POLITICS: Mayor Mamdani just joined the nurses’ picket line against HIMSELF

In joining striking private-hospital nurses on the picket line Monday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani forgot that he’s the city’s chief executive — and so part of the management the union is fighting.

The city’s public hospitals, under NYC H+H , have already committed to matching the private-sector nurse contracts: The union opted not to strike against them out of PR calculations.

Yet the union’s demands mean big trouble for city taxpayers and Mamdani’s other spending plans.

After record pay hikes in the last contract, the NYS Nurses Association now want 10%-a-year increases — up 33% over three years — even as the city’s public hospitals struggle to remain afloat

Last month, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli warned that NYC H+H’s 11 acute-care hospitals and other health-care facilities face tough fiscal sledding amid ongoing deficits, reduced federal funding and a soaring share of patients who rely on Medicaid or no insurance at all.

“My job as mayor is . . . to stand alongside the working people who stand with us every day, and to build a city where everyone can live a life of dignity,” Comrade Mamdani pontificated Monday morning. 

But the striking nurses already live a “life of dignity” and are not “having difficulty making ends meet” — while their demands threaten other working people’s needs.

The union’s ask would hike the average nurse’s salary from $162,000 to $272,000 per year; it also objects to members being asked to contribute to their pensions, something most private-sector workers must do.

Does the novice chief executive know that one alleged contract demand would protect drunken and stoned nurses from being fired? Whose “life with dignity” does that protect?

As in most labor disputes, management and the union are hurling all manner of charges at each other; if he’s to be the mayor for all New Yorkers, Mamdani needs to stay out of the crossfire — not feed it.

If he keeps playing no-skin-in-the-game activist at the expense of his day job, he’ll doom his mayoralty.

Early on, the knock on the last mayor was that he was still behaving like a borough president; this one will find himself in worse trouble if he thinks he can keep playing responsibility-free state assemblyman.