BOOK REVIEWS

Berman, Marshall and Berger, Brian, eds. New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg. London:Reaktion Books, 2007. 368 pp. r25.00 (paperback).

Moody, Kim. From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present.New York: The New Press, 2007. 340 pp. r26.95 (hardcover).

Vitale, Alex. City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. NewYork: New York University Press, 2008. 229 pp. r40.00 (hardcover).

In The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System, historian Hsi-HueyLiang suggests that the lynchpin of any modern revolution is the police. Whenpolice side with revolutionaries, insurrection finds its fait accompli. This wascertainly the case with the Velvet Revolution of 1989. When police side with thestate, the days of revolutionary activity tend to be numbered. At least this was thecase in decades prior to 1989 when the police collaborated with the military toquash uprisings such as Prague Spring 1968. The point is not isolated to Euro-pean history.

By the mid-1990s, the shape and method of modern policing in the U.S.evoked a similar balance-tipping role for the consciences of those entrusted toprotect New York City’s public spaces. Siding with a reactionary backlash againstso-called “quality-of-life crimes,” the New York police participated in a move-ment that transformed the way New York City understood itself. When the cityoffered a plan to curtail police abuses, the New York police lead their ownmini-insurrection. “The demonstration two weeks ago to protest Mayor DavidDinkins’ plan for a more independent civilian complaint review board quicklydeteriorated into a brawl,” the New York Times reported in September of 1992(New York Times, September 30, 1992). “Beer-drinking officers broke throughbarricades to rush the steps of City Hall; others blocked traffic on the BrooklynBridge and used racial epithets to describe the Mayor.” In attendance at the rallywas Rudolph Giuliani, who the Times reports “showed up to support the policedemonstration and berate the mayor. Apparently betting—irresponsibly—that

Workingusa

The Journal of Labor and Society

WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 11 · December 2008 · pp. 523–539© Copyright the Authors

Journal Compilation © 2008 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

divisiveness will win votes, Mr. Giuliani still glosses over the rioters’ conduct.” Ayear later, Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Throughout the decade to come, themeaning of quality-of-life became a focus of policy debate in New York and otherU.S. cities. Faced with increasing homelessness and disorderliness, then-mayorRudolph Giuliani mobilized a coalition of disgruntled residents, police, andcorporate interests to support a zero-tolerance campaign to target visible signs ofdisorder. The very presence of the homeless was seen as a threat to a betterbusiness climate for economic growth. Civil liberties would be sacrificed fororder. To succeed, the mayor collaborated with community groups and police toshift the way a historically liberal city approached social problems. UnderGiuliani’s watch, policies that once emphasized rehabilitation and preventiontook a punitive, neoconservative turn favoring corporate rather than socialwelfare. The result was an overhaul of the way New York viewed social issuesincluding child welfare, unemployment, adult entertainment, graffiti, and home-lessness. In City of Disorder, Brooklyn College sociologist Alex S. Vitale assessesthe drive to restore social control in the streets as well as in hearts and minds.Exploring the dynamics of New York’s neighborhoods, its residents, the NewYork Police Department (NYPD), and the city’s administration, Vitale criticallyexamines the path toward Giuliani’s zero-tolerance method of governance.

Vitale’s work is not alone in assessing the changes gripping the city. KimMoody’s From Welfare State to Real Estate and Marshall Berman and BrianBerger’s New York Calling also delve into the last thirty years of New York historyto consider a story of vexing transformation. While Vitale considers the changevia policing, Moody considers the city’s changes from the vantage point of laborrelations, real estate, and shrinkage of the public sector. Viewing the city as text,Marshall Berman considers what New York tells us about modernism. Berman,of course, is not the first to view the city as a narrative for our age. “Here I wasin New York, city of rose and fantasy, of capitalist automotion, its streets atriumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar,” Leon Trotsky wrotein his autobiography. “[M]ore than any city in the world, it is the fullest expres-sion of our modern age,” Kim Moody quotes Trotsky. Implicit is the recognitionof the vast cultural and economic influence of a city. Moody, Vitale, and Bermanembark on their narratives of urban life from a similar start point. They all agreethat a neoliberal revolution in financing, policing, and real estate has shifted theway the city lives, works, and understands itself. Yet, they each arrive at differentconclusions. Much of their view of the city begins with a glimpse of the spacefrom the street to the sidewalk, between commerce and pleasure, at the inter-section of work and play.

