The City That Workers Built

Joshua Freeman. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. New York: New Press, 2000. xv + 409 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. The view that greets the reader of Working-Class New York seems, at first, unremarkable--a panoramic view of lower Manhattan from Union Square, somewhere around mid-century. Published just as Ric Burns's New York documentary was making its way across television screens, the book's cover seems to echo the same sentiment as that movie--the glory of New York's skyline, a celebration of its physical grandeur, and a vibrant display of capitalist energy. Indeed, just as in Burns's documentary, where the cameras floated over the skyscrapers of New York echoing Brendan Gill's observation that "the Dutch didn't give a damn about anything but money," Freeman's cover image seems to fall into this rhetorical cliché.

But the image--a photograph by Andreas Feininger--is a little clouded. Symbolically, if not in fact, the vista is hazy with the smoke of factories that dominated mid- and lower Manhattan. By mid-century, a half million industrial workers occupied the area south of 59th Street, making this the greatest concentration of industrial workers in the United States (p. 12). In an instant, our view of Manhattan is transformed. New York, in Freeman's powerful book, is the Land of Labor as much as it is the Capital of Capitalism.

With this subtle unmasking of the dominant force behind New York in the twentieth century, Freeman launches into a stunning re-telling of the city's history in the post-World War II era. He argues that New York was preeminently a city of the working class. That working class, through their unions, accomplished amazing feats of urban progress, building a social democracy that would stretch the New Deal beyond its stalled lengths, creating a more complete welfare state, decent and inexpensive housing, cheap and efficient public transportation, universal health care, secure and well-paid jobs with retirement pensions. As Freeman demonstrates persuasively, "What New York workers accomplished in the quarter century after World War II is utterly breathtaking" (p. 104). At the end of World War II, low-skilled workers struggled in conditions not so much improved from their parents, in relative poverty, cramped quarters, with minimal possessions. But, thirty years later, these same workers "had created a revolution in their way of life" (p. 214).

To those who write and teach about New York, and to the rest of the country with an opinion about what New York is--and nearly everyone feels a certain ownership over New York, even if fewer and fewer actually own a piece of the city-- this book is invaluable. During the past decade, the AFL-CIO and labor unions have been making a comeback--organizing unorganized workers, reaching out to women and ethnic minorities and African Americans, determining local and national election outcomes with their agendas and get-out-the-vote efforts, and placing themselves at the forefront of fighting for immigrants' economic and political rights. With equal speed, historians have been retreating from the study of labor unions. Working-Class New York reverses this trend, presenting a vibrant historical account that proudly identifies itself as a history of labor and laboring people. Indeed, Freeman argues that one cannot understand postwar New York City history without seeing it as fundamentally "labor history." As we will discuss below, Working-Class New York runs headlong into dominant contemporary strains of liberal political thought. Freeman's book serves as a reminder about the world labor built, urging those on the left to embrace the progressive achievements of unions and their allies. It should be required reading for Democrats throughout the country today who seem to be desperately searching for some kind of vision and purpose to animate their campaigns. There is an alternative more...