Five
Borough Report June 2003
In the decades after World
War II, labor unions brought a measure of prosperity and security and a sense
of entitlement to tens of millions of Americans across the land. Unions brought
higher pay, nicer homes, decent medical care, and retirement in comfort and
dignity. Politically they acted as a liberal force (at least on domestic
matters), protecting and in limited ways extending the legacy of the New Deal.
But what labor accomplished, impressive as it was, fell short of the hopes and
dreams many Americans had when the war ended, expressed in President Franklin
D. Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights and the CIO's People's Program, with
their calls for full employment, universal, government-guaranteed health care,
affordable housing, racial equality, and checks on corporate power, a social democratic
program rooted in shared sacrifice and a commitment to communal responsibility.
As things turned out, corporate power increased in postwar America, as a more
prosperous but individualistic way of life grew out of the Cold War, suburbanization,
mass culture, and free market ideology.
New York City took a
different path. New York workers and their allies put in place a far more
extensive web of social benefits than elsewhere. This New York social
democracy, which encompassed housing, health care, education, the arts, and
civil rights, was intensely urban in its origins, strategies, and beliefs.
Integral to it was the labor movement, a civilizing force in a city dedicated
to wealth and power, and one that remained relatively strong even as unionism
elsewhere weakened.
New York's exceptionality had
mu1tiple roots. The fact that the vast majority of New Yorkers were
outsiders in a country and a city in which white Protestants controlled the
most important levers of power and wealth helped sustain a political culture of dissent and
struggle, an
openness to ideas and movements outside the national mainstream.
The structure of New York
business facilitated labor power and liberal reform. Small New York employers
might fight particular unions, but they had neither the wherewithal nor the inclination
to launch an antiunion movement. In some industries, employers came to depend
on unions for a flexible supply of skilled workers. Meanwhile, the small scale
of most New York businesses left it up to unions and left-liberal professionals
to take the lead in developing benefit programs, which they did in pathbreaking
ways.
Eventually, working-class
New York's progress down a road not taken by most of the country halted.
Nationally, Cold War anticommunism checked the power of labor and all but destroyed
its left wing. In New York, some left-wing unions managed to survive, and a
few, like 1199, even expanded their influence. But almost across the board,
labor abandoned radical, utopian, or social democratic rhetoric, spurning even
the language of class.
By the 1970s, shifting
residential patterns and changing housing and health economics had reduced the
ability of the labor movement to serve its members and their families. Internal
disputes over racial integration and foreign policy and over who should wield power
further robbed the movement of momentum. Soon after came the fiscal crisis,
which proved more damaging to New York social democracy than the Cold War.
Beneath the cover of assumed economic necessity, a wholesale shift in power and
normative values took place.
In many respects, the city
had become less exceptional. Like everywhere else, brand name consumption and
culture reigned, with the once raunchy Times Square turned into a benign
amusement center where locals and tourists attended Disney shows and bought
food and souvenirs at restaurants and stores owned by Disney, Warner Brothers,
ESPN, and other national corporations. As in much of the country, the politics
and culture of racial and ethnic identity seemed to overwhelm outlooks and
mobilizations resting on class identification.
While in some respects New
York had become more like the rest of the country, the rest of the country in
some respects had become more like New York. Nationally the most robust
economic growth occurred in the service industries, while manufacturing
declined in relative importance. And within the manufacturing sector, many
companies turned away from the standardized, mass production methods for more
flexible approaches of the sort long characteristic of New York. Slowly and unevenly,
the United States moved toward the ethnic and racial diversity long present in
New York.
By the end of the twentieth
century, working-class New York no longer had the dominant role it once
possessed in shaping the social organization, politics, and sensibility of the
City. But New York labor had proved remarkably stubborn, balking at leaving
history's stage. Its persistence, and its continuing vitality, perhaps augur
well for the new century. Working-class New York represents America's past, a
survival from the days when most Americans made or moved things for a living,
from when social ambitions were large and class conflict openly acknowledged.
But it also may represent America's future, the future of a country that has
come to look more like its largest city. Working-class New York may still have
more to contribute to American democracy.
--Excerpted from Working Class New York:
Life and Labor
Since World War II, The New Press, NY, 2000