A common thread that runs through all three texts involves flux in publicspace and, by extension, in the public sector. All three consider the way thecity organized to preserve, privatize, profit from, sometimes support and evendefend public spaces. All three view changes in the urban environment viaits public spaces, the work located within them, the ways people play, buildcommunities, and make lives for themselves here. Much of the change inNew York’s public spaces begins with profound economic and demographic

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dislocation and deindustrialization. New York’s deindustrialization really beganwith the post-war era. Years before globalization, technological advances,including containerization, robbed New York’s waterfront of some sixty thou-sand jobs during the 1950s (Levinson 2008). Then, in 1966, Brooklyn NavalYard closed, taking even more jobs. As these jobs continued to disappear, a“generation of blacks and Latins were conscientiously following the Americanimmigrant model—just when the American immigrant–industrial city was crum-bling,” Marshall Berman notes (p. 17). Workers continued to come to New Yorkin search of industrial work, yet those just arriving were unable to find jobs orprocure capital for investment in their neighborhoods. Redlining increased,furthering a capital crisis that drained resources from neighborhoods inhabitedby minorities. Streets and buildings in the Bronx began to disintegrate in frontof the world’s eyes.

By the early 1970s, the post-war business labor accord, in which businessagreed to compensate workers in exchange for labor stability, began to crumble.Building on the work of Robert Fitch (1993) and Joshua Freeman (2000),Moody, Vitale, and Berman situate the shrinkage in New York’s public sectorwithin a fiscal crisis that culminated in a rebellion against the city’s socialdemocratic polis. This included welfare services, wages, pensions, and increasingsocial diversity. “If we don’t take action now, we will soon see our own demise,”a New York financier confessed during a closed-door meeting of business execu-tives in 1973. “We will evolve into another social democracy,” (quoted in Moody,2007, 17). Fearing that New York City was becoming another welfare state fullof bloated budgets and increasing entitlements, New York’s bankers, businesselite, and Governor Rockefeller pulled the plug, turned right, and sketched apath for the city’s neoliberal rebirth. To pull off their coup, New York’s businesselite built on a series of financial crises, announcing they would no longer backthe city’s debt unless the city changed the way it did business.

A review of the national context for New York’s fiscal crisis is instructive. Inthe years after 1968, and more intensely after 1972, a well-connected elitecomprised of a triumvirate of America’s social upper classes, corporate commu-nities, and policy formation organizations called for a shift in the direction ofU.S. social policy. An oil embargo, cheap foreign labor and goods, and a businessdownturn had all reduced the permanence of the U.S. within the worldeconomy, resulting in diminished profits for U.S. companies. While businessleaders had once considered social welfare policies an effective means to co-optsocial movements and keep the labor force literate, healthy, and productive, bythe mid-1970s these same corporate leaders began to reconsider their views ofsocial welfare policy and programs. Many in the business community felt thesesocial policies helped cultivate movements that destabilized power hierarchies inthe U.S. “It’s clear to me that the entire structure of our society is beingchallenged,” David Rockefeller wrote in 1971 (quoted in Moody, 2007, 17).With the export of jobs abroad, business interest in the health and safety of U.S.workers began to diminish (Abramovitz 2000). Business leaders formed a coali-tion with the increasingly influential new right. Together, this elite class lobbied

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to restrict policies that: 1) created jobs for the unemployed, 2) made health andwelfare policies more generous, 3) helped employees gain greater workplaceprotections and rights, and 4) helped workers organize unions (Domhoff 1998).The result was a series of social and economic public policies that redistributedincome upward, cheapened the cost of labor, shrank social programs, weakenedthe influence of social movements, and most of all, limited the role of the federalgovernment (Abramovitz 2000).

By 1975, the crisis reached its apex in New York. While pensions, substantivemunicipal wages, unions, and social diversity were not unusual, “among Americancities, only New York was broke,” Robert Fitch (1993) notes (p. viii). In responseto the crisis, the city formed a Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC). “It’s thefucking blacks and Puerto Ricans. They use too many city services and they don’tpay any taxes,” a spokesman for MAC would explain. “New York’s in troublebecause it’s got too many fucking blacks and Puerto Ricans,” (quoted in Fitch1993, vii). Every crisis requires its scapegoat. So the city scripted a model of“planned shrinkage” to rid its streets of the scapegoats. “Our urban system is basedon the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker,”New York Housing Commissioner Roger Starr, one of the plan’s architects,argued. “Now there are no industrial jobs,” (quoted in Fitch 1993, viii). So theMAC formed an austerity plan to flat-line wages, reduce welfare services, andcurtail the influence of unions in exchange for federal aid. Its business leadersstarted organizing to create an economy based around finances, insurance, andreal estate, rather than industrial jobs. Those workers who could fit into thepost-industrial workforce would be welcomed. Those who could not would bedisplaced. “We have balanced the budget on the backs of the poor,” Felix Rohaytn,of the MAC, candidly confessed, as the crisis waned (quoted in Berman 2007, 24).

