bed to doorstep — “to make delivery workers direct employees.”

 

The mayor claims the new regulation will reduce commercial vehicle traffic in the city, contributing to pedestrians’ quality of life and fewer car accidents. But the Journal’s editorial board has put its finger on the Mamdani administration’s hidden agenda: artificially propping up the Teamsters union.

 

“The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t allow sub- and independent contractors to unionize,” the editorial observed. “By banning the subcontractor model, the bill could enable the Teamsters to unionize Amazon drivers and couriers.” That is precisely what Teamsters president Sean O’Brien has sought. So, too, have the nation’s trial lawyers and insurers, as the Journal explains:

 

One goal of the bill is to aid plaintiff attorneys who figure they can obtain bigger legal payouts for accidents from Amazon than they could from its small-business partners. Directly employing subcontractors could also impel Amazon to carry more expensive insurance coverage, which would raise delivery costs.

 

If enacted, at-home delivery services costs in New York City will balloon as the services on which the city’s residents rely become exposed to greater liability. But the law would be a great boon to the unions, public and private sector alike. For Mamdani, a contest between union interests and those of the majority of New Yorkers was no contest at all.

 

Mamdani’s maneuver harkens back to the earliest days of the Biden years. At the outset of his administration, Joe Biden threw his weight behind the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would have overridden state-level Right to Work laws — compelling non-unionized workers to join organized labor outfits or even forcing non-members to contribute a portion of their wages to organizations to which they do not belong.

 

Parts of the PRO Act were consciously modeled on a failed experiment in California: 2019’s Assembly Bill 5. The legislation was ostensibly designed to address the abuses and indignities that accompanied work in the so-called “gig economy.”

 

As Vox conceded at the time, this, too, was a gift to the Teamsters, as well as other service and transportation unions. But the people the law was supposedly designed to help — the drivers that firms like Uber and Lyft recognized as subcontractors — were not impressed. By forcing those and similar firms to reclassify their freelancers as employees, it would have robbed them of the flexibility that attracted them to the “gig” in the first place.

 

The Uber drivers were soon joined in their revolt by the independent writers, photographers, graphic designers, and other creative content producers whom California’s bureaucrats had casually rendered unemployable. “These were never good jobs,” California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez explained to her outraged constituents. They weren’t convinced.

 

Californians soon revolted, securing a proposition on the 2020 ballot that defined “app-based transportation” drivers as independent contractors. The proposition passed with a margin of nearly 3 million votes.

 

So, the problem that so vexes the left persists. Today, less than 10 percent of the nation’s private sector workforce is unionized — the lowest point in a long and steady decline in union membership that began in the 1980s. And although public opinion surveys indicate that Americans like unions, in the abstract, and see declining membership as undesirable, most non-union workers have no interest in joining one.

 

In 2020, the right-leaning pro-union organization American Compass asked non-union workers why they privileged their independence. Fully three-quarters of respondents said that it was the unions’ “political activity” that kept them away. But that’s exactly what Democrats like about organized labor, and it’s why the left will never stop forcing Americans to put their hard-earned cash into union pockets.

 

So, the root of the problem isn’t really the unions at all. Rather, it’s you and your unacceptable attachment to your liberty. Perhaps Mamdani will succeed where Democrats in Washington and Sacramento failed. But Americans have proven stubbornly attached to that whole “pursuit of happiness” thing, irritating though that may be to the haughty socialist technocrats who are convinced that you’re living your life all wrong.