Rank-And-File Rebellion in New York City, 1965-1975
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 5-2018 Final Call: Rank-and-File Rebellion in New York City, 1965-1975 Glenn D. Dyer The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2600 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] FINAL CALL: RANK-AND-FILE REBELLION IN NEW YORK CITY, 1965-1975 by GLENN DYER A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 ii © 2018 GLENN DYER All Rights Reserved iii Final Call: Rank-and-File Rebellion in New York City, 1965-1975 by Glenn Dyer This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in History in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Robert Johnson Chair of Examining Committee ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Helena Rosenblatt Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Joshua Freeman ____________________ ______________________________________ Date Thomas Kessner THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Final Call: Rank-and-File Rebellion in New York City, 1965-1975 by Glenn Dyer Advisor: Robert Johnson Between 1965 and 1975, New York City’s workers fomented a powerful yet inchoate movement that challenged the entrenched power of employers, union officials, and politicians. In the words of Central Labor Council head Harry Van Arsdale Jr., “strike fever” gripped the city; workers refused to follow their leaders, rejecting contracts, wildcatting, and organizing insurgent electoral campaigns. While historians have explored the rebellion as a national phenomenon, New York City’s wave of upheaval was a locally bound movement with its own unique dynamics, culture, and timeline, both powerfully shaping and shaped by the local political and social environment. Significantly, workers’ rebellious activity circulated across the city, overcoming barriers of race, occupation, skill, and political persuasion. New insurgent energies—black militancy and youth revolt—fed the rebellion, as did growing political polarization under Mayor John Lindsay. New York’s workers wanted more than better contracts; they contested control of the work process, racism on the job, the workers’ place in America’s socioeconomic hierarchy, and implicitly and explicitly demanded greater democratic control of their representative organization and lives. Some initial challenges were effective, delivering better contracts and unseating undemocratic leaders, but employer recalcitrance and union attacks on militant workers proved too powerful. v In the face of this resistance, workers retreated into a survivalist attitude of accommodation and resignation, contributing to the decline of social democratic New York and working-class power in the city. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would have never completed this dissertation without the substantial feedback and guidance of my advisor KC Johnson. Though this project took a few more years than either of us anticipated, KC’s support was unflagging and his eye ever incisive. His dedication to the discipline and his generous advising over the last eight years have helped me develop as a writer, thinker, and human being. My committee members, Joshua Freeman and Thomas Kessner, also deserve thanks for their many rounds of feedback. Their powerful questions and criticisms greatly enriched the project and pushed me to interrogate my own assumptions and frameworks while occasionally causing me to question my sanity. I am greatly indebted to both of them. The assistance of numerous dedicated archivists helped make this project possible, specifically those at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, the New York City Municipal Archives, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Sterling Memorial Library, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. Special thanks goes to archivists at the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archive who lugged boxes, searched for missing documents, digitized oral histories, and worked behind the scenes for years organizing their incredibly valuable collections. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the numerous rank and filers who sat down with me to discuss their lives and experiences. Their openness and honesty brought a richness that was otherwise unavailable. Further, their participation gives voice to the kind of intelligent, ambitious, and complicated people who made up working-class New York. My wife and love of my life, Stephanie Wakefield, deserves special thanks. Her reassurance and confidence, as well as her suggestion that I apply to graduate school in the first vii place, were instrumental. Those contributions are only outdone by her boundless energy, optimism, and vision, which bring more light into the world than she will ever know. Finally, I would like to thank my mother and father. Their generosity and intelligence, skepticism of authority and pretension, profound sense of right and wrong, and humor and grit in the face of obstacles are a powerful testament to the strength of the working-class and the democratic sensibility that lies at the heart of America. A world without them would be impoverished, and that I can call them my mother and father makes me one of the luckiest people alive. I can only hope that I will do justice to their legacy. Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Rank-and-File Strikes in Transit and Plumbing .......................................................... 16 Chapter 2: Militancy, Alienation, and the Wallace Effect ............................................................ 70 Chapter 3: Strike Fever ................................................................................................................ 116 Chapter 4: Fading Fire ................................................................................................................ 183 Chapter 5: Rank-and-File Resistance to Fiscal Austerity ............................................................ 240 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 289 Selected Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 307 Introduction On January 15, 1969, Harry Van Arsdale Jr. and Joseph Trerotola, two of New York’s most powerful union leaders, met to discuss the central problem facing organized labor in the city. As, respectively, presidents of the AFL-CIO’s Central Labor Council and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Joint Council 16, Van Arsdale and Trerotola represented more than one million union members who were increasingly afflicted with “strike fever.”1 For the previous three years, in industries as varied as municipal transportation, electrical generation, and telephone service, militant union members had gone on strike against the wishes of employers, government officials, and union representatives. Fuel oil drivers, elevator repairmen, and plumbers rejected contracts put to them by their union hierarchy. Telephone workers, United Parcel Service drivers, and railway workers took part in myriad wildcat strikes that challenged bureaucratic grievance and negotiation procedures. Some of the city’s famed labor leaders, including Mike Quill of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and John DeLury of the sanitation workers, led strikes in order to appease restive ranks. While contemporary commentators accused union members of striking only to extract more money, labor upheaval in both the private and public sectors transcended bread and butter demands: it articulated a rising working- class anger in an increasingly polarizing city. Between 1965 and 1975, New York City’s workers fomented a powerful yet inchoate movement that challenged the entrenched power of employers, labor leaders, and politicians. Recent scholarship on the labor upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s has termed this era the “rank- 1 “January 9, 1969 Meeting Minutes, Special Executive Board Meeting,” New York Central Labor Council Records, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, box 117, NYC CLC Executive Board Meeting Minutes folder. 2 and-file rebellion: rank and file because of its animators; and rebellion because it gave an outlet for anger about inflation, work conditions, unresponsive union leadership, and political disempowerment.2 As suggested by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow’s Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below during the Long 1970s, the American working class was “on the warpath,” targeting union leadership just as much as company management.3 By the 1960s, many American unions had completed the transition to stable bureaucracies that acted as “junior partner[s] in the American enterprise,” becoming professional outfits increasingly insulated from their members. In spite of New York labor leaders’ greater social