Marshall Berman was teaching at City College at the time. “[M]any of theelites whose power was supposed to protect us against predators identified withthe predators. They polarized the city into us and them,” Berman remembers.“Starr’s idea for dealing with the fiscal crisis was to divide the city’s populationinto a ‘productive’ majority that deserved to be saved and an ‘unproductive’minority that should be driven out” (p. 22). Planned shrinkage would “strive toeliminate not bad individuals but bad neighborhoods,” Berman recalled (p. 22).It smacked of a very dark impulse. “In real twentieth century life, mass popula-tion transfers have been tragic and murderous,” Berman bemoaned. “Did Starrreally want to bring in Fascism, just to schlag the poor?” (p. 23).

Borrowing from David Harvey, Kim Moody argues that New York’s mid-1970s social and economic transformation served as a dress rehearsal for theneoliberal reorganization of government and politics set in motion withThatcher, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. “Restraint on social spending, privatiza-tion, deregulation, and more importantly, the reassertion of class power by thenation’s capitalist class are at the center of the neoliberal project,” Moody writes(p. 18). Moody points out that New York was an ideal candidate for this project.As much a part of the world as of the U.S., New York and its business elite wereprofoundly influenced by global trends. Their response to the fiscal crisis can be

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understood as the financial elite protecting their investment in New York’sfinancial sector.

Referring to Gordan McCleod, Vitale describes the process as “neoliberal-izing urbanism.” Here, “uneven development inherent in neoliberal entrepre-neurial economic development strategies favors . . . concentrated capital at theexpense of the poor and middle classes,” Vitale writes. The result was: “the city’sgrowing economic and social polarization.” From here, “urban developmentcreates social polarization which leads to a large underclass, who in turn must besocially and spatially restricted from newly developed spaces” (p. 14). Hence theimpetus to control, police, segregate, privatize, and develop urban public space.“[I]ntensely interested in the city’s land use and value, taxing and spendingpriorities, and general business climate,” Kim Moody argues, New York’s highlyintegrated business network or “complex” focused on maximizing the profitabil-ity of New York City’s land use and development (p. 27). “Nowhere in thecountry is land so valuable as in New York City,” Moody continues. “Andvirtually all the components of the corporate headquarters complex have a deepinterest in these values” (p. 17). In order to ensure this better business climate forurban growth, development, and profit maximization, New York’s brand ofurban neoliberalism cultivated intricate public policies and policing approachesaimed at maximizing social control of public spaces, including “closed-circuitedvideo surveillance systems, anti-homeless laws, and gated communities,” Vitalenotes (p. 25). These policies function as “responses to a social crisis” that Vitalecontends this business elite “themselves created” (p. 24). Referring to the workof social welfare scholar William Sites (2003), Vitale suggests that the use of statepowers to redistribute resources away from the poor and toward elite interests isa form of “primitive globalization” not unlike Marx’s “primitive accumulation,”in which the state distributes large portions of capital into the hands of an elitefew (pp. 24–25). “Primitive accumulation” is Marx’s description of the crudeconcentration of wealth that takes place in capitalist economic development.“The basis of the whole process,” Marx explains, is a violent, coercive use offorce by the state to displace the peasantry from lands where they have worked,followed by “bloody legislation” used to regulate the consequences of jarringseparations from traditional ways of life. Of course, the beggars and vagrantsbear the brunt of the punishment (Sites 2003, 13). Skipping ahead from feudal-ism to mercantilism, to the present era’s transition into cross-border economicintegration, William Sites uses this idea to frame his theory of primitive global-ization. For Sites, today’s mode of primitive globalization follows a similarpattern of reactive politics—ad hoc corporate welfare policies and businesssubsidies that displace the urban poor as the state dismantles welfare statesafeguards. The result is a vast dislocation of the poor. “The entrepreneurialpursuit of centralized corporate economic development strategies therefore areresponsible for the rise of the new urban underclass that has destabilized urbanneighborhoods and public spaces,” Vitale concludes (p. 26).

