RGB member’s broken campaign promise

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla to the Rent Guidelines Board in February to fulfill his campaign promise to “freeze the rent.” But the union leader has broken his own campaign promises before.

Critics dug up his old campaign website and discovered that back when he was running for election to the UAW’s International Executive Board in 2022, Mancilla supported a proposal to restrict board members’ salaries to $142,000 and promised to donate the remainder of his salary. “The current 9A Regional Director earns over $175,000. As the next Regional Director, I will donate that difference of over $30,000 in salary back into the movement,” he wrote on the now-archived website.

But the proposal to restrict IEB salaries failed, and there’s no evidence that Mancilla ever donated the $33,000 difference back to the union. In fact, his pay actually increased to over $193,000 by 2024.

Is this a flagrant example of the labor aristocracy pulling one over on the working man? Not according to a person close to Mancilla, who told City & State that Mancilla was informed shortly after he was elected that it wasn’t actually possible for him to donate a portion of his salary back to the union. And though he took the raise, they added that Mancilla – a second-generation union worker who just got engaged to a fellow union organizer  – has personally donated thousands of dollars over the years to “the movement,” including strike hardship funds and UAW-backed candidates.

The resurfacing of Mancilla’s old campaign promise comes as the Rent Guidelines Board is meeting Thursday night to decide on a range of potential rent increases. The board will meet again next month to finalize the rent increase (or lack thereof) on rent-stabilized units. Mancilla, like Mamdani’s other appointees to the independent board, is expected to vote in favor of a 0% rent increase, effectively freezing the rent.