City Talk; Prof. Joshua Freeman, Queens College/Cuny

How I'm Doug Musio, this is City Talk. They were savvy and opinionated. They gave the city its cultural greatness. They played a pervasive role in the shaping of New York City's social, economic, and political structure. They helped build an urban social democracy in New York. They were the heroes of the peace and now they're seen as a villain. They are the post-war working class of New York, with us as their chronic law Joshua Freeman. Joshua is a professor of history at Queen's College and he's the author of Intransit the Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933 to 1966.

He is also the co-author of Who Built America. He is the Dean of New York Labor Historians. He's a frequent commentator on organized labor in Union politics and he now runs the new MA program in labor studies at the Murphy Center here at CUNY. Ten years ago, Professor Freeman published the award-winning social and labor history working class New York, life in labor since World War II. We'll look at post-war New York working class, we'll survey what's happened to New York and it's working class over the decade since the book was published and then we'll take a look at possible and perhaps desirable futures. Welcome Joshua. Thank you, Doug. I read this book when it first came out and I read it again for this interview, I lived this book, I lived part of this book, it really talks to those of us who were born in the immediate post-war period.

Let's talk about, let's move to today that triggered my desire to talk with you. Where are the American working class? Where is organized labor in the grand scheme of American politics? Well, compared to the past, it's a lot weaker. I mean, there's no question about it, you know, you just measure by membership, by its economic cloud. Here in New York City, the decline has been much less than in a lot of the country but even here, you know, particularly in the private sector, unions are much weaker and this shows, you know, in the tremendous growth of income inequality, in the kinds of economic policies, the government's pursuing, so it's not been a good 10 years, really. And then we'll talk about why New York was exceptional and you argue that New York City was exceptional because of the existence of this working class. Talk about the book.

Talk about the thesis of the book. Who is this working class, first of all? Well, you know, it's very diverse and very big. New York City was a blue collar town. I mean, I think it surprises people. It was the greatest manufacturing center as well as, of course, the finance center. And it had at least at the end of World War II, the dominant group were European immigrants and their children. Of course, they were growing number of African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, other groups too. Yeah, this was a city where white Protestants were a minority, you know, the very few cities in American history, where white, you know, it was a big Catholic Jewish working class, a growing African-American population, very, very dynamic kind of feeling its, its oats and building organizations to promote its interests. Talk it when you say that this working class gave this city its cultural greatness in what way? Well, I think there was a kind of vision, you know, a vision of a kind of urbanism. I mean, you think about the country, most of the country, after World War II, went in

the direction of suburbia, single-family homes, kind of individualization, low taxes, racial homogenization, you know, homogenization, we have mass peace options, exactly. We go the other way. So it's this highly social, highly collective, mutually supportive kind of a culture that's just a vibrant, you know, creative, you think of things from, from, from beyond the Belmonts to, to the New York Philharmonic and the fact that the same people like both those things, you know, I mean, people go to Frank Sinatra concerts one night and they go to see the Metropolitan Opera and they go up to Lewis and Stadium, the old football stadium up at City College and listen in the summer to the New York Philharmonic. So both culturally and politically, it was an extremely vibrant city and it, it, it, it took the form of institutions, you know, it created, that we still have with us. You know, the, the, the Sydney University system, free television stations, a huge public hospital system.

These were not things that most cities had that, that, that, that encoded a kind of vision that was really an alternate direction for the country. Yeah, you talked about that the end of World War II through the 1960s that the working class in organized labor, quote, created a social democratic polity unique in the country and its ambition and its achievements. What were its, what were its achievements, I mean, began to allude to some of them and what were its ambitions? Well, I think it was to create a urban way of life in which the kinds of things that Franklin Roosevelt talked about the end of World War II, you know, you know, guaranteeing all Americans a job, healthcare, decent education, things that the federal government, in fact, never did do, we didn't New York, you know, through a massive public housing program through working class co-op housing, through a free public higher education program, through a cultural world that was accessible, and you know, by the way, the unions played a role in that.