“On the one side, neoliberal housing and employment markets were increas-ing the numbers of people who were displaced and homeless,” Frances Fox

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Piven succinctly explains in her blurb for City of Disorder. “The failure ofgovernment on all levels to regulate the market forces driving this development,or to intervene to provide alternatives for the people affected, meant that peoplecoped as they always have . . .” This included sleeping outside, tapping into theblack market economy, peddling for cash, and of course self-medicating beforeanother night on the mean streets. “These behaviors in turn created popularpolitical support for the coercive social controls that came to characterize citypolicy in the nineties. But neither the homeless nor the public were responsiblefor the limited alternatives which drove this mean result,” Piven concludes.

Yet, there is another side to this story. Kim Moody, a leading labor organizerand activist in the U.S., especially through his Labor Notes work, suggests thatresistance to neoliberal social controls comes in countless forms. Moody’s expe-rience as an organizer permeates throughout his work. The result is a pulsing,rich text. Alex Vitale, for his part, helped organize against these forces as amember of the Lower East Side Collective and continues to play a vital role asa member of the City University Professional Staff Congress. Marshall Bermanwrites about the ways his students, neighbors, and citizens in New York Cityresisted the patterns of spatial displacement, redlining, and disintegration thatcharacterized life during and after the fiscal crisis. With public spaces up forgrabs, Berman notes new art forms—including hip-hop and graffiti—brought arange of colors to the panorama of New York’s public spaces. Throughout the1970s, graffiti artists “developed a vibrant new visual language,” Berman recalls.“They made themselves in a drab and disintegrating environment, and infusedthat environment with a youthful exuberance, bold designs, adventurous graph-ics.” Through an eclectic cavalcade, they brought a joyous improvisation tourban space. “They differed in aesthetics and sensibility, some playful andinsouciant, other existentially desperate; some projecting spontaneous overflowsof powerful feeling” (p. 26). Berman, who teaches on the interconnectionsbetween Marxism and modernism, remembers the first time he saw a DJ spinrecords at his school. “It was the late ′70s, during club hours . . . , somebodywould bring out turntables and a DJ would scratch and collage dozens of recordstogether while kids in the audience took turns playing MC, rapping over an openmike” (p. 27). The result was a dance party ideally situated for the streets andsidewalks of New York’s public commons. Berman was particularly excited aboutthe do-it-yourself ethos his students, many of whom could not afford musiclessons, brought to the creation of both a new urban “music povera” and anurban culture of resistance. Between the graffiti and hip-hop, Berman recog-nized signs of distinct regeneration among the rubble of burning buildings,redlining, and urban disintegration. “Their voices became the voice of New YorkCalling,” Berman explains:

Their capacity for soul making in the midst of horror gave the whole city abrand new aura, a weird but marvelous bank of bright lights. They, and all NewYork with them, succeeded in the task that Hegel defined for modern man just200 years ago: if we can “look the negative in the face and live with it,” then

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we can achieve a truly “magical power” and “convert the negative into being.”(p. 29)

Over the decades from the mid-1970s through the 1990s, residents continuedto cope with an ongoing attack on the public sector as best they could. Yet,tolerance for the displaced masses wore thin. “The backlash against thesocially marginal in New York began with the increased social disorder of the1970s,” Vitale writes. “Squeegee men, panhandlers, and people sleeping inpublic spaces came to be the most visible symptoms of an urban environmentthat many people felt was out of control” (p. 70). While the city had histori-cally viewed social problems with a tolerant liberal bent, by the 1980s, theemphasis on social services began to wane. While urban social, economic, andpolitical regimes had previously been viewed as progressive whether Republi-can or Democrat, by the mid-1980s, a pro-development ethos came to super-sede this liberalism. It would define governing coalitions in New York for thenext two decades (Sites 1997). Yet, without services or a safety net, thoselocked out of the new global economy flooded the streets. “[P]ublic spacesthroughout these cities became gathering places for the newly dispossessed,”Vitale explains. “Homeless people, unemployed youth, and others excludedfrom regular participation in housing and labor markets became an omnipres-ent visible statement about the condition of losers in the new global economy”(p. 102). Neighborhood and business groups would push the city to utilizeorder–maintenance modes of policing during the Koch and Dinkins adminis-trations (p. 117). The process only gained intensity with the Giuliani years ofthe 1990s.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s, New York’s public spaces becamesites in a class war between those who lived, worked, and played in public spaceand those who sought to control and curtail this activity. Shortly after hiselection as mayor in 1993, Giuliani’s police chief William Bratton released ablueprint for urban policing focused around reclaiming New York’s publicspaces, out of the hands of the homeless and social outsiders who made use ofthese spaces during the Koch and Dinkins years. This involved a “quality-of-life” focus in policing, including zero-tolerance for the smallest of infractions,profiling, stop-and-frisk policing of those who fit certain police profiles, flexibledeployment, and the ongoing generation of new rules and regulations, all com-bining to create micromanagement of public space (Vitale, p. 121). Critics notedthat the underside of “quality-of-life” policing was increased police brutality andsocial control (Sites 2003, 60). Recent histories of police violence in New YorkCity dedicate considerable attention to Giuliani’s aggressive policing approachaimed at countless elements of urban life ( Johnson 2003). The litany of com-plaints is not short, yet the former mayor’s pro-growth and social control modelof urban governance has been emulated across the country most recently in LosAngeles and even in Mexico City (Lipton 2004).

