In the Arthur Conan Doyle story “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” a key clue for Sherlock Holmes is the failure of a dog to bark when a famed racehorse was taken from his stable. That meant, Holmes surmised, that the abductor was someone known to the canine, not a stranger. What did not happen, rather than what did, proved revelatory.
In considering the situation of the New York City labor movement, we might take a lesson from the great detective. What organized labor has not done is as important to understanding its condition as what it has. The silence of New York labor is as telling as its occasional bark.
By many measures, unions in New York are doing fine, at least compared to the rest of the country. Nationally, just 10 percent of workers belong to a union, while in New York City the figure is nearly double that, 19.8 percent (in 2023–24). That translates to 693,000 union members living in Gotham. Add in their immediate family and household members, and you have an enormous block of union-connected residents, perhaps enough to justify the common designation of New York as a “union town.”
Union influence extends beyond the workplace, most notably in the political arena. Candidates fight hard for union endorsements, and quite a few former union organizers and officers hold public posts. At City Hall and in Albany, unions have considerable sway in the legislative and budgetary processes. Unionism forms part of the common culture of the city, unlike in vast swaths of the country where it is all but unknown.
Unions have become cool of late among young people (as measured, among other ways, in polling data), especially in New York. Young workers have been key to the recent spread of unions in such sectors as museums, higher…
Auteur: Joshua B. Freeman