They helped finance, uh, New York City Center, New York City Opera, New York City Ballet, the concerts in Lewis and Stadium, a low-cost mass transit system that made all the successful to anyone. You could live in the far reaches of Brooklyn, and you know, you could go to a free concert in Central Park. So did they exist in an ideology or an idea that permeates the entire culture? I think so. Absolutely. I want to say it's only working class is a kind of progressive reform tradition that coincides with this. You see a lot of support for this, actually, from the top, upper-class reformers, from the Herbert Lehman's of the world. So I think there was a different vision in New York that was not strictly working class, but the working class had the kind of political clout that made a lot of this possible that made it actually happen. And that was based on their numbers and their diffusion throughout the economy at that time. And the organizations. Okay.

This is most importantly, but the American Labour Party and the Liberal Party, which were third parties, which were actually pretty powerful, tenist groups, block associations, ethnic organizations. So there was a rich organizational life that could be mobilized to support things, for example, like rent control. We know rent control was originally a federal program. Sure. There were two. Now, most places in the country, it just disappeared right after the war. Yeah. We still have it, you know, in some form or another. And that was, of course, there was this mass mobilization to defend it. And some ways New York post-World War II, as you describe it, is more European than American in terms of its social attitudes and values, at least the way you describe it. And it's institutional structure. Yeah. I think it's some ways that's true, you know, the language is different. And in fact, I played around. They really want to use the term social democracy. That's not a term that's used here. And by the way, these folks would not have used that term. They would not have used them. How would they characterize themselves? How do they see themselves?

Well, I think in the 30s and 40s many of them thought themselves as social, as communist, left wing. That language kind of disappeared after the war and part, because of McCarthyism and the association with some things that themselves rooted just like. So you got to call them, for example, exactly. So you get this often very vague language, progressive, liberal, you know, and I think actually it undersells their achievements, because they didn't really have a language to describe how amazing some of the things they did. You know, for example, something like Ken South, you know, a housing project in Manhattan. Right. Ken South, which is still thriving today, right in the middle of New York, is built by the union so that government workers can not only have affordable housing, but they could walk to work. I mean, what an extraordinary thing. You know, actually my open president, Kennedy, came to the opening and on the Roosevelt, it was a big deal. And yet no one today thinks all not much about it, because I don't think there was a language to point out, you know, what was so special and unusual about this.

Well, again, and in part your book, it certainly at least begins to do that. What would you have liked to have added to the book that you couldn't just because what, for whatever reason? Yeah. I think there were certain parts of the social and cultural life that I didn't explore as much as I would have liked to religion. I didn't give as much attention to conservative currents that I would have liked to, which are certainly important. And then I think in a more recent period, the explosion of newer immigrant groups and their working class cultures, which is something I sort of point to, but I don't really delve into. And I think that story, you know, some others are going to tell pieces of it, Roger Sanjak, my colleague at Queens has been tripping book about Queens that touches on some of this. We need a second edition. Come on. We need some, you know, youthful new historians will pick up the filet. So you, you see New York City and you use the term, throughout, as exceptional.

And that there was this exceptional moment, which you alluded to here. And that moment passed, right, basically, last 30 years, the end of the water, fiscal crisis. Yeah. Let me say two things about this one is I made a mistake, I think, I think I over emphasized the exceptionality. And this was the, I now won every grad student about this, okay, you do a case study. And then you make a comparison claim, but you really study the other places. So New York was exceptional, but there were pieces of some of the same things in places like Milwaukee and Chicago. So in some of the other industrial cities, Detroit with strong labor movements, you saw part of it. New York was the most complete version of it. So I think there was a alternative vision that was not just in New York, but we were in the forefront. Since the fiscal crisis, we've become less exceptional, but we're still exceptional, I think. You know, some of it's the physical form of the city, some of the attitudes. But we've become more like the rest of the country.

