New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement ed. by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott (review)

New York City represents something of a paradox for organized labour and the American working class. While union density in the US has been in a decade’s long decline, close to 25 per cent of the Big Apple’s workers are members of a union – about twice the national rate. Yet as sociologist Ruth Milkman points out in her introduction to New Labor in New York, the city has one of the highest levels of income inequality among large urban centres in the US. Furthermore, while organized labour built what labour historian Josh Freeman has called a “social democratic polity” in post-war New York – with rent control, cheap and easy-to-use mass transit, public university and hospital systems, and an extensive network of social service agencies – in the 1970s the city served as a test case for neoliberal restructuring as elites sought to roll-back the gains of working people and the insurgent social movements of the 1960s.

Indeed since the 1970s, urban labour markets in North America have undergone profound restructuring. Deindustrialization and the expansion of service sector employment have significantly altered urban landscapes. The economic and political restructuring wrought by neoliberal globalization has negatively affected the capacity of trade unions to organize the unorganized. And in particular, the rise of precarious employment and growth of the precariat has challenged traditional forms of trade unionism, as old forms of representation do not jive with the labour market realities of many workers. But as we read in New Labour in New York, a new labour movement is rising to these challenges. Focused primarily on organizing low-wage, precarious – often immigrant – workers, community-based labour organizations, including worker centres and new labour-community coalitions, are developing a strategic and tactical repertoire that builds working class power among some of the urban economy’s most marginalized workers.

New Labour in New York is the product of collaboration between graduate students and seasoned labour scholars which had its genesis in a graduate course on community-based organizations, unions, and worker centres at the City University of New York (cuny) Graduate Center. Veteran sociologist of labour and labour movements, Ruth Milkman, guided the project while a number of prominent academics performed the role of interlocutors and constructive critics. The end result is thirteen detailed case studies, written by graduate students, which analyze and document new forms of community-based labour organizing, particularly among New York City’s low-wage, immigrant working class. As Milkman notes in the book’s introduction, New York has the single largest concentration of worker centres in the US, and in many ways is a petri dish for new labour and non-traditional forms of organizing. While grounded in New York City, the book contains many important lessons for labour activists and academics beyond the five boroughs and makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature on organizing the precariat and especially to scholarship on worker centres and other models of community unionism.

The thirteen cases are divided into four sections. The first section focuses on four examples of immigrant union organizing and union-community partnerships. Benjamin Becker’s exploration of a more traditional organizing campaign, at retail giant Target, demonstrates just how difficult union organizing in the US has become, even in a fairly labour-friendly state with workers who fall under the protections employment and labour law. The second section includes two cases of organizing workers in occupations that are excluded from New Deal labour legislation. Kathleen Dunn’s case study of community group vamos Unidos examines the challenges of organizing mostly immigrant women street vendors whose work is not always deemed “legal” by the powers that be. Martha W. King’s study of the Freelancers Union may seem out of place, with its constituency of college grads, but it fits here as exclusion from basic labour protections unites...