Manufacturing in Manhattan

Eric Foner

  • Working-Class New York: Life and Labour Since World War Two by Joshua Freeman
    New Press, 393 pp, US $35.00, May 2000, ISBN 1 56584 575 7

After a period when it mainly conjured up images of street violence and urban deterioration, New York is once again America's number one tourist attraction, and neighbourhoods long in decline are undergoing remarkable revivals. To be sure, a few blemishes mar the renaissance: the periodic killing of unarmed black men by the police, for example, or the persistent failure of the public school system. Census statistics, moreover, reveal that nearly all the benefit of the 1990s boom has gone to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of 'Progress and Poverty' (the title of Henry George's bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement.

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