Chairs. Eggs. Punches. These were just a few of the things New York City’s rank-and-filers threw at politicians, established union leaders, and one another during a wave of upsurge in 1965–75, according to Glenn Dyer’s The Era Was Lost. Dyer persuasively argues that dissident union members’ rising anger about low pay, weak contracts, and decreased blue-collar status helped drive a new wave of sanctioned and wildcat strikes, contract rejections, and internal union election challenges.Dyer makes excellent use of union records, interviews, and media reports to uncover previously untold stories and offer fresh perspective on familiar ones. We learn, for example, that an oppositional slate of Black workers, who were deeply plugged into civil rights struggles, pushed Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100’s president Mike Quill into the well-known 1966 transit strike. Their “Rank and File Committee” met at a Harlem Unemployment workers’ center founded by a protégé of A. Philip Randolph. Though they could not unseat Quill, their slate gained nearly four thousand votes, posing enough of a threat to force Quill to at least look like he was taking on Mayor John Lindsay. “Quill deserves an emmy sic,” quipped one disgruntled member (24).Dyer deftly pairs the TWU strike alongside a lesser-known, all-white Plumbers Local 2 strike in the same year. A “blue ticket” of mostly Italian and Jewish plumbers successfully challenged a “yellow ticket” of corrupt and entrenched leadership and, as in the TWU case, helped force a strike. Ultimately, neither ticket was able to break the employers’ refusal to hire through a union hiring hall. “While popular imagery primarily portrays building trades workers as bigoted, some of them took part in important challenges to their labor leaders and some of the city’s biggest businesses,” argues Dyer, hoping to “reexamine the militancy of such workers” (8). Yet there was no such dissension in the ranks two years earlier, when the New York City Commission on Human Rights tried to force the hiring of four nonunion Latino and Black plumbers, and Local 2 walked out in a twenty-day strike that made national headlines. Here, Dyer misses an opportunity to offer more of an analysis about how and when race influenced white union members’ dissident militancy, and when racial beliefs may have provided grounds for unity among white union leadership and members.Some of The Era Was Lost’s subjects are people of color and women, like the social workers who challenged the city’s cuts to services during the 1975 fiscal crisis, or the city’s postal workers, who were the last to return to work in the 1970 postal strike. But white men often take center stage in the narrative. Their concerns about crime and safety on jobsites add a workplace dimension to the New Right’s concerns about law and order, offering at least one explanation for some working-class support for George Wallace’s 1968 presidential run. Dyer argues that Wallace tapped white workers’ sentiments in the city, if not always their votes. Likewise, striking Teamsters Local 831 sanitation workers were a largely white, male group who were angry about the denigration of their blue-collar status by the city’s elite, including Mayor Lindsay.The chapter on taxi drivers offers an intriguing insight into how class and race intersected in one of the city’s economic contests. Taxi drivers formed a union in 1965 with the help of Harry Van Arsdale Jr., president of the city’s Central Labor Council. Yet by the early 1970s, yellow cab drivers were in a “racially polarized conflict with Mayor Lindsay and the city’s primarily Black and Puerto Rican livery cab drivers” (111). Most of the city’s taxi drivers were fleet drivers, a mixed-race group who wanted the union to focus on higher pay and benefits. But owner-drivers, most of whom were white, wanted to focus on limiting competition from livery cab drivers. Many cab drivers, meanwhile, refused to pick up Black fares, causing communities of color to support the livery industry. After union members threw tables and chairs at Van Arsdale in the spring of 1971 out of frustration with his role in the mayor’s new Taxi and Limousine Commission, dissidents formed a Taxi Rank and File Coalition, which unsuccessfully tried to unseat leadership. Dyer ultimately describes the taxi story as “a portrait in miniature of a fracturing city and declining hope” (126).In fact, defeat permeates the rebels’ stories. The plant telephone workers of Communications Workers of America Local 1101, for example, were one of the city’s most militant groups. They joined the half million telephone workers on strike in 1971, but then refused the executive board’s back-to-work order. The insurgent local stayed out on strike for seven months, fighting strikebreakers and sabotaging equipment, but ultimately lost its bid for higher pay and benefits in what Dyer argues was a resounding defeat.The Era Was Lost adds a new layer of working-class activism to existing studies of New York City and its fiscal crisis. It also situates New York City’s rank and file, including white union members, amid the national wave of working-class promise and uprising in the 1970s. Yet Dyer only vaguely identifies the causes for that wave’s defeat. We learn little about the tools and tactics that employers—plumbing contractors, taxi fleet owners, telephone companies, and city agencies—used to fight the rebels and their unions. Such a focus on employer resistance would have deepened Dyer’s analysis of how and why members “gave up on collective struggle and focused primarily on their individual survival” (110).Though the rank-and-file rebellion ultimately failed, petering out by the early 1970s with a short resurgence during the 1975 fiscal crisis, The Era Was Lost captures a moment of possibility when many of New York City’s working people waged a pitched class battle and fought for a different outcome for their city and communities.
Lane Windham (Fri,) studied this question.