Class 9. November 6. Neighborhood economy 1: Firms, workers, customers
Methods: identifying firms (industries, products), their workers (BLS, O*NET); their customers and sales
(Friday, November 8: tour and discussion with Architectural Grille).
Experts: Joshua B. Freeman, labor historian, Jacquelyn Kelly, Deputy Director, NYC Labor Market Information Service
Readings or applications:
Joshua B. Freeman, “Working-Class New York,” and “‘A Useful and Remunerative Job’,” Chapters 2 and 9 in Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: The New Press, 2000).
Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg, “Missing the Connection? Social Isolation and Employment on the Brooklyn Waterfront.” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (May 1996): 501-519.
Kathy Booth, John Carrese, Laura Coleman, Evgeniya Lindstrom, Theresa Milan, and Lori Sanchez, Nick Kremer, 2015. Understanding Labor Market Information Resources: Descriptions, Benefits, and Limitations. California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Vocational Education Research and Technical Advisory Committee.
Aspen Institute, 2015. “Using Labor Market Data to Improve Student Success” College Excellence Program.
John Dorrer, 2016. “Using Real-Time Labor Market Information to Achieve Better Labor Market Outcomes,” Lumina Issue Papers
Using Red Hook as a case study, in “Missing the Connection” Kasinitz and Rosenberg demonstrate that having a concentration of blue-collar jobs in close proximity to a low-income neighborhood does not translate into jobs for those residents. Instead, they show that social networks and connections matter more for gaining employment than proximity to the job. This contradicts the prevailing urban planning assumption that bringing low-skilled labor to low income neighborhoods would result in higher employment rates and economic growth. This also made me think about the separate phenomenon of “satellite cities” often discussed in urban sustainability planning, whereby bringing jobs closer to where people live would minimize their commute and thus lower their carbon footprint. Of course, this is a separate issue from the one discussed in the Kasinitz and Rosenberg article but I would imagine the outcomes would actually be similar. In order for people to work close to where they live, they would have to build significant networks that would enable them to apply and interview for jobs that were conveniently located close to their homes. Which really just highlights the systemic inequalities of entering the labor market regardless of the level of skill – networks are king across our society.
While I appreciated Freeman’s reflections on the history of working-class New York – mostly because he is a beautiful writer and I am a sucker for anything that glorifies New York – I wonder if perhaps he is painting a much rosier picture of what it’s like to be working class in New York. Sure, I don’t doubt the cosmopolitanism that emerged from different ethnicities living together – in fact, Jews have often been referred to as being (rootless) cosmopolitans because of our history of forced assimilation – still, I don’t believe that there wasn’t more prejudice than this account is willing to admit. Still, this article highlights an undeniable working class identity of New York – one that we are likely to lose unless blue collar jobs grow.
Finally, it was fascinating to read about the different ways colleges can use labor market information to develop curricula that can best position their students for professional careers. There is an inherent practicality in doing this, especially since many students will seek a college degree precisely because it can increase their earning potential. However, it bugs me that public schools are becoming engines that train the future workers that will perpetuate our capitalistic system. Don’t get me wrong – I understand the immediate needs for students to get jobs right out of college and it makes sense that schools want to create pipelines into specific professions. But it makes learning intrinsically instrumental as opposed to being expansive. Again, I understand that not all students have the leisure to pursue liberal arts but I’m saddened that liberal arts is a dying field that is reserved for the privileged.
Hmm, maybe I am just being defensive, but I don’t think liberal arts is a dying field reserved for the privilege. Listening to my students who teach in the CUNY community colleges, they often have the pleasure of awakening ideas and stimulating critical thinking among their working class students and that is a key motivation for them to teach, over and above the practical impact of their students gaining various labor market-relevant skills.
This week’s combination of studies and research on labor and New York City raise serious questions of employment, mobility, and geography. A clear connection between working class proximity to jobs and the role of networks and workplace preparation in Kasinitz and Freeman identify the unique set of challenges facing working class New Yorkers after WWII.
