Why this Primary is So Frustrating
Progressive-Labor Division in NYC Looks to Deliver Disappointment on Tuesday
If this election feels particularly disappointing for progressive voters, one reason is that the progressive-labor alliance that built a more progressive New York over the last two decades has largely shattered. The Working Families Party that helped build that alliance over those years maintains its ballot line, but the local unions that once participated in its work in New York have largely withdrawn.
The result is that the lion’s share of unions have endorsed Eric Adams in the mayor’s race (see box below), with the UFT teachers union and many of the building trades sticking with Scott Stringer, and the main sanitation worker unions endorsing their old boss, Kathryn Garcia. Only SEIU 1199, the union representing workers in private hospitals in the City, along with the state Nurses Association have joined the Working Families Party and other progressive organizations and leaders in the WFP coalition in supporting Maya Wiley.
You see the exact same dynamic playing out in the Manhattan DA’s race, with labor unions largely supporting Alvin Bragg, with some of the building Trades supporting Diane Florence, and only DC 37 and UNITE HERE Local 100 joining WFP in supporting Tahanie Aboushi in that race. The result of this split vote is quite likely to deliver the DA’s race to Tali Farhadian Weinstein, who is seeking to buy the seat with her household’s hedge fund wealth. A few more unions have lined up with WFP in supporting Brad Lander for Comptroller, but the largest unions in the City have all endorsed his main rival, Corey Johnson.
Compare this to 2013 when the New York Post (unhappily) headlined that the “Working Families Party the big winner from a de Blasio victory” with a new mayor who had been allied with WFP from his first days as a City Council member. The WFP’s endorsement in the Public Advocate’s primary four years earlier was critical to de Blasio’s win then and set him up to run for Mayor.
Why did the labor-progressive activist alliance fall apart?
One answer is Andrew Cuomo deliberately set out to destroy it.
In early 2014, Cuomo had built a comfortable governing alliance with Republicans in the NY State Senate and refused to support campaigns to fight for Democratic control of the chamber. A challenge by Zephyr Teachout focused on campaign finance reform added to the tension over whether WFP would endorse Cuomo. In response, in the words of multiple observers, Cuomo began “putting the screws to labor leaders” to leave the organization.
While WFP ultimately endorsed Cuomo that year, the damage was done. Key union backers began leaving the WFP, including the departure of SEIU 1199, the United Federation of Teachers, and the Hotel Trades Council in the wake of the 2014 fight. A similar bruising battle in 2028 when Cynthia Nixon challenged Cuomo would see SEIU 32BJ and the Communication Workers of America among other unions pull their backing of the WFP as well.
In 2019 Cuomo sought to finalize his attack on the WFP by creating an ostensible “State Public Campaign Financing Commission” to kill the WFP’s separate ballot line. And when the state Supreme Court blocked the commission’s actions as violating the state’s constitution, he engineered a 2020 legislative deal that sharply increased the votes the WFP needed to receive to keep its ballot line. While the party managed to meet the threshold in 2020, the move reflected the nearly decade-long effort by Cuomo to destroy the party.
But progressive activists were hardly blameless in the split. Unions in the state have to deal with Cuomo daily over labor and other government contracts that are critical to union member’s wages and, as WFP’s experience highlight, rightly feared retaliation from Cuomo if they challenged him – or were even seen as less than supportive. Cuomo’s brutal treatment of Assemblymember Ron Kim over the latter’s criticism of Cuomo’s coverup of his mismanagement of nursing home safety during the pandemic unleashed a wave of other politicos around the state relating their fears of crossing the Governor. Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris noted that Cuomo’s threats to ruin careers to score wins were “not a terribly unusual story” for anyone dealing with the Governor.
More broadly, many labor leaders felt progressive activists in the WFP leadership did not take labor interests in jobs and core economics seriously enough. In 2014, Mike McGuire, political director for the Mason Tenders of New York City, was particularly harsh in saying Teachout’s focus on campaign finance reform over pocketbook issues meant the “WFP leadership is now nothing more than a bunch of Park Slope limousine liberals.”
While overblown, this captured the frustration of labor leaders that on multiple economic development fights, progressive activists would be on the other side blocking new development projects – and blocking the jobs as well as the new property tax revenue funding public employee salaries, that are the bread-and-butter for many unions.
Nothing captured this divide more than the proposal to bring Amazon’s national headquarters to Queens. The project promised 25,000 permanent jobs for the city, as well as $27 billion in tax revenue. While progressive activists objected to the $3 billion in tax subsidies in the deal, notably far less than projected tax revenue, a large chunk of those subsidies were devoted to ensuring construction and property maintenance jobs would be unionized.
Along with the building trades, SEIU 32BJ representing property maintenance workers strongly endorsed the deal for promising 3000 permanent jobs for its members as part of the 4- to 8- million square foot building project.
Following the bruising battle over the Cuomo nomination, key groups making up the progressive activist base of the Working Families Party like Make the Road and New York Communities for Change would square off against its former union allies to fight the Amazon HQ deal.
The mobilization against the deal was successful, capped off when state Senator Michael Gianaris of Queens, a vociferous critic, was appointed by the state senate to a key state board overseeing the deal, with Amazon soon abandoning new negotiations over the development project.
As the late Hector Figeroa, then head of SEIU 32BJ, wrote in the New York Daily News in the wake of Amazon abandoning its NYC deal: "The good news is that an emboldened activist-left has shown that it knows how to win. The bad news is that it also shows catastrophically bad judgment about what to fight for in the first place."
Notably, the Amazon victory left progressive activists at odds not just with most of their labor allies (a few like the retail workers union had supported the anti-Amazon campaign) but with public opinion in the City, which overwhelmingly (67% in one poll) said losing Amazon HQ was a bad thing. In particular, black voters supported the Amazon HQ deal by an even greater margin.
All these divisions would in turn be reflected in the 2021 mayor’s race. Especially once the Working Families Party and its activist allied organizations pulled their endorsements from Scott Stringer following allegations of sexual harassment, that left the progressive groups and labor on almost completely opposite sides once again in a major political fight.
While Stringer and Eric Adams had criticisms of the specifics of the Amazon deal, both had remained supporters of the project in general. SEIU 32BJ in particular would emphasize in its endorsement of Adams that he was “committed to our union’s core issues of responsible economic development” and the Carpenters would emphasize the issue of Adams's support for jobs and development in their endorsement of his campaign as well.
In contrast, leading anti-Amazon leader state Senator Michael Gianaris appeared at Maya Wiley’s opening campaign event last October, making him one of her most prominent early progressive supporters, symbolizing how the conflict over economic development was baked into primary divisions.
This institutional division between progressive activists and labor in New York extends beyond the Working Families Party to groups like the Democratic Socialists of America. National labor leaders were once in the leadership of DSA and, while the organization has added a lot of individual members in recent years, those institutional ties by DSA to labor leaders have largely evaporated. A memo by its New York City labor branch outlining a strategy to recruit rank-and-file members in order to vote out current union leaders just added to tensions.
It’s not that unions and progressive activists are in an irreconcilable clash. They continue to agree on many issues and cooperate on campaigns ranging from the minimum wage to green jobs to health care. But the fraying of institutional relationships and coordination in recruiting and supporting candidates means we end up with frustrating divisions like we are seeing in this New York City primary.
I will leave with this twitter post by 32BJ’s Hector Figeroa, who continued to praise the Working Families Party even as the union withdrew its institutional support and who was a paid-up member of DSA itself. As the fight over Amazon HQ heated up and became at times bitter between groups on either side, he wrote on the need to build better mutual respect and keep working to overcome short-term disagreements in building long-term cooperation for progressive change.