Labor Day divide: Socialists organize workers in New York City, while capitalism puts them to work

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Sept. 7, 2026 — On Labor Day, New York City’s socialist mayor celebrated American workers by creating another government office.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order establishing the city’s first Office of Worker Power, an arm of City Hall intended to help private-sector employees “get informed, connected and organized.”

The office is led by veteran labor organizer Tony Perlstein and will assist unions and organizing groups, educate employees about workplace rights and hold public hearings on labor issues. Details about its staffing and budget remain unclear.

It is a fitting symbol for the direction of the modern Democratic Party: Government will not merely enforce labor laws or protect workers from exploitation. It will use taxpayer resources to help organize private-sector employees and strengthen the political institutions closely aligned with the party in power.

Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is not concealing his philosophy. His administration is building government machinery intended to organize workers, expand union power and place City Hall more deeply into the relationship between private employers and their employees.

In Mamdani’s New York, “worker power” increasingly means government power exercised in the worker’s name.

Yet outside the socialist laboratories of New York and a handful of other Democratic-run cities, the American labor market is delivering a very different Labor Day message.

Workers without college degrees — the tradespeople, mechanics, equipment operators, drivers, technicians, construction workers and service employees Labor Day was originally intended to honor — are experiencing one of the strongest job markets in decades.

A new Wall Street Journal analysis, drawing on research from the Burning Glass Institute, found that unemployment among Americans ages 22 to 34 who did not graduate from college has rarely been lower during the past 20 years.

At the same time, young workers with bachelor’s and advanced degrees are confronting one of their most difficult employment markets in years. Graduates in science, technology and other professional fields are having an especially hard time finding their first foothold.

College graduates still have lower unemployment in absolute terms, but the direction of the two markets is striking. For most of the past two decades, employment prospects for college and noncollege workers generally rose and fell together. Now they are moving apart.

The explanation is largely supply and demand.

America has a shortage of skilled tradespeople. Electricians, welders, plumbers, mechanics and construction workers are aging out of the workforce faster than younger workers are replacing them. Reduced immigration is tightening the labor supply further, giving American workers more bargaining power.

Meanwhile, the country is producing more college graduates than ever. Many are competing for entry-level office jobs at precisely the moment employers have discovered that artificial intelligence can perform a growing share of the research, writing, coding, data processing and administrative work traditionally assigned to young professionals.

“There’s a rapidly growing supply of people with a bachelor’s degree, and you have a rapid decline of people who don’t,” Burning Glass chief economist Gad Levanon told the Journal. “I don’t think it’s a temporary thing.”

A separate Burning Glass Institute report describes the change as structural, as opposed to merely cyclical. Artificial intelligence is eliminating or compressing many of the junior tasks through which college graduates once learned professions and moved up the career ladder.

A machine may be able to summarize documents, generate routine computer code or prepare a first draft of a report. It cannot easily repair a diesel engine in Prudhoe Bay, wire a house in Wasilla, land a plane in Bethel or weld a pipeline in subzero weather.

That may challenge the notion of what Americans have been told for generations: that college is the universal route to economic security, while vocational education and blue-collar work have too often been treated as second-class options.

The market is now rendering its verdict. A degree is no guarantee of employment, and practical skills are becoming more valuable as experienced workers retire and the supply of replacements shrinks.

In Alaska, where the economy depends on people who build roads, operate heavy equipment, maintain aircraft, crew fishing vessels, work on the North Slope, keep power plants running and move freight through some of the most difficult conditions in America, this is especially relevant.

Those workers do not need a socialist mayor or a government organizer to tell them they have value. Employers competing for scarce skills are already doing that through wages, benefits and opportunities.

This Labor Day, we’re seeing clearly that the socialist answer is to build a government office, hire political organizers, and place City Hall between workers and employers.

The free-market answer is to create conditions in which businesses compete for labor and workers can take their skills wherever they are treated best.

There is an appropriate role for government in enforcing contracts, stopping wage theft and protecting workers from genuine abuse. But now, it’s City Hall using the power and resources of government to organize unions and build a political constituency for the party controlling the city.

Labor Day should honor work, skill, responsibility and the dignity of earning a living. It should recognize the people who show up when roads need building, planes need repairing, groceries need stocking, fires need fighting and communities need protecting.

This year, many of those workers have something worth celebrating. Their skills are scarce, their bargaining position is strong and the economy needs them.

The greater anxiety belongs to a generation of college graduates discovering that the credential they were told would guarantee their future may be competing with an algorithm.

That problem will not be solved by socialism or another government office. It will be solved by adaptability, useful skills, entrepreneurship and an economy free enough to create forms of work that do not yet exist.

Suzanne Downing is founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.