Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City’s Public Employee Unions by Richard Steier (review)

New York City’s unionization rate exceeds that of any other large US city, and yet few scholars have explored the reasons why. Many other aspects of the city’s recent labor history have been equally neglected. As of 2012–13, more than a fifth (22 percent) of all wage and salary workers residing in the five boroughs were union members, double the national average. Union density is particularly high in the public sector: 72 percent in New York City in 2012–13 and 36 percent nationwide (Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce, The State of the Unions 2013: A Profile of Organized Labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, at media.wix.com/ugd/90d188_da93349cfa7b0c6dd61a5dde5cee0ae8.pdf).

Indeed, New York stands out as an exceptional metropolitan fortress of union density in an era of national union decline. Apart from Joshua Freeman’s superb Working-Class New York (2000), the literature on this subject is conspicuous mainly by its absence.

Labor journalist Richard Steier’s lively volume is a start at filling that gap. It is not a scholarly work, but nevertheless it is a useful resource for labor historians, bristling with fascinating details. Sadly, however, it is not likely to succeed in engaging more general readers or anyone without extensive prior knowledge of New York City’s labor landscape. Steier’s book ranges across the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of that landscape, but it also reflects the enduring provincialism of the nation’s largest city and its highly insular labor movement. All too often the narrative presumes a degree of familiarity with the particular cast of characters and the context in which they operate that few readers will have—a classic case of missing the forest for the trees. For that reason, this book is not likely to be read beyond the limited circle of close friends and determined foes of New York City unionists. That is unfortunate, for Steier is a smart and thoughtful commentator who has been monitoring the city’s labor scene for decades, and his book offers valuable insights.

Apart from the introduction, the epilogue, and a few other brief sections, Enough Blame to Go Around is composed of reprinted columns that the author previously published in the Chief-Leader, a New York City weekly paper that focuses on municipal workers and their unions. Steier has been at the Chief-Leader since 1998 as a columnist and editor. He also spent a few years as a labor and city hall reporter for the New York Post but was “not invited back” after the 1993 strike at that paper, during which he publicly criticized owner Rupert Murdoch.

The core of the book is made up of five clusters of Chief-Leader articles on specific topics. The first focuses on the recent history of rhetorical and political attacks on public-sector unions and the ways in which those attacks smoothed the path to extracting major concessions from New York City’s municipal unions, especially targeting pensions. There is also some background information on the aftermath of the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, but all of the articles in this part of the book were written during the eleven-year reign of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and most of them date from after the 2008 crash. Steier provides richly detailed accounts of this period and helps illuminate the developments that led up to the situation at this writing, namely that virtually all of the municipal unions have been working under expired contracts for several years. New York’s newly elected labor-friendly mayor, Bill de Blasio, has yet to reveal how he will address this problem, making Steier’s perspective especially timely.

The book’s next three sections are concerned primarily with union corruption, ranging from the case of Central Labor...