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Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II

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The narrative in "Working Class New York," grows less interesting along with the declining labor movement it chronicles.

That's no criticism. After all, Joshua Freeman did not write a novel, rather penned an important nonfiction and academic effort that tells the story of New York through its workers.

"Working Class New York," is wonderfully done and demonstrative, at every turn, with the author's passion for his subject.

But, for labor enthusiasts, the end can't match the beginning for excitement.

In the early chapters, the poesy of labor reigns as the Hatters, Printers, Furriers, Elevator Operators, Milliners, Bakers and Tugboat workers, representing a rainbow of crafts and productive industries, bring the world's mightiest city to a halt through mass strikes driven by the underlining goal of reorganizing society itself.

Freeman's analysis of New York's economic structure, and how it created a textured union movement unequaled in the rest of the country, is fascinating and as much a love letter to the unions as to Gotham itself.

Indeed, the author frequently asserts that the city's best face was the lined countenance of the laborer or craftsperson enlightened by their recognition of a shared destiny, on the shop floor and front stoop, with similarly situated souls.

"Working Class New York," meticulously follows the labor movement's progress and retrenchments, starting with its halcyon days in the post-war 1940s.

It makes no bones about the powerful impetus communist politics played, and the subsequent loss of energy that coincided with the reds being chased out of American labor.

Freeman illustrates how the union movement reflected changes in the city as it lost manufacturing jobs and embraced the financial and service-based industries.

His mapping of municipal unionism's rise has less of a workerist flavor and more of what the departed Allan Bloom called the "Nitzscheanization of the left," as ethnicity and cultural issues consumed unions' internal power struggles and drove their industrial strategies.

And the book details how the decline of labor in New York reflected its nationwide losses as the country grew more individualistic and market-oriented in the 1970s and '80s.

Freeman's chapter on how financial types used The Big Apple's fiscal crisis in the late 1970s to undermine and rollback the unions' hard-earned, and unique urban social democracy, is must-read for anyone interested in those dynamics affecting the American workplace for nigh on a generation now.

Labor leaders and activists who share the desire to see the U.S. labor movement regain its power should read "Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II" by Queens College associate professor of history Joshua Freeman, Unlike many labor history books, which often leave the reader with little insight into how to help shape the present, Freeman's new book succeeds in laying the groundwork for strategic thinking about the future of the labor movement. Providing more than a just a narrative of past events, Freeman constructs a useful framework for analyzing labor's present situation, exposing both the role of broad structural forces-changes in the economy, politics, and culture-and the role of decisions made by the labor leadership in defining labor's trajectory.

For those with a fear of starting and not finishing a 400-page "history" book, fear no more. This book is an engaging and fast read; and it reveals facts that most labor leaders and activists are probably unaware of. (For example, one of the first actions of the post-WWII strike wave occurred in New York City with the September 1945 strike of 15,000 building service workers, the predecessors of today's SEIU 32B-J.)

"Working Class New York" is one of the best labor history books published in the last two decades for the simple reason that its vantage point is not as narrow (one industry or one union in a particular period) or as wide (the US labor movement as a whole) as others. By focusing on the history of the organized working class in one particular city, Freeman avoids a problem that has often plagued labor historians: i.e. the "fitting" of labor history into preconceived notions, stereotypes, or ideological biases. Instead, Freeman's book examines the full range of forces that propelled both the New York City labor movement's expansion and decline in the twentieth century.

Today, the task for labor leaders and activists is to absorb the lessons of the past and use them to chart labor's future of growth. "Working Class New York" provides a valuable resource for anyone interested in helping to steer that course.

Greg Tarpinian is Executive Director of the Labor Research Association ().

This insightful, intelligent book not only writes from the usual historian's view of events but also describes the cultural and personal context of New York in the post war period. Highly recommended for New York City buffs and for people interested in labor history or the history of real people.

This book is balanced and strongest in its discussion of the 1940s through the 1960s. After that period, however, the author tends to see the politics of the city as a battle between the good guys in white hats versus the bad guys in black hats.

Freeman's shallow, tendentious treatment of New York's fiscal crisis of the 1970s, for example (perhaps the most important event in the second half of the twentieth century for New York), allows him to portray it as a mere excuse for mean spirited, right-wing attacks on labor's gains. According to Freeman, the good guys (labor and its allies) sought to defend their eminently reasonable and necessary social-democratic policies, while the bad guys (lawyers, investment bankers, etc.) used the purported budgetary problems as an excuse to roll back social welfare policies. Even those unfamiliar with New York, however, will realize that generous social welfare programs, combined with strong municipal unions and pervasive political patronage is, at the very least, expensive. If you want to go that policy route, you have to be willing to pay for it-you can't just borrow money forever. But even that limited degree of complexity is more than Freeman presents.