Giuliani opponents would note that “Mayor Guiliani’s Quality of LifeCampaign hinges on his definition of ‘quality-of-life’”

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Community gardens bulldozed throughout the five boroughs; communitycenters auctioned off to profit-driven developers; aggressive police intrusion intopeaceful assemblies; thousands of cyclists and pedestrians hit every year; parksrigged with police video cameras; rents soaring (which profits whom?); sanitizedchain stores and remote corporations reshaping every neighborhood in their ownimage; airwaves treated as corporate products; public schools still understaffed,underfinanced, deteriorating. . . . (Reclaim the Streets [RTS] broadsheet)

The broadsheet was written by RTS, a direct-action affinity group of theLower East Side Collective. While Giuliani took a restricted view of publicspace, RTS suggested there was more to urban citizenship than going to andfrom work. The group’s goal was to “reinvigorate inner-city public life. Ourdefinition of ‘quality-of-life’ does not mean conventional, homogenized, capi-talized life, working 80 hours a week to pay the rent . . . We want real, eclecticdemocracy, not the brand that’s being tossed our way.” Their broadsheetargued that open public space was a vital dynamic of democratic life: “Wedemand great feasts of public space. We demand our freedom to express. Wedemand clean air—as if the basis for democracy were not the ability to breath!”In response to the new quality-of-life policing, the group noted, “The Mayor’scampaign has been combined with efforts to privatize public spaces . . . alreadyin short supply. If Giuliani is successful, his vision of a whitewashed, DisneyfiedNew York . . . will replace the diverse, exuberant, exciting New York of thepresent.” In response, the group asked those who had been swept out of publicspace to reconverge. “Help us counteract Guiliani’s ‘Quality of Life’ campaignby celebrating the real quality of life in New York with an all-inclusive, fun,takeover of Astor Place—after all, if we can’t dance, it’s not a revolution!” Thegroup specifically called for New Yorkers to make their presence known andresist: “We hope to fill Astor Place with all those ‘undesirables’ that have come(or will soon come) under attack of Guiliani’s homogenizing vision. We needyou to be there.”

Over the next decade the emerging class war between the do-it-yourselfethos described by Berman and organized by RTS and the neoliberal urbanismof Giuliani and Bloomberg would only become more pronounced. At the centerof it all was a question about public space. “New York City feels like a verydifferent place today,” Marshall Berman concludes his introduction to New YorkCalling. Thirty years after Roger Starr’s “planned shrinkage,” the city is morediverse than ever. “It is more saturated with immigrants, more ethnically diverseand multicultural than it has ever been, more like a microcosm of the wholeworld,” Berman declares defiantly. “[A]nd thanks to New York’s distinctivelyconfigured public space, you can see this whole world right out there on thestreets. Its mode of multiculturalism is sexy—and threatening to the ultra ortho-dox in every religion” (p. 32). Perhaps this is why the Giulianis of the world havesought to curtail and contain the abundance of its public spaces.

While New York is a vastly different place than it has been, the back andforth between its multicultural mix and blandification has only become more andmore vexing as the city is increasingly suburbanized (Hammett and Hammett

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2007). Income inequality has come to characterize life in New York; the poor arestill working, building, going back to school, and holding on, while the powerbrokers work in concert with the Bloomberg elite governing regime ruling NewYork. The patterns of displacement continue to follow. While progress andprosperity represent one New York story, another is that New York has also beenrecognized as a city with some of the largest income disparities in the U.S.According to the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity (2008),New York continues to have some of the highest rates of poverty of any largecity, with an increasing percentage of working adults persisting below the federalpoverty line. Speaking of the social inequalities of New York, longtime socialworker Lucita Cangemi notes, “It has increased the problems of our poor,”(quoted in Dwyer 2008, B4). In the face of these trends, countless forms ofresistance, such as the Lower East Side Collective, the Diallo Protests, TimesUp!, and RTS have influenced debate about urban poverty, quality-of-life polic-ing, and have won access to public space. Yet, a great deal of community publicspace has been lost. Within this context, the mere existence of such forms ofresistance is worth celebration, even if some succeed more than others. As ofnow, the struggles Berman, Moody, and Vitale critically evaluate have yet toresolve themselves. Yet, through their work, we come closer to making sense ofthe vexing changes gripping New York’s public commons.