The case studies of Red Hook and the city at large also bring up the dynamics of how race significantly plays into the employment opportunities for New Yorkers. While this is unsurprising, it contributes a close look at the dynamic of organizational significance and spatial relationships in labor outcomes. For example, during the suburbanization of manufacturing in New York City, whites were much more flexible to move to closer neighborhoods outside of the city and drive to work, verses POC were excluded due to redlining. Racist practices of the union often limited the protection of jobs as manufacturing declined. And neighborhood association generated negative outcomes on the local job market (“too convenient,” as described in Kasinitz). Yet the tension of social capital and social embededness also comes into question in the reports on social capital, employment preparedness, and higher education. As we prepare to meet with NYCHA this week and consider the limitations to proximity of services and benefits while structural racism persists, it provides a sober look into the policy challenges of supporting all of Gowanus at a time of rapid development and dislocation.
Indeed. Maybe you can share your thoughts for this coming week about how our discussion with the public housing residents sheds further light on this.
The Freeman chapters provide a fascinating account of the trajectory of the New York City labor movement between the 1940s and 1970. The 1940s seems to have constituted something like an apex of worker militancy and solidarity. In the course of the subsequent two decades, unions confronted the challenges associated with the shift from industrialism to post-industrialism, as increasing capital mobility and automation shifted value creation and employment in the New York City economy from manufacturing to services. In the process, militancy gave way to a negotiated acquiescence with the cost-cutting imperatives of business, calculated to maintain competitiveness and keep manufacturing in the city. Rather than broad worker solidarity – Freeman may be overstating the evidence for militancy and solidarity in the 40s – we see a generalized failure to strategize together, with manufacturing, construction, electrical, and transport unions operating in various ways at cross-purposes. There are echoes today in differences between the retail and construction unions over Amazon coming to Long Island City. Indeed, the relative lack of inter-union solidarity in New York City is typical of the American pattern of business unionism, marking it off from the much higher degrees of cohesion enjoyed within federations in European and other countries.
This seems to hold apropos the soldier’s quip that New York “is just another foreign country.” But there is a larger comparative point to make here.
It struck me when reading these texts that inter-city comparisons, as opposed to inter-national comparisons, remain under-leveraged in labor studies. New York City certainly does better than most others in the United States in terms of unionization and broadly workers’ power. It has surprised me to see how important a factor they are in local politics. They’ve also weathered the process of deindustrialization relatively well. Figures that I’ve seen suggest a decline in unionization between 1980 and 2010 of somewhat less than ten points.
Local factors, which I can only now guess at, would have to explain that. New York City’s historical industrial structure, it has often been noted, was not very concentrated, the milieu involved a dense interlocking of manufacturing firms that employed small numbers of people. There may be a measure of isomorphism between the sort of organizing and labor relations practices that held in that milieu – such as a well-institutionalized system of pattern bargaining – and what worked in the new service economy.
Intriguing points that I cannot expand as much as I wish I could. The rise of public sector unionism (more or less fostered by city government) certainly accounts for much of the union density in NYC. The garment unions are mere shadows of their former selves. Notable are the rise of unionism in the healthcare sectors and in hotel trades. The willingness of some of those unions to embrace immigrant-origin workers is a major part of the story (native black and Puerto Rican workers are disproportionately in the public sector unions). New York is still very much a ‘union town,’ more so than just about any other major city, but it is not due to working class-wide solidarity.
The Freeman chapters on the three postwar decades highlight the huge difference between what labor and the working class meant (and the power “it” was capable of wielding in/over the city, with city-stopping strikes) at the start of the period vs. what it was still able to do (and the much more it was no longer able to do) by the time the narrative ends in the fiscal crisis of the mid-70s. His definition of working class rightfully included white collar – absolutely made sense in the 40s and maybe much less so by the 70s. The divergence of fortunes between the two segments of the working class underscores the importance of the when of the descriptive analysis.
When we get to the Kasinitz and Rosenberg’s study of Red Hook, we are fully in labor’a post-hegemonic moment, especially in the waterfront related scene in the aftermath of containerization revolution that undermined its corrupted foundations. Their argument against the proximity-based “environmentalist” approach to urban economic development is almost entirely tied to race – it is compelling only because race-based explanation is the trump card in US history, and — notwithstanding what is observed above about the importance of timing – wields it’s devastating power across time.
Freeman’s observation that NY labor leaders (and most others in the leadership class) were unable to foresee the dramatic changes that would undermine the centrality of labor is useful background for considering the “timely” practical application of labor market data to fine-tuning (community) college curriculum offerings.