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Full-Text Articles in Labor History
More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan
More Austerity Coming? Lessons From New York City's 1970s Fiscal Crisis, Marc Kagan
Publications and Research
Crises can be moments of opportunity, but it is not foreordained who will seize the ring. The Great Depression ultimately led to the New Deal/Great Society state and increasing equality. 1975 New York City fiscal crisis, on the other hand, laid the groundwork for decades of neoliberal austerity. Despite political vulnerabilities, bankers and their Washington allies acted boldly to protect imperiled assets and remake a city in which the working class wielded some power as a bastion of finance capital. Seemingly powerful unions abandoned the public they served, and followed a risk-averse strategy of concessions in exchange for junior-partner corporatism, …
The Ideological And Organizational Origins Of The United Federation Of Teachers' Opposition To The Community Control Movement In The New York City Public Schools, 1960-1968, Stephen Brier
Publications and Research
This article explores the origins and ideological practice of public school teacher unionism as it was articulated and revealed in New York City before and during the epochal strike against an experiment in community control of neighborhood schools undertaken by the United Federation of Teachers in the fall of 1968 that closed down the city’s massive public school system for weeks and put almost 1 million school children in the street. How and why did unionized New York City public school teachers support the particular kind of trade unionism that the UFT and its president, Albert Shanker, embodied and practiced …