Who Are New York City’s Worst Bosses?
The New York City comptroller’s office has launched a useful new tool for the public: a database detailing the city’s worst bosses and their various labor abuses, along with an accompanying “Employer Wall of Shame.”

An Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York, photographed in August 2024. (Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
During the golden age of the Village Voice, New York’s genre-defining alt-weekly, journalists Jack Newfield and Tom Robbins compiled annual lists of the city’s worst landlords to run in the paper. The feature’s popularity led Newfield to add a spin-off: New York’s worst judges, featuring mug shots shaming these crooked perverters of justice. The worst judges landed Newfield in legal trouble himself. As Martin Garbus, the paper’s lawyer, told Newfield after publication, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is the bar association is starting an investigation because of your article. The bad news is they are investigating you, not the judges.”
The spirit of that list lives on in New York City today. The city’s public advocate’s office compiles a worst landlords list annually. And we now have a new worst-of list, courtesy of the city’s comptroller’s office: New York’s worst employers.
In addition to the Employer Wall of Shame (inspired by similar tools in New Jersey and Suffolk County, New York), the comptroller’s office debuted a comprehensive labor-violations dashboard. Accessible online, the tool tracks businesses’ violations of a range of workers’ rights and protections, including workplace health and safety violations, wage theft, prevailing wage violations, illegal union busting, discrimination, and harassment.