More than a quarter century ago, Ira Katznelson's City Trenches (1981) showed that divisions between workplace and community identities constrained the development of a durable working class politics in the urban United States. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci's metaphors of trench warfare, Katznelson maintained that the ethnic and religious associations of the neighborhood and home created a separate “trench” from those of the class identities forged in the factory. In Free Labor: Workfare and the Contested Language of Neoliberalism, John Krinsky extends and expands this Gramscian framework to encompass the cultural, political, economic, and policy discourses surrounding workfare in New York City at the turn of the millennium. His efforts have produced an extraordinarily important study that is a worthy heir to City Trenches.

Krinsky seeks to explicate the “process by which political claims gain currency, policy debate agendas are set, and political identities bounded” (p. 31). He pursues this goal by integrating “political-economic, organizational, cultural, and cognitive” analysis based on the ideas of Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lev Vygotsky (p. 31). The core achievement of Free Labor lies in Krinsky's skillful interweaving of such theory with his detailed empirical investigations of workfare in New York.

Free Labor proceeds from a grounding in New York City's recent political-economic history. Krinsky shows that the city's mid-1970s fiscal crisis exploded both the welfare rights model and the generous municipal employee contract settlements that emerged from the 1960s. From that point forward, New York's social policies required ratification by bond raters, a deep constraint that shapes Krinsky's analysis of workfare. Following the crisis, the city developed a series of “neo-corporatist” arrangements for the continued provision of social services through private groups. This created an organizational framework of advocacy groups in fields such as housing, anti-hunger, and legal services from which opposition to workfare would emerge. Initially, such organizations opposed WEP through “soft-assembled coalitions” that formed around networks of “personal acquaintance and shared information” and led to “coordinated actions” against workfare (p. 73). Soon, however, a “hard-assembled coalition” emerged around the specific goal of organizing workfare participants as workers, with rights to unionization, decent working conditions, and pay at prevailing rather than minimum wage rates (p. 156).

This coalition, however, failed to attain worker status for WEP enrollees, largely due to high rates of turnover, fears of retribution among workers, and weak “choral support” from unions—in particular, the failure of AFSCME's District Council 37 to reinforce the core claims advanced by the anti-WEP coalition. This led organizers to pursue legislative, legal, and morally based modes of resistance. Claims about workfare shifted as well, from a characterization of participants as workers to one based on their needs as potential workers, such as training and transitional jobs that would facilitate escape from WEP. Meanwhile, a “Pledge of Resistance” campaign forged non-profits and religious organizations into a soft-assembled coalition that resisted WEP's expansion into the non-profit sector through claims about the program's moral failings. Krinsky argues that the pledge actually represented a miscalculation, as it allowed the Giuliani administration to evade confrontation “when it reduced the [welfare] rolls fast enough to meet the federal standards without expanding the program” (p. 112). Krinsky points out that, in Gramscian terms, the pledge constituted a “war of maneuver,” designed to achieve a single decisive strike, but that the workfare struggle was actually a “war of position” that had to be fought across multiple trenches of city politics.

Krinsky next offers a series of models that explore the mechanisms through which actors shift dominant claims within particular configurations of actors, claims, and “context/objects.” Through the construction of temporal blockmodels, Krinsky traces the discursive deployment of claims made about workfare in the New York Times and Daily News from 1993–2004. The results confirm the significance of DC 37's failure to support organizers' claims about the status of WEP participants as workers, as well as the capacity of “state executives … to secure hegemony precisely by picking multiple fights rather than by securing simple consent” (p. 173). Krinsky's second model, based on Cultural Historical Analysis Theory (CHAT), shifts attention to the nature and role of cognitive psychology in claim making. Building on the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev, Krinsky argues that “cognition depends on actors' orientation to an object, mediated by environmental artifacts they use to make their objects tractable” (p. 180). Rather than emphasizing individual cognition in the formation and comprehension of political claims, Krinsky argues that “it is critical to take the actor's point of view and to situate it in the context of the actor's object oriented, tool-mediated, and socially structured activity” (p. 203). In Free Labor's final chapter, he draws this analysis together in a convincing series of conclusions about the dynamics of political claim making.

A few qualifications are in order. First, the book offers little basis for comparing New York's workfare program to similar efforts elsewhere in the United States. Krinsky is aware of this limitation, and offers a largely convincing defense (p. 220). Even a brief comparative section, however, might have added context and depth to the New York case. Second, Krinsky may be too pessimistic in his assessment of what workfare opponents accomplished. While they never achieved the abolition of WEP, they contributed to a significant decline in program enrollment, as well as a notable modification of the program through the addition of training and other non–work first options under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In conjunction with the recent worldwide economic crisis, this might suggest that workfare marked not neoliberalism's triumph, but merely a momentary peak that has proved even more ephemeral than the Keynesian regulatory regime of the post–World War II decades.

These minor caveats do not detract from the accomplishments of this highly significant book. Krinsky greatly advances understandings of social movements, coalition formation, policy development, and “the cognitive consequences on and recursive causes of strategic change” (p. 215). Free Labor deserves a wide readership among urbanists, cultural theorists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians (who will find a rigorous approach to historical contingency). It is a work that may match City Trenches in scholarly longevity.