The Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York has endorsed Andrew Cuomo for mayor.
Gary LaBarbera, president of both the city and state chapters of the BCTC, confirmed on Tuesday that the organization is supporting the former governor’s bid.
The news is not surprising, given LaBarbera’s well-established support for the former governor and the fact that individual unions that make up the umbrella organization, including the carpenters’ and laborers’ unions, have already publicly endorsed Cuomo. Still, the construction boss has up until this point refrained from publicly endorsing him for mayor.
On Tuesday, he cited Cuomo’s “very strong relationship” with the building trades.
“In many ways, Andrew Cuomo is seen, and was seen as a builder,” he said, pointing to Cuomo’s focus on large-scale infrastructure projects when he was governor, including the redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport and the construction of Moynihan Train Hall.
LaBarbera said the group, which represents more than 100,000 members across 15 different unions, may hold a public event at some point to highlight the endorsement.
Some of the group’s members got such fanfare out of the way months ago. Cuomo launched his campaign in March at the New York City District Council of Carpenters’ Manhattan headquarters. The carpenters’ union and District Council 9, the painters’ union, announced their endorsements of Cuomo at the event.
Cuomo’s campaign has courted support from developers and construction unions. Real estate executives have poured millions of dollars into Fix the City, a super PAC backing Cuomo. Roughly 70 individual donors working in real estate or construction donated the maximum amount of $2,100 directly to Cuomo’s campaign during the last two months, filings with the city’s Campaign Finance Board show.
After multiple sexual harassment and misconduct accusations were leveled against Cuomo, LaBarbera told TRD in 2021 that while he did not diminish the allegations and would let the process play out, but that his relationship with the governor had not changed. At the time, he called Cuomo “the best governor for the building trades unions and for the state of New York in terms of building public infrastructure.”
During his campaign, Cuomo has underscored the importance of using union labor as part of his housing plan, which calls for the construction or preservation of 500,000 housing units over the next 10 years.
Construction wage requirements are a perennial point of tension between the BCTC’s members and real estate. Most recently, the issue came to a head in the debate over the replacement of the property tax break 485x.
Developers have maintained that the wage requirements attached to 485x will lead to fewer units of housing. According to data collected by the city, developers interested in the tax break plan to build housing projects with 99 or fewer units, which would avoid a wage floor that kicks in at 100 apartments.
LaBarbera told TRD last month that the smaller projects were the latest example of developers focused on “enriching themselves, as opposed to being committed to raising wage standards for workers and strengthening the middle class.”
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