Something strange has happened in urban public space over the last threedecades. While the encroachment of the private into the public has onlyincreased, social movements continue to serve as a counterbalance. Kim Moodyconcludes by reminding us that countervailing forces do exist. It is up to us tomake sure they do so.

Benjamin Shepard, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Human Services at CityTech/City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author/editor of fivebooks, including Queer Politics and Political Performance (Routledge), forthcom-ing, 2009.

References

Abramovitz, M. 2000. Under attack, fighting back. New York: Monthly Review Press.Berman, M. 2007. Introduction. In New York calling: From blackout to Bloomberg, ed. M. Berman and B. Berger,

9–38. London: Reaktion Books.Domhuff, G. W. 1998. Who rules America? Power and politics in the year 2000. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield

Publishing Company.Dwyer, J. 2008. A sister and social worker, and the last of her kind. New York Times, August 27, B1.Fitch, R. 1993. The assassination of New York. New York: Verso.Freeman, J. 2000. Working-class New York: Life and labor since World War II. New York: Free Press.Hammett, J., and K. Hammett. 2007. The urbanization of New York. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.Johnson, M. 2003. Street justice: A history of police violence in New York City. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Levinson, M. 2008. The box: How the shipping container made the world smaller and the economy bigger. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press.Lipton, R. 2004. Giuliani, selling public image, branches out for private profit. New York Times, February 22,

A1 and 30.

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New York City Center for Economic Opportunity. 2008. Poverty in New York City, http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/html/poverty/poverty_facts.shtml (accessed August 29, 2008).

New York Times. 1992. Strong words for a police riot. New York Times Opinion. 30 September, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEEDB173EF933A0575AC0A964958260 (accessed 21July, 2008).

Sites, W. 1997. The limits of urban regime theory: New York under Koch Dinkins, and Giuliani. Urban AffairsJournal 32(4):536–57.

———. 2003. Remaking New York: Primitive globalization and the politics of urban community. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Gendering Labor History: The Working Class in America History Series.Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007, 374 pp. r25.00US (paperback).

This series of essays is authored by Alice Kessler-Harris, the R. Gordon HoxieProfessor of American History at Columbia University, whose previous worksinclude: Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview, Out to Work: A Historyof Wage Earning Women in the Union States, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meaningsand Social Consequences, and How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship,winner of the Joan Kelly, Phillip Taft, Herbert Hoover and Bancroft prizes.Collectively, these books constitute an indispensable resource for those who wantto study the historical transformation of “women’s work” into wage labor,women’s struggle for equality at work, and the gendered implication of publicpolicies with respect to wages, hours of work, and equal pay. Gendering LaborHistory further develops these themes. Its principal thesis, as the title implies, is aplea for a labor history which recognizes gender as a major shaping force. In placeof separate studies of labor and working women, Kessler-Harris makes the casethat gender, like race, should be an essential part of all labor history, not only in thestudies of the U.S. but in relation to the global labor force.

The seventeen essays included in this collection are grouped into foursections.

In Part 1, the author examines women’s role in labor unions. First, seekingan answer to the question of why there were so few women in labor leadershipat the turn of the century, she points to the sexual division of labor, whichdefined women’s roles. Next, taking a closer look at the exceptional women whowere active in labor struggles of that day, Pauline Newman, Fania Cohen, RosePesotta and Rose Schneiderman, who were organizers for the InternationalLadies Garment Worker’s Union (ILGWU), Kessler-Harris notes that theywere not “feminists,” meaning when class consciousness and their identificationas women conflicted, they opted for class as their first priority. Their associationwith the Trade Union Women’s League (TUWL), an organization of well-to-dowomen reformers, is the subject of another essay, “Problems of Coalition Build-ing,” which highlights the conflict between “a trade union movement that ishostile to women in the work force and a women’s movement whose participantsdid not work for wages.” “The Limits of Women Trade Unionism,” another

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