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Reviewed by:
  • Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice ed. by Ian Thomas MacDonald
  • Myer Siemiatycki
Ian Thomas MacDonald, ed., Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change ( Ithaca: Cornell University 2017)

This book provides a more optimistic account of labour's influence on North American cities than readers might expect. In the process, its authors show commendable restraint eschewing any temptation towards wishful triumphalism. Instead, the essays in this uniformly strong collection present a highly nuanced account of successes and setbacks of union campaigns to shape the direction of two changing cities: New York and Toronto.

To be sure, hard times have befallen labour in these and other cities across the continent in recent decades. Symptoms abound in both plummeting and rising trend lines: declining union density, workers' collective action, and real wages; increased precarious employment, work insecurity and income inequality.

This timely work shifts the focus from class relations at the workplace to union efforts to shape the urban landscape in labour's interest. Exploring union efforts to influence urban land use, regulations, and services, the book illuminates the local state as a significant terrain of labour activism. A key theme is whether union campaigns to define urban landscapes can renew and revitalize the labour movement. It doesn't help that workers themselves are largely missing in action from these union urban struggles.

This book advances the intersection of labour and urban studies. It turns from the more familiar ground of municipal worker strikes, or citywide minimum wage campaigns, to lesser studied contestations over urban space. As capital relentlessly strives to remake the city in its image and interest, this book looks at labour's rejoinder in all its commitments, coalitions, and contradictions. Editor Ian Thomas MacDonald succinctly conveys the collection's aspiration to "serve as a road map toward both a stronger labor (sic) movement and a socially just urban-ism." (1)

The collection itself is a well-designed symmetrical construct. Case studies explore and compare how unions are contesting four dimensions of the postindustrial city in each of New York and Toronto. Paired chapters examine struggles to define "the hospitable city" (tourism, attractions, hotels), the "creative city" (film production), "the sustainable city" (a green economy) and "the caring city" (child care) in New York and Toronto. The focus on these cities retrieves them - from more familiar designations - as leading labour cities, past and present.

Ian Thomas Macdonald's opening case study examines the successful recent campaign of unions in the New York hotel sector to block proposed redevelopment in Midtown Manhattan which would threaten existing unionized hotels with new hotels known for lower wages and antipathy to unions. Ambiguities surface with the recognition that building trades unions supported redevelopment, while key property owners allied themselves with hotel unions to block neighbourhood change.

Steve Tufts provides a sophisticated study of a failed bid by Toronto's leading [End Page 258] hotel sector union to promote a downtown casino. For Unite Here, the casino proposal was "about getting the local government to prioritize postindustrial development as a means of reproducing middle-class jobs." (72) More potent was a diverse array of forces aligned against the proposal, including influential downtown residents, competing gaming and real estate corporations, and other unions opposed to the casino.

The second pairing of essays examines "creative city" impulses through the lens of film production. In both instances, unions in the film sector succeeded in extracting favourable commitments from their city government. Maria Figueroa and Lois S. Gray examine the campaign to secure tax incentives for filming in New York, while Thorben Wieditz perceptively charts the progressive and problematic dynamics behind a successful campaign to preserve film studio space from redevelopment in Toronto. Both cases saw labour partner with local film industry employers. Both essays suggestively question whether union efforts were fuelled by union narrow self-interest or by broader social objectives.

The next essay thematic - "the sustainable city" - sees a turn from unions waging largely defensive preservationist struggles, to labour adopting a more pro-active stance. It is the front on which unions have the least to show for their efforts. Maria Figueroa shows that New York construction sector unions have promoted retrofitting and...

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