New York, despite its status as the capital of capitalism, is one of the great American cities of unions and working-class movements. In City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York, sixteen scholars examine workers, their struggles, and the organizations they built over four hundred years. Edited by Joshua B. Freeman, this collection of essays—a companion to an exhibit of the same name that appeared at the Museum of the City of New York in 2019—is strong and wide ranging, attentive to both the achievements and shortcomings of the past and the contradictions and possibilities of the present.

City of Workers, City of Struggle is written by senior scholars and grounded in both the historiography of labor history and questions that swirl around today's labor movement. With its clear writing and dynamic design that will appeal to the general reader, the book will benefit scholars, teachers, workers, and activists. Like the exhibit (for which I was a consultant, unlike the book), the volume takes a healthily plural approach to the history of workers and their institutions. Instead of a narrow focus on unions and their leadership, City of Workers, City of Struggle explores different kinds of workers, including slaves, domestic workers, sex workers, and garment workers. Indeed, the book is as much a history of work in New York City as it is a history of labor movements.

Steering clear of what Freeman calls two great myths in labor history—continual progress and continuous struggle—the book charts a subtle course. In addition to unions, the volume explores the recent rise, in immigrant New York, of ethnic organizations that fight for workers’ rights and workers’ centers that gained prominence in the struggles of car wash workers and the fight for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage.

In delivering on the book's subtitle—How Labor Movements Changed New York—the book brings the history of labor movements and the working class into a fruitful relationship with urban history. Surely, as the book points out, labor activism helped create the broadly social democratic culture of mid-twentieth-century New York, when unions—in tandem with the New Deal order—crafted a range of public and working-class institutions that moderated the harder edges of New York capitalism. At the same time, the racial exclusions of that city testify to both the limitations of the city's labor movement in the past and the need for stronger unions and working-class institutions for today's blacker and browner workforce.

But what about the opposite question: How did the city change workers? In particular, how have workers been shaped by the recent decades in New York City—from the budget cuts of the fiscal crisis in 1975 to the emergence of New York as a global symbol of urban inequality? To this question, the book offers a mixed answer.

In recent years, from Occupy Wall Street to the fight for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage to Black Lives Matter protests, New York has seen an upsurge in militancy. The alt-labor movement epitomized by workers’ centers—sometimes alone and sometimes in concert with labor unions—has invigorated organizing in immigrant communities and won victories for domestic workers and car washers.

But, for all of this activism, the death tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that working-class New York—composed largely of people of color and immigrants—suffered disproportionately. Transit workers, cashiers, delivery workers, and cleaners, employed in positions that require face-to-face contact, regularly confronted the virus. And many of them lived in overcrowded housing where the virus spread easily. White-collar workers, in contrast, could work from home or retreat to country houses.

The pandemic disrupted conventional work routines in New York, accelerating the rise of working from home and making workers reluctant to return to underpaid service jobs. What the pandemic has sharply illuminated, however, is the growth of inequality in New York City. Although the city has a greater percentage of unionized workers than other cities, the death and devastation among working people, despite their relatively high levels of unionization, suggests that there are limits to unions’ power in New York.

As Kimberly Phillips-Fein observes in her contribution to the volume, an essay titled “The Fiscal Crisis and Union Decline,” New York workers and their institutions present us with a paradox: they remain stronger in New York City than in the rest of the United States, but they are “far less visible and influential than they once were and, in particular, they seem less capable of shaping the city's politics.” Is it possible, she asks, that New York City unions have, consciously or unconsciously, swapped “a more confrontational and disruptive role” in the politics of the city for “relative stability” (pp. 172–73)? The question is worth asking, and a full answer to it reaches far beyond the city's boundaries. New York, especially since the nineteenth century, has been closely tied to international flows of capital, goods, people, and ideas. Its economic history is defined not by enduring and uninterrupted success but by booms and busts.

If the heroic age of labor in New York in the middle of the twentieth century teaches us anything, it is that even as great a city as New York cannot overcome national and international trends by itself. Only with the power of the federal government, and funding from the federal government, can New York City hope to recover some of the equity that was once—however incompletely—part of its civic culture.

In light of the pandemic, and the persistence of economic inequality in New York City, the present is conflicted and the future is uncertain. Anyone who wants to understand what workers and unions have bequeathed to New York, and the possibilities of the city's future, will benefit from reading this book.