Some Advice for New York’s Next Mayor: Tame the Unions

If he wants to control a ballooning budget, New York City’s next mayor needs to tackle rapidly rising public-employee pension and health-care costs. As Manhattan Institute Fellow Ken Girardin explains, this can’t be done without confronting the city’s powerful public-sector unions. From lavish health and retiree benefits to costly union-run welfare funds, the city is spending billions more than it should and getting little in return.

The mayor may already have the tools to fix this problem. Since the 1960s, New York City has coordinated its benefits coverage through the Municipal Labor Committee, but this arrangement may be vulnerable to constitutional challenge—giving the mayor “leverage to push for major changes to employee health coverage” and to increase automation.

“When the next mayor meets with public-sector unions, he should remember that they’re sitting at a negotiating table, not an altar,” writes Girardin.

In collaboration with the Sun Valley Policy Forum (SVPF), several luminaries from the Manhattan Institute will speak at this year’s SVPF Summer Institute, on July 1st and 2nd. This two-day conference retreat will be held in the premier mountain town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Reihan Salam (Manhattan Institute President), Jesse Arm (Manhattan Institute Executive Director of External Affairs & Chief of Staff), Heather Mac Donald (Thomas W. Smith Fellow and Contributing Editor of City Journal), and Senior Fellows Jason Riley and Abigail Shrier will be featured in the programming, along with other notable thought leaders. As a benefit to City Journal readers, Reserve ticket bundle registrations will be upgraded to the Bronze pass level, which includes access to a private cocktail party. For more information on the program, go here; to register with MI benefits, go here.

In his first month as San Francisco mayor, Daniel Lurie visited many of the city’s drug and crime hotspots, where he noted “people passed out in the bus stops, people using fentanyl in the bus stops while kids were going to school.” He changed the process for responding to crisis calls—now a single team, instead of five city departments, will focus on a particular area.

Of course, turning the city around won’t be easy. But, Bill Jackson writes, Lurie can start by “changing the perception that San Francisco is a place where you can come to do drugs while accessing free services; and improving the city’s grim fiscal outlook.”

Read Jackson’s suggestions here.

In a new study, David Rozado asked 22 large language models to choose the more qualified candidate from pairs of résumés—one containing a male first name, the other a female first name. “To control for qualifications,” he writes, “each résumé pair was presented twice, with the assignment of gendered names to résumés reversed on the second presentation. This made the distribution of qualifications statistically identical across genders, so in theory, an unbiased model making selections based on merit should have selected male and female candidates in roughly equal proportions.”

That’s not what happened, however. All 22 LLMs chose the female candidates more frequently.

“Hidden biases are embedded in today’s frontier AI systems—and they can lead to harmful and unjust outcomes when deployed in high-stakes scenarios,” Rozado observes.

Read more about the study here.

Founded in Washington, D.C., Casa Ruby was a nonprofit that provided social services to transgender-identifying individuals and immigrants. Its founder, Ruby Corado, once celebrated in the media, fell from grace after pleading guilty to wire fraud last year.

“Hundreds of thousands of vaporized taxpayer dollars later, Corado is the face of a scandal that left staff unpaid, clients stranded, and city officials red-faced,” write Tim Rosenberger and Vilda Westh Blanc. “It’s a microcosm of what happens when credulous civil servants and donors collide with lax oversight and a tidal wave of federal cash.”

Read the story here.

“Excellent article. I am in complete agreement, and likewise I have never been to the Middle East. But I have been following the conflict since ’67 and have seen the pattern of events and the respective behaviors of the opponents. It’s an easy choice, and Oct. 7 spelled it out more graphically than ever before.

Finish off Hamas, whatever it takes. Deport foreign insurgents of the Palestinian cause from our own shores. Tolerate zero excesses from Hamas supporters here.”

Photo credits: Pacific Press / Contributor / LightRocket via Getty Images