Well, and then you look at the fiscal crisis and see this as a turning point. You've talked about a narrow social vision became dominant. The public sector was demonized and corporations exalted. I mean, it sounds like I'm reading today's headlines. How and why did this happen? If this was so successful, why would they ultimately so weaken the face of their implacable animals? I think there are several dimensions, that's right. One is it wasn't successful on a fiscal level. This kind of expansive notion of state function could not be financed on a local or even on a state level. You really needed a national orientation, this direction. And in the 60s, with rising missile salaries, with rising welfare costs, New York City went into huge debt to sustain this expansive notion of state function and it created a real fiscal crisis, which then became an opportunity for a political intervention by conservatives

who said, this is bad idea, it's unworkable, you got to ditch this thing. And I think this really was the beginning of what we think of as the Thatcherite, Reaganite kind of return towards a kind of fee market ideology and orthodoxy. And that process has been continuing, you know, for 35 years since. Talk about workers and unions in New York City today and in the United States. I mean, clearly, as I said in the opening, in some ways, labor is increasingly seen and particularly unionized government workers, so I've seen more and more to be the villain of the place. Right. Well, I think that's true. And I think in some ways, they're kind of isolated. One big piece of this, of course, is the client, the private sector unions, which were once bigger, you know, today nationally, there is many public employees and unions as private, but that's a huge historical chain.

Even here in New York, we think of this as a union town in the New York Metropolitan region, only 15% of private sector workers belong to unions. So the public sector workers now are becoming a kind of real exception. They have benefits that a lot of us no longer have. So that's a kind of source of a certain amount of- And then there's an attention issue as well. Right. And it's also a target because a lot of private employers don't really like to be in a situation where public employees set a standard that their own workers are not getting. So there's a lot of private sector opposition to these kinds of benefit packages and tends to be focused on benefit more than pay because, in fact, these folks are not that well-paid. But what they do get relatively generous benefit. What about the political cloud? We're talking about unions now. Right. Well, you know, that's interesting. Political globally. Yeah. Like locally, meaning New York City, New York City. Yeah. I think the political cloud of unions has remained stronger than their economic cloud, particularly

again with the private sector, even just for a second nationally, 25% of voters come from Union households. They vote in a higher proportion. New York unions have a lot of influence in the Albany. They have a lot of influence into the whole- And someone would argue that they have too much influence on the Albany. And that's why you have this fiscal crisis because of these rising pension and healthcare costs, for example. Respond. Well, I think the big drop is really on the revenue side. I mean, I think that if you're looking at the financial crunch, which is real, you know, I don't want to minimize it. You know, starting with Mario Cuomo, you know, and almost ever since, we had tremendous decreases in state taxes. If you went back to the tax rates, Mario Cuomo was elected governor, there wouldn't be no financial crisis. So, you know, we made some decisions whether they were right or wrong. So I do- We mean the political extent. Yeah. The society. The state, you know, all of us- Of course not. Of course not. Of course not. So I think that to focus, you know, on pension costs, which are real, I'm not so minimizing it.

But I think that's isolating for ideological purposes, one side of the story. So, you know, still have a lot of power, but it's defensive power now. It tends to be defending what they have or defending maybe the agencies they work for, you know. Which puts them in a bit, to your position in terms of the, I mean, the dominant narrative really flows against them. Yeah. I think that's right. And I frankly think that most laborally is all very good in making their case. You know, I mean, they, they, they didn't have to. So I think that they're not politically savvy about how to do that. Okay. And one of the things that you a book does brilliantly, I might add is look at sort of the giants of the labor movement during the year that I grew up in fact, I worked for at least one of these folks, you know, David Dopinsky with the garment workers, Mike Quill with the transport workers union, and then Albert Shankar at that, at the UFT. Talk about them and their role and their influence and compare it to the present day. Well, first of all, their household names.

