As I wait to speak with Julie Su, a lifelong labor advocate who has, under socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, become the first deputy mayor for economic justice, I watch people come through the doors of city hall and interact with artist Tom Stanford’s life-size wooden cutout paintings of the New York Knicks, on loan to the city in honor of the city’s beloved and often beleaguered basketball team, which has made the NBA playoffs this year. The figures seem to invite people to identify with the greatness of some of the city’s most intense strivers, as well as to feel at home in city hall, proud to be New Yorkers, and optimistic that better times are just ahead. Many visitors take selfies with the paintings.

I’m summoned and move to the room just next door to the Knicks cutouts for my meeting with Julie Su, a policymaker whose role in the new Mamdani administration is key to turning that welcoming, forward-looking vibe into something more tangible, in the form of a better collective life for New Yorkers. Su, fifty-seven, was acting Secretary of Labor under President Joe Biden for two years, but the Democratic-controlled Congress never agreed to confirm her due to her pro-worker track record, which proved off-putting to center-right Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

Some of the accomplishments they hated: the Department of Labor she led enacted new protections for construction workers, farmworkers, and miners and recovered more than a billion dollars for workers who had experienced wage theft. When union leaders call the Biden administration “the most pro-labor“ White House in decades, they’re praising Su’s leadership.