Unions and the City
Unions and the City

Author: Ian Thomas MacDonald

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2017-06-13

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1501712683

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Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities, even after years of decline. Labor continues to play a vital role in mobilizing urban residents, shaping urban conflict, and crafting the policies and regulations that are transforming our urban spaces. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address nonunion workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members.Unions and the City serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. The book presents the findings of a collaborative project in which a team of labor researchers and labor geographers based in New York City and Toronto investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. The contributors assess the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals—such as protecting employment levels, retaining bargaining relationships with employers, and organizing new workforces—as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), this book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents. Contributors Simon Black, Brock University; Maria Figueroa, Cornell University; Lois S. Gray, Cornell University; Ian Thomas MacDonald, University of Montreal; James Nugent, University of Toronto; Susanna F. Schaller, City College Center for Worker Education; Steven Tufts, York University; K. C. Wagner, Cornell University; Mildred Warner, Cornell University; Thorben Wieditz, York University

City Unions
City Unions

Author: Mark H. Maier

Publisher:

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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In City Unions, the first comprehensive history of New York City's municipal unions, Mark Maier traces the rise of collective bargaining in New York City from 1896 to the present. Maier argues that despite public images of strength, many New York City unions were in fact "managers of discontent," taking on traditional management roles by preventing strikes and enforcing workplace rules.

Enough Blame to Go Around
Enough Blame to Go Around

Author: Richard Steier

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1438449569

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Since 1980 Richard Steier has had a unique vantage point to observe the gains, losses, and struggles of municipal labor unions in New York City. He has covered those unions and city government as a reporter and labor columnist for the New York Post and, since 1998, as editor and featured columnist of the Chief-Leader, a century-old independent newspaper that covers city and state government in greater detail than today's mainstream news organizations. Drawing from his column with the Chief-Leader, "Razzle Dazzle," Enough Blame to Go Around describes in vivid terms how the changed economy has drastically altered the city's labor landscape, and why it has been difficult for municipal unions to adapt. There can be no doubt, he writes, that public employee unions have contributed to the problems that confront them today, including corruption and failed leadership. But at the same time and for all their flaws, he believes unions represent the best chance for ordinary people to receive fair economic treatment.

The Unions and the Cities
The Unions and the Cities

Author: Harry H. Wellington

Publisher:

Published: 1972

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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Research monograph on problems resulting from the emergence of militant trade unionism among urban area civil servants and public servants in the USA, with particular reference to the applicability of collective bargaining to the public sector - questions the assertion that what works in private employment will work equally well in the public sector, examines the impact of strike actions of municipal employees on the public interest, etc., and suggests remedial measures. References and statistical tables.

Social Reproduction and the City
Social Reproduction and the City

Author: Simon Black

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0820357537

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The transformation of child care after welfare reform in New York City and the struggle against that transformation is a largely untold story. In the decade following welfare reform, despite increases in child care funding, there was little growth in New York’s unionized, center-based child care system and no attempt to make this system more responsive to the needs of working mothers. As the city delivered child care services “on the cheap,” relying on non-union home child care providers, welfare rights organizations, community legal clinics, child care advocates, low-income community groups, activist mothers, and labor unions organized to demand fair solutions to the child care crisis that addressed poor single mothers’ need for quality, affordable child care as well as child care providers’ need for decent work and pay. Social Reproduction and the City tells this story, linking welfare reform to feminist research and activism around the “crisis of care,” social reproduction, and the neoliberal city. At a theoretical level, Simon Black’s history of this era presents a feminist political economy of the urban welfare regime, applying a social reproduction lens to processes of urban neoliberalization and an urban lens to feminist analyses of welfare state restructuring and resistance. Feminist political economy and feminist welfare state scholarship have not focused on the urban as a scale of analysis, and critical approaches to urban neoliberalism often fail to address questions of social reproduction. To address these unexplored areas, Black unpacks the urban as a contested site of welfare state restructuring and examines the escalating crisis in social reproduction. He lays bare the aftermath of the welfare-to-work agenda of the Giuliani administration in New York City on child care and the resistance to policies that deepened race, class, and gender inequities.

