Mayors across the country should take note of a groundbreaking executive order Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed in New York City. The new Office of Worker Power will connect workers with information about their rights and will direct city agencies to proactively investigate wage and safety violations in workplaces across the city. It’s no coincidence that Mamdani signed the order on Labor Day, a holiday that exists because workers once fought, and sometimes died, for the eight-hour day, the weekend, and the very idea that a job should not cost you your health. My research shows it’s something bigger: a public health intervention. Smart mayors will steal this model to make workers — and their whole city — healthier.
I spent years interviewing Black women across the country — nurses, teachers, home health aides, higher education staff — who have been represented by unions. What I found in my research on the mental health of Black women in unions should inform how cities think about offices like this one. The data demonstrate that union representation isn’t just an economic arrangement. For the people most exposed to workplace precarity, unionization functions as a mental health and well-being intervention.
Black women are the sharpest test case. Despite real gains in educational attainment, Black women remain concentrated in service-sector work and disproportionately poor — we make up 13 percent of women in the United States but nearly a quarter of women in poverty. The United States does far less than peer nations to cushion that inequity: no guaranteed paid leave, no universal childcare, no free health care. Black women pay with their physical and mental health.
Unions alleviate some of the strains caused by structural racism. As one participant put it: “I’ve experienced racism all my life. So the union sort of provides protection from discrimination for… Black folks in the workforce.” Research on Black women’s mental health consistently finds that experiencing discrimination carries its own psychological cost, on top of the burden of lower socioeconomic status, creating pervasive, daily stress with a deleterious effect on mental health outcomes. A union grievance process requires discrimination to be addressed, rather than something a worker has to absorb.
When a union enters the workplace, the difference is measurable. One participant in my study, a home health aide with more than two decades in her union, told me: “I sleep better at night. I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if today’s the day that I’m gonna get fired… it eliminates a lot of anxiety, fear, uncertainty.” That is not a fringe benefit; it is the alleviation of chronic stress. It is a health outcome.
Research suggests that what protects the most exposed group protects everyone. Union protections don’t attach to a worker’s race or gender — they attach to the job. A wage floor, a grievance process, a safety standard, a say in scheduling: once those exist in a workplace, they cover the delivery driver alongside the home health aide who needed them most.
Collective bargaining has functioned this way for a century. Workers with the least power demanded protections that, once won, became universal. Black women’s outcomes are the leading edge of the current struggle. One of my research participants, who lacked a college degree and had worried it would count against her, described the shift this way: “It’s so empowering… I feel there’s nothing like standing arm in arm with other Black and brown women and folks, and having this collective voice.” That is precisely why the Office of Worker Power matters. It educates workers and lowers the barriers that keep workers from ever getting to the table in the first place.
The new program will not change labor law, which is governed by state and federal regulations. But policies that address social determinants of health always arrive as incremental shifts. Reaching workers before exploitation becomes routine, rather than after, is a meaningful structural move that has the potential to change lives.
My research is unambiguous: for Black women, union representation eased chronic anxiety, restored sleep, and returned a measure of dignity, control, and well-being that precarious, unprotected work strips away. What protects Black women protects the workforce of an entire city.
The impact of an Office of Worker Power will be measured in more than recovered wages or workplace investigations. It will result in fewer people lying awake at night wondering whether tomorrow is the day they lose their livelihood or their family’s home. That isn’t just good politics. That’s public health.
Jamie Danielle Daniels, Ph.D., LICSW, lives in Amherst.