On Labor History and the Working Class:
A Talk with Joshua Freeman
How did you decide to write about the Transport Workers Union? When I was a graduate student I was very interested in the relationship of the political activity of unions to their role in bargaining contracts. I was particularly interested in the unions that formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which emerged in the 1930s as a new, dynamic wing of the labor movement. So I thought maybe I could find a union that had been quite politically active. I wanted to try to relate what were seen as two separate parts of history: One was political history and collective bargaining; The other was the everyday lives of workers. I wanted to see if I could find a way of linking the two. So I was looking out for a union to study and working part time at a publishing company and one of my coworkers told me that his dad was a transit worker and he said I should meet him, that they had a great story. So I met his dad, who was a retired Irish transit worker. He was not a talkative guy at all. In fact I learned very little from him, but in the course of preparing to interview him I realized hey, this is a great story. According to your research, how did the union change the everyday lives of workers? One of the points I tried to make in the study of the transit workers was that unionism became a kind of revolution in slow motion. It's not a sudden transformation of everything. But if you look at where the workers started and then you look at where they were 20 years later, their lives were radically different. Everything from their health and the healthcare they got, to the opportunities their children had, to where they could live, what their life on the job was like, to their social circumstances. When I started my research I was trying to find some transit workers who had been around when the union got started. So I contacted the union and it turned out they have a retirees association with a bunch of chapters in Florida. In the 1930s when this union first began, the idea that a working person — a bus driver or a person who cleans subway stations — could retire, let alone retire to Florida, was absolutely unthinkable. And yet within one generation to have so many New York transit workers down in Florida that they actually set up a retirees association, that's an amazing achievement that is easy to dismiss because we've gotten so used to this idea. In your book Working-Class New York you say that too many accounts of post-World War II New York ignore the working class. What made you take notice? Some of it was family heritage. I had parents who grew up in working-class homes and my father's father was very active in his union. I always had a sense of the richness of their world. My grandparents were great opera buffs, they were very politically active. They had interesting and complicated lives. And as a kid I just loved exploring different kinds of neighborhoods in New York, working-class neighborhoods. And then I was always struck as I was reading the histories of New York; they just seemed so narrow to me. It's easy to write about Rockefeller Center, and abstract expressionism, and certain kinds of political activities. These are things that are incredibly important but they just didn't seem like the whole story. One of the things that has been nice is I now see that there is a lot of work being done, particularly by graduate students, on these kinds of issues — looking at working class politics and working class life, the religious beliefs of working people, racial conflict among working people, and so on. Do you think that traditionally the working class hasn't been seen as rich scholarly subject matter? Yes, particularly for the post-war period. There's always great interest in the period of European immigration, which was largely working class. But for the post-World War II period, attention shifted away from this. I do think that is changing. You really have explored ways that culture, ethnicity and religion have factored into the labor movement. I've tried to do that. While I'm interested in unions and institutions that working class people built, particularly in the post-war years, we live in a mass-culture society, and I think to understand how people understand the world and how they act in the world you do have to situate them culturally. Sometimes labor history can be very narrow — as is true with a lot of specialized fields — and I wanted to show that it touches things that everyone knows about. Plus there are so many newer immigrants. One of my senses of my own limits is that I only scratched the surface on the newer working-class immigrants that make up a huge part of New York City life: West Indians, Asians, Africans increasingly — all with their own cultural traditions. Historians have begun, but only begun, to explore the lives, ideas and forms of collective activity of new immigrant workers in the United States, who in many cases operate under a burden of illegality. What other aspects of the working class deserve more attention from scholars? Certainly what is usually called globalization raises a host of challenges for labor historians. Compared to the 1950s and 1960s, today the international context is far more important to understanding the lives of working people in this country and elsewhere: What happens to working-class communities after manufacturing jobs move away; how the availability of low-cost goods, made abroad, changes working-class life (and ideas); and what forms of international labor solidarity might develop that could challenge the extraordinary power and freedom global corporations have developed. You say in Working-Class New York that as the working class has lost influence, New York has become less civilized. How so? What I meant is that there is a kind of ethic of solidarity and mutuality that I think working-class New Yorkers have. Some of it grows out of necessity; you're living on the margins, you need to turn to other people, whether it's extended family to watch your kids, or whether it's neighbors. That mutuality is part of the way of life for working-class people. The labor movement is something that grows out of that. This notion of solidarity, this notion that to improve yourself and promote the values you have, you have to stand with other people, it's a necessity and an ethic and a value system. And I think that's a very civilizing notion. I think that that notion is one that labor, at its best anyway, has embodied and promoted. And I think as labor has shrunk, you see less of that and there is a kind of individualism and a kind of sense of “to heck with the other guy,” that becomes more prevalent. During the transit strike you were widely quoted in the media. How does it feel as a scholar to have research that you've been working on your whole career suddenly become so relevant? It's an odd experience because when I began working on the transit union, it was a completely obscure subject and other than transit workers themselves and a few labor historians, I don't think people were particularly interested in it. So it was very strange. On one level it's great. It's a tremendous pleasure to be able to share this knowledge that you've developed. Eventually it got bizarre. During Christmas break, right after the strike, when I found myself standing in a snow drift in Massachusetts talking on National Public Radio's All Things Considered by pay phone I thought, this is getting too strange. –Jamilah Evelyn |