City of Workers, City of Struggle
City of Workers, City of Struggle

Author: Joshua B. Freeman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 023154958X

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From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York

Enough Blame to go Around
Enough Blame to go Around

Author: Richard Steier

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2014-01-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1438449542

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Veteran labor journalist Richard Steier explores the tensions between New York City’s public employee unions, their critics, and city and state politicians. Since 1980 Richard Steier has had a unique vantage point to observe the gains, losses, and struggles of municipal labor unions in New York City. He has covered those unions and city government as a reporter and labor columnist for the New York Post and, since 1998, as editor and featured columnist of the Chief-Leader, a century-old independent newspaper that covers city and state government in greater detail than today’s mainstream news organizations. Drawing from his column with the Chief-Leader, “Razzle Dazzle,” Enough Blame to Go Around describes in vivid terms how the changed economy has drastically altered the city’s labor landscape, and why it has been difficult for municipal unions to adapt. There can be no doubt, he writes, that public employee unions have contributed to the problems that confront them today, including corruption and failed leadership. But at the same time and for all their flaws, he believes unions represent the best chance for ordinary people to receive fair economic treatment. “No one knows New York City’s working men and women better than journalist Richard Steier. Whether he’s depicting the heroic exploits of legendary union leaders or exposing the excesses of corrupt labor bosses or recounting pivotal battles over labor contracts, Steier always provides fresh, behind-the-scenes insight into the vast world of municipal workers, a group that too often is unfairly maligned. And he does it all with a powerful bare-knuckle style that will leave you wishing for more.” — Juan Gonzalez, staff columnist, New York Daily News “If you want to know about municipal unions in New York City, you need to read Richard Steier. I sometimes disagree with him, but for more than two decades he has been one of the most informative and provocative chroniclers of the ins and outs of public sector labor.” — Joshua B. Freeman, author of American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000 “New York City’s labor unions have been luckier than they deserved to have had reporter and editor Richard Steier around to spotlight their occasional triumphs and their much more frequent failures. Like Murray Kempton, another great New York columnist who loved the men and women of labor but who never suffered the fools who sometimes ran their unions, Steier’s columns are filled with news, insight, and always compassion for those who ride (and drive) the early trains and buses to work.” — Tom Robbins, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism “Steier presents an impassioned case for public sector unions and the benefits they have won, along with fascinating tales of the machinations inside several of the largest unions in New York City—District Council 37, Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the 2005 strike that paralyzed the city, and the United Federation of Teachers.” — Alair Townsend, former New York City Budget Director and Deputy Mayor

Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds
Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds

Author: Lowell Turner

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-07-05

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1501726684

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Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds examines a diverse array of innovative strategies for revitalizing the labor movement by forming alliances outside the workplace with a variety of community groups, social movements, and faith-based organizations, particularly those that address civil rights, immigrant rights, and consumer concerns. This book presents case studies of issues—such as living wages, community development corporations, and local politics—around which urban coalitions are built in "union towns" (New York City, Boston, Buffalo, and Seattle), "frontier cities" (Los Angeles, Miami, San Jose, and Nashville), and European cities (London, Frankfurt, and Hamburg). Introducing the role of urban social context in the field of labor revitalization, the editors have chosen cases with different outcomes—cities in which strong coalitions have enabled new union influence are contrasted with those in which such coalition building has been thwarted. As they survey the successes and failures of the new urban labor movement, the editors and contributors conclude that actor choice, strategic innovation, coalition building, and the urban context of labor organizing are key elements in the revitalization of the labor movement and the renewal of democracy. This book will allow the labor leaders of the future to learn from the recent experiences of their peers throughout the United States and Europe.