[Excerpt] For over 20 years, Cornell University’s Empire State Poll (ESP) has taken the pulse of New York State residents’ public opinion. Now administered through the Center for Applied Research on Work at the ILR School, the poll continues to ask many general opinion questions, with an increased focus on work. The result is over two decades of rich data on the issues most important to state residents, their views on the state economy and government, as well as key indicators of New York’s labor market, among other things.

Under CAROW and ILR, we have been tracking key employment indicators to help capture the portrait of work in New York State. ESP data from 2003 through 2024 illustrates how the structure of work has remained consistent over time with full-time employment the most common arrangement, but with a significant rise in gig work and a decline in average hours worked after the pandemic. It also shows that real household income growth in the state has slowed in recent years, while inflation has risen. Perhaps relatedly, cost of living now dominates respondents’ key concerns, eclipsing other priorities such as the environment. Alongside this trend, respondents’ outlooks on their personal finances and on the state economy have grown increasingly pessimistic, and trust in institutions has declined.

Taken together, our findings point to clear steps policymakers and others can take to alleviate some of the economic anxiety emerging in the data, which are outlined at the end of the report.