“City of Workers” is curated by Steven H. Jaffe, with the aid of an impressive advisory committee of labor historians headed by Joshua Freeman. They divide this long history into three sections. The first, “In Union There Is Strength,” covers the rise of organized labor from 1830 to 1900. The second, “Labor Will Rule,” charts the emergence of workers and their unions as power players in the city from 1900 to 1965. The third, “Sea Change,” captures the trials of globalization and the rise of the public and service sectors as key sites of struggle from 1965 to 2001. An epilogue titled “New Challenges” brings the show up to the present with a pair of short films by Rebecca Jacobs and Nate Lavey about the city’s contemporary working class. A companion volume from Columbia University Press, edited by Freeman, expands the story with essays on topics from the colonial era to the present.
The museum partnered with two of the largest labor archives in the state (the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives at Cornell University and the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University), and the collections on view are incredibly rich. The design, by Pentagram, renders this wealth of material legible by leaving the gallery completely open. With colorful graphics and posters on the walls and vitrines full of flyers, buttons, and more of the everyday ephemera of organizing, the space evokes a union hall. The overall effect is alive and welcoming: Here are New York’s organized workers, in all their chaotic, cacophonous continuity.
As Jaffe explains in the press release for the exhibition, “Labor movements have been central to the rise of the city we know today.” From the radical mayoral campaign of political economist Henry George in 1886 (on a United Labor Party platform that included a land tax, the eight-hour day, and equal pay for men and women) to present-day struggles over Amazon’s misadventure in Queens, working people have fought to make New York a more just and livable city for all of its inhabitants. At the same time, this history cannot be reduced to a simple story of workers united against capital. Across all of the show’s sections, Jaffe and his team have put competing visions for New York’s labor movement in conversation, provocatively and productively. Along the walls are the histories of some of New York’s best-known unions: the early American Federation of Labor (AFL), the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and 1199, the Health and Hospital Workers Union (now 1199SEIU). Facing the walls, and sometimes perpendicular to them, are cases packed with images, objects, and quotations from workers who did not fit, or were not welcome, in these unions. As the section text for “In Union There Is Strength” explains at the outset, “Multiple labor movements—with unequal access to power—challenged employers and each other” in New York City from the beginning.