Hundreds of people are lining up for Mamdani's jobs center; can the city actually hire them?

It’s 9:20 a.m. in Lower Manhattan and hundreds of people want jobs. 

The new Jobs NYC center, which Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration opened on Oct. 5, didn’t even open for another 40 minutes but the line to get inside already stretched around the corner, down Centre Street, around another corner, down Reade Street, with more people are joining all the time. A passerby looked agape at the crowd and asked someone: “Is this to vote?” 

A 30-year-old man in a mid-length tan trench coat and a neatly trimmed beard was at the front of the line, a spot he secured by arriving from his home in Floral Park at 6:30 a.m., pre-sunrise. He’d visited the site when it first opened two weeks ago but was told to come back on Wednesday when actual hiring managers for city jobs would be on hand. He’s passed the time shuffling from one foot to another, making friends on the line and clutching a blue folder in his right hand. He’s been out of work for about two months in the procurement industry and having a frustrating time finding more work. 

“I've had one interview in the last two months,” said the job seeker (who, like many people in this story, asked to remain anonymous, because applying for jobs is fraught enough already). “Recruiters don't even get back to you. They tell you to call and fill out a form. They don't respond. It's been bad.” 

His willingness to wait on a long line in the pre-dawn chill mirrored the half dozen other people I spoke to over two days at the new jobs center, who echoed his sentiments: this at least beats applying to something online, where filters, AI bots and overwhelmed hiring managers seem to reject applications as soon as they get them. My feed alone is full of friends and neighbors who are eager to work but can’t seem to crack the force field of AI filters that never ever let human eyes see their application. Others who actually get a callback are enduring an ungodly eight or more rounds of interviews before being told they were cut from consideration (a too-common practice that should be punished in a future reckoning by capacious use of trebuchet). 

The Jobs NYC center at 2 Lafayette St., nearly right across from the Municipal Building, is technically an expansion of an Jobs NYC initiative from the Eric Adams administration, which sought to hold more pop-up job events and hiring halls in the five boroughs. But Mayor Mamdani opened the new location this month as the city’s first permanent walk-in jobs center; attendees told me they saw word of it on social media or through the mayor’s newsletter, and decided to check it out.