I mean, today I asked my students at Queens College, you know, name a labor leader, most of them can't name anyone. I mean, some of them so no Randy Warren garden, maybe that's the one name. These were absolute household names. They were extraordinarily able, they were extraordinarily forceful, they were extraordinarily unapologetic in their advocacy for their members and for workers. Some of them, like Quill, were also, you know, incredibly witty, you know, sharp talk. So you know, they come from a real, they got a lot of things you know, and the TWU, a lot of Irish Republican army folks were in that union. Absolutely. Absolutely. They were very politically sophisticated. You know, even someone like Shankar who was involved with, you know, young socialist groups, Scott Baum comes out of that same time and back, they were politically savvy. They came from a working class culture, which was highly politicized. Today, by the way, I think you see that more among immigrant workers, you know, refugees from El Salvador or, you know, Nicaragua, who came to the United States in the 80s and 90s were refugees from other places.

Today, more politically sophisticated than their American born peers. Back 30 years ago, you saw that in this group. So they were very sophisticated, they were kind of big figures, and they carried a lot of weight. And I just don't think we have very many people nationally or locally of quite the same character, which is not to say we don't have competent folks. I mean, we have a lot, but they don't hold that same position and they haven't been tested in that same way. And I think we're coming into an era in which they're going to have to be able to step outside the confines of the labor movement and make the case to New Yorkers. More generally, you know, this is what we're trying to do. This is what we've achieved. This is what we've achieved. What's the case? What's the case for them? Well, first of all, I think the case is against the downward spiral that we've seen in working class standards of living for now, you know, a quarter century. You know, we used to be a society where every year everyone lived better. Now we were society every year we lived worse, you know. And I think the concessionary bargaining, you know, is a managed process of downward mobility

and every group affects every other group. These said benchmarks, you know, the idea that you should be able to work 25 or 35 years and retire on a decent pension, you know, that's in some ways maintaining a society where public sector unionized employees, you know. I think the tendency is we're going to work till we drop, you know. And so we're kind of seeing history go backwards. So some of that seeming winery, you know, not getting with the program, which seems selfish and some ways you're selfish. I don't want to. Sure. But that doesn't mean it doesn't help other people too, you know. So I think that's part of the case that needs to be made. I think also in the public sector, you know, good teachers will be attracted if they do good jobs, you know. And so, you know, if you want to attract and retain competent people, you've got to make it not a slum job, you know, not a sweatshop job. And that's true for police and transit and so forth.

So I think there's much to be said, there were abuses. And you know, this of course, you know, is terribly costly to the, you know, when you have the lieutenant in the police department in Jersey City, it retires with a $250,000 pension, they help anybody and it's indefensible, you know, and it's ridiculous to try to defend it. Okay. Your conclusion in 2000, the end of the 20th century, we were a decade later, I'll read it. You're a bit pessimistic, but you conclude, but possibilities remained as the 21st century begins for ordinary folks through action to turn the ghost of working class New York back into a living organism and allow it once again to play the Marley and socially salutary role it traditionally held in the great city, 10 years later. Well, you know, at the labor movement has not been a success was I would have hoped. I'm a backer of it, but you know, it's not a totally grim picture either. You know, I think probably many people would disagree with me, but I thought that

trained it to drive five years ago was an incredibly impressive display of solidarity. Not just among the workers, but among the workers who basically supported these workers who basically said, no, they shouldn't have their pensions cut. No, they shouldn't have their health care taken away. And I thought it was a magnificent display of people. But then what happened? Well, there was a look, obviously it was a very controversial event, but if you look at polling, actually, they had a lot of support. You saw it on the streets when Bloomberg, I think in one of these more foolish moments, you know, described as union leaders as thugs, you know. That did not play well, you know, and in fact, I thought that was the tie turning moment. Now, you know, actually, a lot of trans workers would disagree with me. They think, you know, a lot of them think that they induce a well-mouthed strike. I think they do a pretty, got a pretty good resolution of it. There are other things to I'd point to. Again, I don't want to be Polly Anish. I mean, it's been a tough period. One of the interesting developments is the growth of non-collective bargaining oriented work organizations, the workers centers, for example, for example, for example, the domestic

