City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York ed. by Joshua B. Freeman (review)

On May Day 2019, the Museum of the City of New York unveiled "City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York," an exhibition charting the history of workers organizing in Gotham over the past two centuries. Steven H. Jaffe curated the show, advised by a committee of labor historians headed by Joshua Freeman and drawing materials from the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University and the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. The exhibition told the stories of well-known labor leaders and rank-and-file organizers of myriad backgrounds, trades, and creeds. Exploring everything from Henry George's mayoral run to garment worker health centers to civil service career ladders, the show substantiated the argument in its title: labor movements have shaped the way New Yorkers work, and they have also refigured the politics of the city in ways that have made New York more equitable for the working-class majority of its residents. (I reviewed this exhibition last fall for The Nation.)

This companion volume, which Freeman edited, features sixteen short, synthetic essays from labor historians, several of whom served on the show's advisory committee. These pieces reinforce the core claim of the exhibition—as Freeman puts it, that "labor shaped New York and New York shaped labor"—while broadening the scope of the inquiry both topically and chronologically (220). The volume is organized into three sections: "Workers in the City of Commerce, 1624–1898"; "Union City, 1898–1975"; and "Crisis & Transformation, 1975–2018." "Workers in the City of Commerce" features five broad, thematic essays exploring the worlds of artisanal labor (Simon Middle-ton), enslaved labor (Leslie Harris), sailors (Jonathan Thayer), women's housework and homework (Elizabeth Blackmar), and the visual culture of work, workers, and activism (Joshua Brown). Only artisans featured significantly in the museum show; here a much fuller picture of work in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New York emerges, with an emphasis on the fact that "free" waged labor was far from dominant in New York City until the mid-nineteenth century. In Gotham, as in every US city, slavery, indenture, and coverture governed both production and social reproduction in households, small shops, and emerging industries. Brown's piece at the end of the section does double duty: it illuminates the evolution of print journalism's coverage of labor and organizing in these years and also provides context for the illustrations that fill the pages of the volume. (The design firm Pentagram laid out both the exhibition and the book.)

The six essays in "Union City, 1898–1975" examine how working people built a labor-liberal political coalition and a social democratic approach to civic welfare in New York during first three-quarters of the twentieth century. Annelise Orleck and LaShawn Harris offer tight, lively summaries of their scholarship on garment workers and sex workers, respectively, in the early twentieth century. What unites these seemingly disparate stories—unionizing the city's largest industry and making a living in the underground economy—is the solidarity and creativity of women workers, whose struggles preserved their families and communities and subverted patriarchal assumptions. Freeman and William Herbert place New York at the heart of major changes in the national labor movement, tracing the role of New York unions in the rise of the CIO and public sector organizing. Martha Biondi and Aldo Lauria-Santiago investigate connections, collaborations, and conflict between the labor movement and Black and Puerto Rican freedom struggles. Along with Orleck and Harris, and in keeping with the "struggle" in the book's title, these chapters illuminate how Black and Latinx New Yorkers struggled alongside and within the city's established labor movement in search of shop-floor democracy and civil, political, and social rights in the city.

This...