Mamdani’s Win and Affordability — Why We Need to Focus On All Three Dimensions of Affordability: Wages, Prices, AND Time

by WorkFour Executive Director Vishal Reddy

Zohran Mamdani’s win in the NYC mayoral primary is a big deal. He defeated Cuomo by running head-on at the cost-of-living crisis and telling a clear story about why life feels so hard for working-class New Yorkers. Over and over again, Mamdani brought the message back to one word: affordability.

His platform (a rent freeze, fast and free buses, a $30 minimum wage by 2030, and free universal child care) was organized around that theme. The message was simple and resonant: working people can no longer afford to live in the city they keep running. And clearly, voters agreed. Or else the message of affordability wouldn’t have had such broad resonance, and people wouldn’t have voted for generational change.

Now that affordability is back at the center of political discourse, it’s worth asking: what exactly do we mean by it? Most of the time, we talk about affordability in terms of prices and wages. How much do things cost? And how much do they earn? But that leaves out a necessary third dimension: time. A fuller, more complete (...may I say, “3-D”) view of affordability requires this. 

That’s because the “cost of living” isn’t just what things cost divided by what you earn. It’s also about how long you have to work to pay for them. A $2,000 rent means something very different depending on whether you're working 20 hours a week or 60. But most policy conversations treat them like the same problem. We measure prices, we track wages, but rarely do we ask how much of your time are you spending just to stay afloat.

Getting by in this economy costs money, and money costs time. And when you’re working class, it takes you more time to earn sufficient money to make it by. Rent often takes a full week’s paycheck or more. A MetroCard might not seem like much, but for a minimum-wage worker, that’s nearly a full day of work after taxes. Groceries, childcare, healthcare: while these costs are accounted for by receipts and credit card statements (and increasingly—and depressingly—Klarna payments), they’re felt in hours worked and leisure lost: late-night shifts picked up, morning sleep cut short, evening plans with friends cancelled.

That’s why focusing on wages and prices—while essential, especially in NYC where rents have risen 64 percent since 1960 while incomes have only gone up 18 percent—still offers an incomplete picture. Even meaningful wage gains don’t close the gap if time isn’t part of the equation. Yes, wages today are higher on paper than they were 60 years ago — but the main reason life doesn’t feel affordable is because the time it takes to afford the basics. The average amount of hours households work today is higher than it was in 1969: households are working longer and harder across more jobs, all to stay in place. Even if wages rise and prices fall, it doesn’t change the core reality: people are trading away more and more of their lives for less stability, less rest, and less control over their time.

This is especially clear when we look at childcare policies. Take Mamdani’s proposal for free universal childcare. It’s a bold and necessary plan. Most coverage frames it as a response to rising costs, and it is. But it’s also a response to the collapse of time. Parents aren’t just struggling to afford childcare — they’re struggling to cover it, to piece together schedules, shifts, and favors from friends/family just to get through the week. A universal childcare program lowers the financial burden in two ways: first, by directly offering a free public service, and second, by expanding the overall supply of care; this reduces scarcity and pressure on working families scrambling for limited slots. But its most overlooked benefit is what it restores: time. It cuts the invisible labor of scheduling, the unpaid hours of juggling shifts and favors, and the caregiving that parents take on when no other option exists. For parents, especially mothers, this often means cutting work hours, foregoing rest, or putting everything else on hold. A public childcare system doesn’t just help them afford care — it gives parents back the time they spend being the care. As politicians or the media talk about the impact childcare would have on working families’ wages or costs, it’s also essential they talk about it in terms of the time they’d save if there was universal childcare.

This emphasis on time in our analysis of cost of living isn’t a new idea. In fact, some of the most defining and durable victories of the labor movement have been time-based. The weekend, paid time off, and sick leave were concrete changes that reshaped what it meant to live and work. And they remain the core of how we understand progress. Just look at any list of reasons to thank unions and you’ll see they’re overwhelmingly about time: the 8-hour workday, the 5-day workweek, the weekend, overtime pay, family leave. These victories have endured because they successfully set the baseline for a decent life. 

But that baseline is fraying and fraying fast, in part because over the last six or seven decades, we’ve drifted away from treating time and leisure as central central political demands, even though those earlier wins remain some of the most popular and broadly felt legacies of the labor movement. After the passage and amendments of the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1940s, the push to shorten working hours stalled even as productivity soared by 400%. Instead of more free time, workers were promised a consumerist fantasy: rising wages and cheaper consumer goods. 

But this new deal was fundamentally incomplete — and ultimately unstable — because it ignored the role of time. The gains of higher wages and cheaper prices were quickly undercut by longer workweeks, rising burnout, and widening inequality. As productivity rose, so did expectations; instead of distributing the gains through shorter hours, workers were expected to simply do more. The absence of time protections meant that any financial progress was offset by a growing time deficit, especially for low- and middle-income workers who couldn’t outsource household labor or buy back their time. Over time, the gap widened not just in income, but in energy, rest, and control over daily life. By the 1980s, the premise of that deal – a better quality of life via higher wages and cheaper prices – began to unravel, and after four decades of neoliberalism, it has seemingly close to collapsing altogether. As political and labor leaders stopped prioritizing time, a new norm quietly took hold: longer hours, side hustles, and the idea that success meant working more, not less. Wages and prices became the only metrics of progress. Without time in the equation, inequality exploded. High earners bought back their time with money; low- and middle-income workers gave up more of theirs just to stay afloat. 

Somehow, we’ve come to accept time scarcity as natural even as nearly everyone, across class, still treasures the protections we fought for generations ago. That’s why today’s affordability crisis can’t be solved by dollars alone. When we ignore time, we misunderstand what people are really losing — not just money, but life itself.

If municipal leaders are serious about tackling affordability, they should put worktime reduction on the policy agenda. Cities can’t fully control rents or food prices — but they can lead on time. Local governments could begin by piloting 4DWs in city agencies without cutting pay or benefits. They can offer grants or tax incentives for private employers who aim to reduce hours. They can mandate time-off minimums — such as guaranteed three-day weekends for shift workers — in city contracts and procurement. And they can build scheduling predictability into local labor standards, giving workers more control over their hours. By treating time like the scarce resource it is, cities can lead where higher levels of government have stalled, and make real progress on affordability in the process.

It’s not just smart and meaningful policy — it’s smart politics. The shared experience of time scarcity is also what gives time-based policies their unique political power. A warehouse stocker, a barista, a nurse, a lawyer; all benefit from having more time off. Worktime reduction doesn’t require empathy with someone else’s struggle; it speaks directly to your own. That universality makes it easier to build broad coalitions, harder to divide people, and more difficult to roll the policy back once it’s won. Compare that to something like a rent freeze or a minimum wage hike — both essential, but narrower in who they reach, which makes it easier for the opposition to use those policies to divide workers. Time is different. Everyone wants more of it — and that shared desire gives us a stronger political momentum to organize, legislate, and win. Bold ideas require momentum. 

This is where we come in. Mamdani’s win showed that voters are ready to fight on affordability. Our job is to help expand what that message means so that our policies hit all three dimensions of affordability: wages, prices, and time. Because a livable life isn’t just about what you can pay for with what you earn, it’s about what’s left of your life once you’ve paid for it.