workers union. This is an organization of people who clean houses and take care of children. They don't engage in collective bargaining, which would be very difficult to think to organize out of this. But, you know, they have pushed for legislation. In fact, both houses of the legislature passed a bill they put for that hasn't been reconciled yet to get basic protections over time, you know, minimum wage, health and safety. What are the champions? How do they do it? How do they exercise the political muscle or the, what is it? Yeah. It's an interesting question. I think that they have been very good in building coalitions, you know, they, of course, they have to organize their own group and they have a good case to make. But I think that they found ways to build ties to other groups, including the Central Labor Council, which it's credit here, has opened the doors. You know, for example, the tax workers aligns, which is another one of these groups, doesn't collect the bargaining, because these tax workers are in effect kind of independent

contract is, they're actually affiliated with the Central Labor Council. This was the first time in the country where a non-traditional union type group joined the Central Labor Council. So, so, so, so, what's happening here? Something's happening now. We'll let scale up. I don't know. But it's in the restaurant industry, the New York State Department of Labor was worked pretty closely with some of these groups in terms of enforcing existing law. You know, we also have pretty good laws in the books. Unfortunately, not always enforced about minimum wage, about, you know, over time, about child labor. So, that's an interesting development. I don't know in the end if that mile's going to work. But these tend to be immigrants. They tend to be young. They tend to not come necessarily at this with the same assumptions. And I think the labor movement, the old labor movement, what I call that kind of realizes this is something they need to pay attention to, and they've been fairly open to it. Even another example, kind of a moment, the freelancer's union. Right.

You know, that's great science in the subway. Right. You know, that's a very non-traditional model, but I think that's part of the labor movement too. Yeah. But what's the underlying ideology here? Is there an ideology that transcends their immediate interests? As you argue in the book, it occurred between the end of the war. It's a good point you raise. It's not very spoken. Let's put it that way. I mean, the ideology tends to be basic decency. Right. Let's get people out of the cellar. It does, though, interestingly, I think, involve looking to govern it, you know, and the political process, more than the collective bargaining employer employee relationship to upgrade conditions. You know, in part, because it's hard to do that for these isolated workers. Okay. So it does envision a kind of activist government that is taking on to itself the responsibility to create a floor, you know, for New Yorkers. And that's a very important thing in an era in which we seem to be tumbling downward. You're in 2010.

You've had the advantage of an historical perspective. Being forward, you've just deluded to some of it, but does working class New York ever arise again in any way near the influence it once had? And it wouldn't be exceptional, as you claim it was. It would have to be a very different kind of movement. It would have to be of service workers, of white collar workers, because our economy is so changed. I think we'd have to speak to different interests. So it's never going to arise in the same way, but could workers be more of a force in shaping our city or politics? I think they couldn't be. It's a tough moment to know what's going to happen next, because the context of the economy is so uncertain right now. And the last minute or so, what about the working family's party? Given that it's attachment to labor, is it a mechanism for the flowering of this? So is this sort of a standard political operation?

Yeah, I think it's both at once, and it's done a lot of good work in terms of getting legislation through that AIDS workers. It's a very, very impressive achievement, and of course, in the nuts and bolts of politics, they're very good. They relationship to Democratic Party, they guys sort out, you know? And sometimes they're a little bit of an adjunct that kind of lines up the troops of the Democrats. Sometimes they're a real pressure group to push these things. So it's a very impressive development, but I don't know yet, and the end, is it going to really be very different, or is it going to just be a kind of liberal pressure group? That remains to be seen. So that's the future we have to say it, and ain't very clear, but you're still somewhat hopeful. Well, I am, actually. I think Labor's always shown a great deal of resiliency, and frankly, you know, one advantage we have is that the upper class blew it. You know what I mean? Yeah, we live in a city full of financiers who screwed it up. OK, you're going to stop right there.

We'll leave the blame with. We believe the blame may lie. My thanks to Joshua Freeman. Join me next week when Harold Holzer and I will talk Abraham Lincoln. Go on to the museum. Let us know what you think about this show. You can reach us at cuny.tv. When you get there, click on the board that says contact us and send your email. Whatever it is. Thanks. No thanks. I'm not just do it. Send it.