New York City's self-styled working-class mayor is brokering a deal to eliminate nearly 200 horse-drawn carriage jobs without guaranteed compensation — and the drivers who stand to lose everything are calling out the hypocrisy in plain English.
Nine union carriage drivers rallied in Central Park Friday to demand Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin reverse course on Romanch's Law, which would ban horse-drawn carriages in the five boroughs starting June 2028. The bill offers workers career counseling and job referrals. What it doesn't offer is money — for people who poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into their businesses.
The stakes are straightforward: working-class families face financial ruin so politicians can signal virtue to animal-rights activists. Driver Atakan Aktay, a 13-year veteran, put it directly: "Before you became mayor, you participated in a 15-day hunger strike to support yellow taxi medallion owners facing financial ruin. Now you are mayor, and we face the prospect of losing our businesses without guaranteed compensation."
Aktay called it what it is: "How can you fight for one group of medallion owners while allowing another group to face financial devastation? To us, that feels hypocritical and humiliating."
Cristina Hansen, a driver and TWU Local 100 shop steward, dismissed the bill's workforce transition program as empty. "This is not a plan. It's a concept of a plan that sometime in the spring, the mayor will assign some agency to look at some consideration, to publish on a city website of what he's going to do with absolutely no funding, no legislative mandate or anything."
Hansen singled out Menin, who went quiet on the carriage issue until the June death of 18-year-old Romanch Mahajan — the namesake of the bill. "She calls herself a friend of labor. She is no friend of labor. People are gonna get evicted, people are not gonna be able to take care of their kids or pay for their schools."
Menin's spokesperson offered boilerplate about "meaningful protections" and "better economic opportunities" — words that don't pay a mortgage. City Hall said the administration has "begun discussions" of compensation. Discussions. Not commitments.
The New York Post covered the drivers' rally and their grievances straight. HotAir, meanwhile, spent its bandwidth on Tucker Carlson horse memes — a completely unrelated story about the pundit making odd comments about bestiality on a podcast. The working-class drivers fighting for their livelihoods didn't make the cut there.
That's the landscape: politicians who hunger-strike for one group of workers while legislating another group into poverty, and a media class that would rather chase meme cycles than cover the people getting ground down.
The bill is set for a vote next week. The drivers say they won't surrender quietly. The question is whether anyone in power will treat their life savings as something more than a line item on a progressive resume.
