Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott (Eds.)
New Labor in New York: Precarious Workers and the Future of the Labor Movement
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014, 352 pp.
Precarity is a concept that, while popular in Europe, has found less purchase in the United States. Referring to the common conditions of workers who lack employment security and benefits, precarity in the United States has tended to be talked about in relation to non-standard employment, informal labor, contingent labor or flexible labor. However, these types of employment are not synonymous with precarity, as its use by labor theorists such as Guy Standing also connotes the shared experiences of workers in a variety of other employment contexts, from migrant laborers to freelancers and consultants. Whereas in Europe these shared experiences have been looked to as the potential base for a new social class—the precariat—in the United States there has been considerably less effort to link the labor conditions of, for example, contract software engineers and undocumented garment workers.
New Labor in New York provides an opportunity to consider the concept of precarity in relation to labor in the United States, especially as seen through the diverse kinds of work and labor organizing found in New York City. The collection’s editors are both affiliated with the City University of New York (CUNY), with Ruth Milkman a professor of sociology and Ed Ott a distinguished lecturer at the Murphy Labor Institute. Ott previously worked for over forty years in the New York City labor movement and was executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council, ALF-CIO. The collection originated in a CUNY graduate seminar that required students to conduct fieldwork and write case studies of organizing campaigns and groups. Consequently, the collection’s authors have diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, labor studies, geography, public health, history, political science and cultural anthropology. Many authors are also actively involved in organizing.
Building on the experiences of its authors, New Labor in New York describes labor movements that attempt to win improvements in working conditions and benefits for precarious workers in New York City. Its three parts present essays focusing on immigrant labor and “new” forms of labor such as freelancing, as well as topics such as the emergence and growth of worker centers (community-based organizations that operate at small and medium scales and do not engage in collective bargaining, instead focusing on providing resources to workers and winning specific concessions from employers) as an alternative to traditional unions (which tend to be larger and, the editors suggest, limited in their tactics). The collection’s introduction sets out a history of labor in the 20th century, with the post-1970s reduction in union participation largely linked to deregulation and privatization pursued by neoliberal policy agendas. As the editors point out, corporations’ moves to remain profitable in a deregulated market included an increase in contract labor among blue collar workers such as taxi drivers as well as white-collar workers in information technology and similar fields.
While much of the edited volume focuses on the emergence of worker centers as a form of labor organization that provides an alternative set of tactics to those available to unions, researchers of information work are likely to focus on questions around the organization efforts of highly-skilled workers. Theorists argue that these freelancers and contractors share conditions of precarity with other groups discussed, but the literature noting this similarity can sometimes feel more aspirational than descriptive (see, for example, work by Maribel Casas-Cortés, Greig de Peuter, and Guy Standing). As Martha W. King’s chapter on the Freelancers Union suggests, workers considered precarious can vary widely in income, education, and goals. This chapter, when read alongside others in the collection, provides an opportunity to, first, better understand labor organization among information workers and, second, to compare the values and practices of these workers to those of taxi drivers, retail workers and others.
In terms of worker characteristics, King describes the Freelancers Union members as independent, creative and quite diverse, with yearly earning ranging from under $50,000 (over 50% of members) to over $100,000 (13% of members). Within the kinds of work members perform, wages can similarly vary widely, as King notes that hourly wages for computer programmers and engineers can vary by as much as $150 between individual workers. While the union provides training workshops on accounting, marketing and similar topics, its primary function has been to provide health insurance plans to members as a portable benefit, with the proceeds keeping the union self-sufficient.
While the creation of portable benefits is also a topic of concern for a range of other precarious workers, King’s description of the Freelancers Union implicitly suggests more differences than similarities between information workers and other types described in the collection. One main difference is that King describes freelancers as strongly committed to maintaining their autonomy and independence, with one ad for the union describing it as a “federation for the unaffiliated.” Rather than engaging in collective action or negotiations with employers (the goal, for example, of a worker center for retail employees described elsewhere in the collection), the union allows freelancers to retain their independent lifestyle while acquiring an affordable safety net. In other words, information workers, more so than other workers, appear to embrace the flexibility and freedom from standard employment that precarity entails; yet, like other workers, they still seek specific forms of security such as healthcare and legal advice.
The Freelancers Union is also described as distinct form other organizations in terms of its membership structure and goals. As an open group (there are no qualifications to join), it aspires to gather “nearly all workers.” Yet King notes that it has to this point attracted “highly educated, better paid, creative and professional workers.” These workers likely have resources (such as savings or income from a partner) to manage labor insecurity differently than other types of precarious workers. These distinct qualities question the extent to which precarity can unite diverse workers, even as the Freelancers Union makes one of its “core elements” affinity, “which could be based on risk sharing, solidarity, collective identity or mutual interdependence.” Achieving a collective identity with other precarious workers appears especially challenging for the Freelancers Union, the members of which have strong senses of self-identity that are reinforced by the organization’s witty advertising slogans, young staff and high-tech culture. As King notes, “If the union were a person, one might describe her as creative, brazen, and thinking outside the box.” This characterization is unlikely to apply to the other kinds of workers described in the collection.
Read alongside this description of the Freelancers Union, chapters on retail workers and taxi drivers (by Peter Ikeler and Mischa Gaus, respectively) make clear the challenge of counting information workers among the precariat. While concerns over portable benefits are found in all these cases, retail workers’ separate complaints (over low pay, erratic scheduling and discrimination) and those of taxi drivers (concerning wages and working conditions) are distinct from those put forward by freelancers (such as nonpayment of contracts). In sum, although information workers do experience precarity, they have distinct characteristics and concerns from migrant laborers, displaced industrial workers and others with nonstandard employment. Precarity as an experience is still a relevant concern in relation to information work, but New Labor in New York questions the ability such shared experience to bind disparate groups of workers for the purposes of organizing social movements.
For researchers within information studies who have spent little time reading in the field of labor studies, New Labor in New York will be an unfamiliar book. Many of the chapters take on tones of advocacy for workers experiencing precarity, and the descriptive accounts of various organizations often feel either repetitive or mired in relatively obscure (and often detailed) histories of labor organizing. However, the book does offer a unique opportunity to compare empirical accounts of labor struggles in a range of work areas, providing insight into the perspectives and experiences of information workers engaged in precarious labor. In addition, it provides a history of employment relations and labor organizing in the United States that can be used to contextualize current research on information work.