There has long been a peculiar disconnect between reality and popular rhetoric concerning organized labor and the working class in America. While politicians, journalists, and all too many scholars tend to focus on the mythical “white working class” when discussing the role of labor in politics and society, readily available data show that the white male manufacturing worker in the Rust Belt in fact represents a small minority in today’s working class. An accurate depiction of American labor in the early twenty-first century must focus on women, people of color, and immigrants; it must focus on employment in service occupations as well as manufacturing, public-sector employment as well as private, part-time and temporary employment as well as full-time and permanent; it must focus on densely populated coastal regions more than the deindustrializing Rust Belt; and it must take note of diverse forms of labor organization that fall outside of the framework of the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board.

Historians engaged in this effort will find much that is useful in New Labor in New York, a provocative book containing thirteen compelling essays, edited by sociologist Ruth Milkman and labor organizer Ed Ott, and written by students in the editors’ seminar at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Each of the essays in this collection focuses on New York City—which, as Milkman points out in her introduction, “is the most highly unionized large city in the United States” (p. 3). Despite this tight geographic focus, the essays cover a broad range of topics that reveal the breadth and diversity of labor activism in the twenty-first century. These topics include: an unsuccessful attempt to organize a Target store on Long Island; a promising effort to organize immigrant workers at small grocery stores in Brooklyn; a campaign for a living wage law; an attempt to foster a grassroots protest movement to build on the success of Occupy Wall Street; an attempt to develop “craft identity” among retail workers; the formation of a community-based social justice organization of Latino/a street vendors; the development of the Freelancers Union; the formation of a large membership organization for immigrant workers; a community organization for Latino/a workers; a community action center for Korean Americans; an advocacy center for restaurant workers; the story of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which won repeated victories through successful labor action; and the development of Domestic Workers United, a group that helped to win passage of the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.

The book lacks a concluding essay, leaving the task of synthesizing these fine-grained descriptive essays to the reader. Taken together, these essays identify some of the key characteristics of “new labor” and should help to dispel some of the popular myths about race, class, and labor in the United States. In most of the cases here, workers won concessions through legal action and collaboration with allied organizations rather than through collective bargaining. Also, while in a few of these cases new labor organizations worked with traditional unions, most of the successful efforts relied on other organizations such as worker advocacy centers, community groups, and philanthropic foundations. Finally, many of these campaigns used workers’ racial identities as a tool to facilitate organization.

Although this volume is self-consciously forward-looking and produced with the evident intent to provide lessons to future labor organizers, it will be valuable for historians of labor, business, and capitalism. It is probably not suited for assignment in most undergraduate history classes, but it would likely stimulate productive discussion in a graduate or advanced undergraduate seminar on labor history or the history of capitalism.

In recent decades, historical accounts of organized labor have tended to take the form of a declension narrative: a sort of E. P. Thompson story in reverse, focused on the eclipse of manufacturing jobs over the past half century and the parallel weakening of New Deal–era labor institutions. However, by showing the emergence of new styles of labor action after the decline of midcentury unionism, the essays in this book could help historians tell a different story.

Scholars exploring the rise of neoliberalism have thus far tended to tell a top-down story, focused on big banks and big corporations. Historians of capitalism could use this volume as a source of raw material for a bottom-up story of neoliberalism, supplemented with ideas from Milkman’s earlier writing about immigrant workers in Los Angeles,^{Footnote 1} scholarship on the rise of worker-owned cooperatives,^{Footnote 2} and recent historical writing that shows workers trying to shape their own fate in the face of growing corporate power and economic precarity, such as Shane Hamilton’s Trucking Country.^{Footnote 3}

The ideas in this book could also help historians recast narratives about pre-Wagner Act labor movements. Informed by New Labor in New York, historians might resist the tendency to describe methods used by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century labor movements as primitive precursors to modern post–New Deal unionism, and view them instead as logical strategies for countering the power of capital in an age of expanding wealth, monopoly power, and political corruption.

Finally, this volume contributes to the growing effort to place race and racism at the center of American histories and helps to undermine the popular dichotomy between “social justice” and “working-class” issues in American politics. The essays in this book reveal that successful working-class campaigns are not necessarily incompatible with social justice campaigns and that embracing social justice movements can in fact be a winning strategy for working-class movements.