For Freeman, recent New York politics is as simple as "social democracy" for the people versus right-wing "ideologues." For that reason, to take but one example, the treatment of recent immigration is egregiously shortchanged.

Well written and engaging, but union-centric, incomplete and progressively more biased.

Working-Class New York is a book with a lot of strengths, especially several of its earlier chapters. The chapters in Part I, about NYC's industrial and political exceptionality, help one understand how much blue collar work New York once had, and how exceptional that blue collar work was. Freeman also has good material about the uniqueness of NYC unions themselves. For instance, in no other American city did unions take it upon themselves to building housing for their members as NYC unions did.

Freeman's chapter on the loss of NYC's manufacturing jobs "A Useful and Remunerative Job" is also very well done. Several unions, like the ILGWU, adapted to deindustrialization by gradually giving back the benefits and salaries they had worked so hard for over the years. Other unions attempted ultimately futile mass action techniques reminiscent of the Great Depression, like when the United Electrical Workers staged a sit down strike at American Safety Razor, planning to leave NYC for Virginia.

Despite its strengths describing the stories of unions, I felt Working-Class New York was missing a lot in the areas of culture, politics, and ethnicity. Those subjects are not ignored, but if you want to learn about what working New Yorkers did when they weren't on the job (or on strike), this book will not satisfy you. There is little about non-work socializing, the white backlash, and egregiously little on ethnicity. Freeman has stuff about working-class New York on tv, like the Goldbergs and All in the Family, but nothing about what working class New Yorkers themselves were watching.

For ethnicity, I believe Working Class New York is the first book I have ever read about the working class in an urban center that does not use the term "white ethnic." This neglect is especially annoying when Freedman attempts to answer the question of why New York developed into America's one experiment with social democracy. I've always thought that New York's being so Jewish had a lot to do with that. Freeman's one chapter that deals with culture, New York and the Nation, is well done, one wishes there was more like it.

As the book goes on, Freeman's bias becomes more and more prominent. Freeman isn't a radical, and from time to time attempts to be balanced, but it is clear where his feelings are.

An example of Freeman's bias. Freeman says of open admissions at City College "thought not without faults, open admissions represented a significant advance toward equal opportunity and the ideal of liberal education for all. It was one of the great triumphs of working-class New York."

First of all, open admissions at CCNY was not a creation of the working-class. When Freeman himself tells the story of it coming to be, it is clear that open admissions was a creation of Puerto Rican and Black activists and their upper middle class white liberal allies. Also, open admissions had nothing to do with equal opportunity. An effort at equality at opportunity would have dealt with fixing the crappy grammar and high schools most Puerto Ricans and Blacks found themselves in. Open admissions at CCNY merely attempted to ignore the differences in results.

Whether or not you see open admissions as a triumph depends on your point of view. CCNY used to be one of the nation's best public colleges, on the same level as Berkeley and UVA. Even today, after 30 years of CCNY mediocrity, no other public school has produced nearly as many Nobel laureates as CCNY. CCNY, formerly the "Harvard of the proletariat" for 30 years became an institution of remedial education.

If you think everyone is entitled to a free college education, fine, but nothing is really free. New York City had to pay for those hundreds of thousands of extra students, and surely policies like CCNY's open admission were a factor in the fiscal crisis.

I agree with Mr. Moten that Freeman's chapter on the fiscal crisis itself is superficial and one-sided. Freeman claims the fiscal crisis was caused by banks refusing to lend to New York. Isn't that like saying "the Civil War was caused by South Carolinians trying to take over Fort Sumter"? The banks' refusal to lend only began the fiscal crisis. The fiscal crisis was caused by a drastic gap between revenue and spending. That gap was caused in part by exorbitant union salaries and generous social services. The banks themselves cannot really be blamed for not lending either, since NYC's deficit and debt were so enormous that a loan might very well have become a gift.

Freeman has a right to be on the side of the unions, but he never describes the costs of their power, i.e. the highest local taxes in the country. In the 1970s, cities poorer than NYC had fiscal stress, not crisis. Also, unions themselves brought now NYC's social democracy. John Lindsay was as dedicated to the dream of New York as a social democracy as anyone else, but if you read or remember Lindsay's administration, it will become apparent taht the resistance to the dream came not from the bankers or real estate lobby, but from unions themselves. That New York City become "ungovernable" came from the very people Freeman idolizes.