New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801479371 ISBN 13: 9780801479373

Publisher: ILR Press, 2014

Synopsis

New York City boasts a higher rate of unionization than any other major U.S. city―roughly double the national average―but the city’s unions have suffered steady and relentless decline, especially in the private sector. With higher levels of income inequality than any other large city in the nation, New York today is home to a large and growing precariat―workers with little or no employment security who are often excluded from the basic legal protections that unions struggled for and won in the twentieth century.

Community-based organizations and worker centers have developed the most promising approach to organizing the new precariat and to addressing the crisis facing the labor movement. Home to some of the nation’s very first worker centers, New York City today has the single largest concentration of these organizations in the United States, yet until now no one has documented their efforts. New Labor in New York includes thirteen fine-grained case studies of recent campaigns by worker centers and unions, each of which is based on original research and participant observation. Some of the campaigns documented here involve taxi drivers, street vendors, and domestic workers, as well as middle-strata freelancers―all of whom are excluded from basic employment laws. Other cases focus on supermarket, retail, and restaurant workers, who are nominally covered by such laws but who often experience wage theft and other legal violations; still other campaigns are not restricted to a single occupation or industry. This book offers a richly detailed portrait of the new labor movement in New York City, as well as several recent efforts to expand that movement from the local to the national scale.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Milkman is Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and Academic Director of CUNY’s Murphy Labor Institute. She is the author of several books, including the prizewinning Gender at Work and L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement. She also is coauthor of Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy, editor of Organizing Immigrants, and coeditor of Rebuilding Labor and Working for Justice, all from Cornell. Ed Ott is Distinguished Lecturer at CUNY’s Murphy Labor Institute. He spent over forty years in the labor movement, most recently as Executive Director of the New York City Central Labor Council.

Review

"This book testifies to the collective organizations emerging to represent the precariat, and the progressive energies driving them. They are the harbinger of new collective action, and bodies like them must be strengthened everywhere. The precariat is new. For the first time in history workers with education are expected to do labor and work in conditions that previously only the uneducated were expected to accept, and they are typically exploited off as well as on conventional workplaces. Above all, the precariat seeks a different future from what the proletariat sought, and unions must wake up to its needs."

(Guy Standing, University of London)

"New Labor in New York is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of workers in the twenty-first century. It documents some of the most inspiring recent organizing efforts in the nation's premier global city, offering richly detailed analysis of their achievements as well as their limits. Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott have compiled a set of provocative case studies of union campaigns, worker centers, and other community-based organizing that teach valuable lessons relevant not only to New York City but also the nation. This book will help to guide our efforts in the years to come as we forge new ways to represent workers in the face of an unrelentingly hostile twenty-first-century economic order that has scuttled many basic labor protections that took decades to attain. This volume casts a wide net, capturing the struggles of immigrants and U.S.-born workers, low-wage workers and those more fortunate, as they confront the new realities of precarious work."

(Richard L. Trumka, President, AFL-CIO)

"A fundamental text for anyone interested in the future of the labor movement, New Labor in New York offers honest and insightful analysis of key organizations and campaigns at the forefront of labor organizing today, many of which are profiled here for the first time. As the labor movement continues to grapple with the new challenges of the twenty-first century, the case studies in this volume will offer both inspiration and valuable lessons."

(Jennifer Gordon, Fordham University School of Law)

Edition details

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0801479371
• ISBN 13: 9780801479373
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Milkman Ruth, Ott Edward