“Working-Class New York Revisited” Conference Honors Joshua Freeman, Discusses the History and Prospects of Working-Class Power and Social Democracy in New York City

By Marc Kagan

“I do hope that this book illuminates the possibilities for ordinary people to play a greater role in shaping their city and nation than they do today.” Joshua Freeman, Working-Class New York, 2000.

New York City’s working-class had real political, economic, and social power for almost thirty years after World War II. That power, expressed primarily through private- and, increasingly, public-sector unions, made life substantially better not just for their own members, but millions of other working-class New Yorkers. It was an age of big dreams and big accomplishments: rent-control and the provision of low-cost public housing, a cheap transit fare (fifteen cents until 1953; twenty cents until 1966), a free-tuition CUNY. Not without its warts, New York was the primary exemplar of what social-democracy in the United States — utilizing the power and resources of the government to improve the lives of wage laborers, their families and their communities — might look like.

That’s the premise of Joshua Freeman’s influential Working-Class New York, first published in 2000, which also examines New York’s turn away from that vision during the 1970s and its gradual replacement (in the final section of his book) with what the author presciently called “Trump City.”

The argument of Working-Class New York, and its utility as a guide to a new progressive urbanism, were “re-examined” in a day-long conference at the School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) on April 23, 2021. The conference also honored Professor Freeman on his retirement from CUNY after more than twenty years of teaching students at Queens College, the Graduate Center, and SLU. Earlier, Freeman had been part of CUNY’s American Social History Project, serving as a lead author of the first edition of its textbook Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History, which places the stories of generations of a broadly defined American working-class at the center of its narrative. Freeman is also the author of In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966, American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945-2000, and, most recently, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, featured on the front-page of The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

As a number of conference speakers noted, WCNY was significant in its time as the first study of post-WW II New York that put the city’s millions of working-class people at the center of its history and into motion. In its first sections, it chronicled “mass participation, solidarity, and democratic participation,” noted Deepak Bhargava. “It freed a history that was buried,” said Steve Brier. To Penny Lewis, first reading it in the company of other union organizers, it “lifted a distracting veil that had shrouded our perceptions of the city we were trying to change,” from one of money and finance: for the first time, “we saw the city that was hiding in plain sight.” Today, there’s an extensive literature about working people’s daily lives and struggles, their solidarities and contradictions, but as Freeman noted in his remarks, in 2000 they had been so erased that “I felt the need to justify the title and the use of the term working-class,” in the introduction to the book.

Yet, WCNY is not just “history from below,” a common mantra of the “New Labor History” of which Freeman’s early work was a part. Andy Battle sees it as a primer on how to combine “attention to lives as they are concretely lived” with “a focus on political economy.” Comparing it with recent work on the history of capitalism which often loses sight of the working class as an historical actor, Samir Sonti called it, “a history of capitalism with class struggle,” providing a vision for today’s progressives that working class power is possible.   

We could, of course, then read the book in a sort of nostalgic way, from an, “I would like to live in that New York” perspective, as Kim Phillips-Fein called it. But, anticipating much of the rest of the day from her position as moderator of the first panel, she asked: “How strong and viable was that social-democratic city? What were the distinctive historical conditions that made that version of New York possible… and the divisions and fault lines that made it difficult to protect over time? Could it be recreated or rebuilt today? What are the opportunities and obstacles; how could it be given a more secure footing?” And, what do we need to understand more, or better, to answer these questions?

As one potential answer, Premilla Nadasen suggested a more expansive perspective on the working class and its struggles. Nadasen noted that the working class is not just the wage workers Freeman primarily focused on, and working-class struggles are led by other institutions besides labor unions. One panel was devoted to African-American and Puerto Rican movements, whose goals sometimes came into conflict with those of unions. Here is a tension still unresolved today: how to reconcile different parts of the social-democratic vision within a single city of inevitably limited resources. Moreover, as unionized manufacturing — traditionally the entry-way of immigrant labor toward a better way of life — disappeared, people of color were increasingly consigned to what LaShawn Harris called the “slow violence” of permanent poverty. Yet Johanna Fernandez argued that their struggles gave working-class New York “a new lease on life in the 1960s,” while Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Brian Purnell described anti-racist campaigns for better employment and against job discrimination, for affirmative action, and better housing, healthcare, and education.

The 1968 teachers’ strike against the quest for community control of education in Ocean Hill-Brownsville — just three years after social workers struck in part to secure better treatment for their clients — is still probably the most dreadful example of how competing aims could divide the New York working class. (The decidedly mixed record of unions on opening their own doors to people of color was another.) That lack of cohesion truly came home to roost just a few years later, during New York’s mid-70s fiscal crisis, when finance capital was triumphant, and unions, community groups, and social movement organizations bickered over crumbs, a moment which still haunts any vision of progressive New York today. A few years later, though, labor and community found some common ground in the struggle to keep Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital open. In more recent times, the notion of “Bargaining for the Common Good” inspires hopes for more unity of purpose.

