Several members of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team and committees were on hand at the annual New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC) conference on December 9 at the Times Center in Midtown Manhattan. The event focused on the future of employment, economic opportunity, higher education, and racial justice.
Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams boasts that his administration has broken the all-time high jobs record several times over the course of his term. The city has nearly 5 million private sector jobs among the five boroughs — positions such as hospital staff, finance, and professional services. Meanwhile, unemployment has fallen by about 40% since 2022, including a 31% drop in Black, indigenous, and people of color unemployment, said the city.
However, while that is a good achievement, the city hasn’t completely eliminated existing racial and gender disparities in its workforce, and that is what the conference was intended to address.
“Black and Brown New Yorkers have higher unemployment rates than white New Yorkers, and that’s an issue, but you can’t undersell that there’s also under-employment,” said Gregory J. Morris, CEO of NYCETC, at the event. He was recently appointed to Mamdani’s transition committee on Economic Development & Workforce Development.
Under-employment, said Morris, is the idea that someone has a “low-wage job” and therefore is still struggling to make ends meet. This includes fields with high rates of Black or immigrant essential workers, such as home health aides and nurses, schools, retail, city government, and transportation. Many of these sectors did not fully recover from COVID job losses. “There’s this sense of folks not having had access,” said Morris. “The disproportionate sort of employment rates, the gap in employment, the gap in gender pay, are significant and complicated.”
Morris is advocating for more investments in training, credentialing, and upskilling to bolster adult Black and Brown workers, as well as youth just entering the workforce under Mamdani’s administration. Meaningful access to housing, childcare, food, and reliable transportation is also critical for this demographic to thrive, he said.
Morris added that the same neighborhoods that have always had the highest rates of unemployment, and historically been underserved by the city in terms of workforce development, have remained the same for decades — pandemic or not. Neighborhoods like Jamaica, Queens; Brownsville and East New York, Brooklyn; pockets of Harlem that have not been gentrified; the South Bronx, and part of Staten Island are always in a position of struggling in relationship to employment numbers, said Morris.
Not to mention that it’s gotten more expensive to live in an already-costly city.
“We learned that disproportionately Black and Brown people, because of suppressed wages and occupation segregation, struggle the most when it comes to making ends meet, and so we put on the ballot a true cost-of-living measure,” said Jennifer Jones-Austin, CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (FPWA). She served under former Mayor Bill de Blasio on the city’s Racial Justice Commission and is currently on Mamdani’s transition committee on Small Businesses & Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise (M/WBE).
Is college worth it anymore?
Dean Angie Kamath of the NYU School of Professional Studies said learning and education is transformative for young people, regardless of the idea in some circles that going to college isn’t necessary anymore. College enrollment rates have dropped significantly among young white, Black, and Latino men. Even young Black male students enrolling in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) hit a historic low in 2023. Many cite rising tuition costs, the spread of more traditional gender roles on social media, and a desire for more income quickly as reasons for not going to college.
“[Higher education] is worth it, because it is a place where you can start to learn about yourself, what you’re good at, what energizes you, what excites you. It happens in a classroom,” said Kamath, “but we have to make the price tag affordable. It can’t be a place with crushing debt.”
Changes at the federal level and defining diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) under President Trump have also made it harder for people to want to go to college. His administration has limited federal student loans, eliminated graduate PLUS loans; and redefined professional degrees in crucial sectors such as nursing, physical therapy, dental hygiene, occupational therapy, social work, architecture, education, and accounting with the passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act.
There are 64 State University of New York (SUNY) campuses and 26 City University of New York (CUNY) institutions. SUNY Chancellor John B. King Jr. has been named to Mamdani’s transition committee on Youth & Education. King said that every day, the state’s schools are making it possible for New Yorkers to access social mobility through affordable public education. Tuition can range from free for in-state students with grants to about $7,000 a semester, said King.
“Let’s first acknowledge that some of the work we’re describing is under attack. When people say you can’t do diversity, equity, and inclusion, that is an attack on our ability in higher education, in the workforce, to respond to the unique needs of particular communities,” said King at the conference panel. “And I will say, at SUNY, we just utterly reject that.”
Ariama C. Long photos
Advocacy and entrepreneurship
Executive Director of the Social Justice Fund (SJF) Gregg Bishop, a member of Adams’s transition team in 2021, had an interesting path to advocacy: He dropped out of college, taught himself how to code, and entered the workforce at age 25 with an annual $125,000 salary. However, when he was laid off, he did not have a degree to fall back on. Bishop was able to pivot into the world of advocacy and entrepreneurship, serving as the city’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS) Commissioner from 2015 to 2020 before finding a home at SJF.
Bishop agreed that finances are partially the reason why Black men aren’t going to college. The other reason is that they weren’t excited about schooling to begin with because of an overall disinvestment in local high schools and primary education. It can also be that higher education clashes culturally with a young Black man’s sense of masculinity.
“A lot of individuals feel like, ‘I don’t want to be the smart one on the block,’ … ‘I don’t want to be the nerd on the block,’ … ‘My friends might think I changed because I’m going to college,’” Bishop said. “[But] that’s the whole purpose of going to college, especially when you go away, because you are now exposed to new experiences, new cultures, et cetera, and so when you come back to the block, you’re different. That shouldn’t be a negative.”
Certification in skills that lead to high-paying, union jobs, such as Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) training or specialized maritime/STEM programs in harbor school, are options for young New Yorkers that are just as important as college, added Bishop.
He also noticed that there is not much racial diversity in leadership roles in the nonprofit and advocacy sectors in the city — possibly because of low salaries and education requirements. However, he is encouraged by the groundswell of leaders, business owners, and organizers of color that SJF has invested in in Brooklyn with training, resources, and grants over the years.
Will AI replace us?
Julie Samuels, president and CEO of Tech:NYC and part of Mamdani’s transition committee on Technology, said that no matter what job a New Yorker currently has, the reality is that AI will affect them eventually because of rapid technological advancement.
Much of the development in the tech and finance industry is physically located on the West Coast. Samuels said her company strives to connect NYC’s students to project-based learning and these companies. It is hard to stay ahead of what employers look for in workers, she admitted, because companies have no idea what jobs will look like or what they will be hiring for in the future.
“Working right now with AI is both terrifying and incredibly exciting,” she said. “In real time, we’re all learning it together, and it is scary for the people in the middle. I don’t mean to belittle the fear around the uncertainty, but it’s also kind of amazing.”
King said SUNY is working on embedding Google certificates into their humanities and social science degrees because they want students to have options and an understanding of AI tools as soon as they graduate.
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