Still, if, as Nadasen contends, New York’s “labor movement” is alive and well if we think of it as struggles in which the working-class people dominate — including Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist work, immigrant rights, housing and anti-eviction efforts, worker centers, welfare rights, the transformation of policing, and the Fight for $15 minimum wage — what today’s “progressive New York” activists lack is a clear ideological/political unity of purpose. For decades, these movements, cumulatively, have been less than the sum of their parts — just the opposite of the postwar years.

In this regard, a key, and often overlooked, part of WCNY is its examination of the effects of the McCarthyite purge of the Communist Party and other radicals not just from the unions themselves, but the broader movement culture. It was the left, Freeman contends — not left-liberals or labor-liberals — that provided the glue for a unified vision of wielding social power for class-wide goals. Although many leftists, as individuals, snuck back in to the unions and other movements in subsequent years — the silver lining to the cloud — the ideological commitment to “a social infrastructure serving New Yorkers far beyond its [labor’s] ranks” was lost. The sense that the class should act for itself and as a united force also disappeared.   

Here, Nelson Lichtenstein’s observation that it is necessary to distinguish between social-democracy, with its political content, and the welfare state, a series of programs, seems crucial in tracking the decline of working-class power. Freeman himself noted that he struggled with how, precisely, to characterize his postwar city, using “social-democratic… for lack of an alternative.”

Traditionally, social-democracy was disparaged by the left, as, at best, an unsatisfactory halfway step toward socialism. Yet once the left as a coherent voice was banished, the principle of class responsibility and solidarity — across racial lines, less satisfactorily across gendered ones — was lost. The politics of working-class power devolved first into institutional support for existing achievements, funded by a few decades of extraordinary local economic prosperity, rather than a continued fight for an even more expansive vision. Eventually, the notion of a unified working-class became just vague recollections. That made capital’s own ideological offensive during the fiscal crisis — waged with what Freeman, at a forum on Phillips-Fein’s Fear City called “a counter-revolutionary boldness” — and the subsequent (almost) fifty-year reign of neoliberalism, far more effective. In “an age of limits,” he noted, progressives of all stripes have fought rearguard actions. Political imagination was narrowed to “protecting things you think are not good enough.”

Can a progressive agenda, political imagination, and what Frances Fox Piven called, “the confidence of worker power,” be revived under today’s new circumstances? Can New Yorkers realize Marta Gutman’s entreaty to, “transmit the city greater, better, and more beautiful than it was given to us” with better housing, schools, healthcare, possibilities for leisure and sustainability? Will they answer Kafui Attoh’s call to reprioritize class aspirations and solidarity over individual social mobility?

Panelists generally concurred that the current moment seems both fraught with obstacles — locally, problems of post-COVID tax revenues; nationally, the political danger of nativist populism — and ripe with the possibility of progress based on new sets of alliances.  Ruth Milkman argued that social-democracy now had a new life, led (once again) by self-identified socialists, but with social movements rather than labor unions providing the bulk of mass participation, and — taking advantage of the COVID crisis — in an odd alliance with the seventy-eight-year-old white man occupying the White House. Young leftists, she argued, “can’t imagine socialism or social democracy without… race, gender, the #metoo movement, immigration, LGBTQ… it’s central to their whole agenda.”

So, today’s activists have a broader perspective than “just class,” but do the freedom struggles themselves have enough “also class,” to find the common ground necessary to build social-democracy and wield social power anew? Joking that he was taking on the unexpected role of an optimist, Bhargava was hopeful that such a new synthesis was possible, “around the issues of class, race and gender that works at the level of program and of people’s lived experience.” Workers’ movements and racial justice movements especially have become intertwined and, generally, there is more effort than in the past, “to center a critique of capitalism” in the anti-racist, immigrant rights, and climate movements. “Our challenge as progressives,” Milkman said, “is to figure out how to stitch [those] groups together and create a political discourse that coordinates their common interests… a culture of unity.”  

The day closed with final words from Eric Foner followed by Freeman himself. Foner, who noted that he was the only speaker who had taught Freeman, went on to praise the quality of his teaching and the growing sweep of his books, from his first study of a single union to his final survey of factories and their technological, social, and cultural meaning across centuries and continents.

Freeman returned the honor by recounting how he had learned to teach by watching Foner who, “took every student and every student comment seriously. He always tried to find the valuable germ… I always tried to emulate that democratic classroom ethos.” Outside the classroom, he became New York’s foremost public intellectual on the labor movement, explaining labor struggles to the general public, and talking to trade unionists themselves about their own history. “Nothing,” he said, “could have made me happier.”

Looking back at Working-Class New York more than two decades later, his intent was, “to bring to life the complicated, flawed, glorious world of New York’s working people and expand the notion of what mattered in the history of the city,” to pay tribute to the social benefit structures they built, and call attention to the revolution in working-class lives unionism wrought. “In the years I wrote about,” concluded Freeman, “the fighting spirit, the perseverance, the good humor, and the creativity of working people made New York City a better place. I think they, we, can do that again.” 

The entire conference can be viewed at https://slu.cuny.edu/public-engagement/conferences/

Marc Kagan is a graduate student in the CUNY Graduate Center History Department. He's working on his dissertation, entitled, "The Fall and Rise and Fall of Transport Workers Union Local 100, 1975-2009: Unions and Working Class Power in New York City.