A crisis in urban liberalism: The New York City municipal unions and the 1970s fiscal crisis.
Item
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Title
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A crisis in urban liberalism: The New York City municipal unions and the 1970s fiscal crisis.
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Identifier
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AAI3159258
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identifier
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3159258
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Creator
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Spear, Michael.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Judith Stein
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History, United States | Urban and Regional Planning | Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores the important role that New York City's municipal unions played during the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s---critical moment in both New York City's and in the nation's history as the long postwar economic boom ended and as New Deal liberalism was rapidly replaced by a new fiscally and socially conservative politics.;Municipal unions had emerged in New York City and many other of the nation's city's as major political forces in the 1960s. As New York City teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in 1975, the city's and the nation's political and economic elites watched anxiously to see what the city's powerful municipal unions would do. In the end, these unions would play a complex and paradoxical role. One the one hand, they were forced to accept wage freezes and the firing of thousands of their members. On the other hand, they remained one of the city's most powerful interest groups due to their agile political maneuvering and their control of the pension fund assets, which the city desperately needed access to in order to avoid bankruptcy.;Throughout the fiscal crisis, the main goal of the city's municipal unions was to defend their institutional power. In order to insure that goal was reached during a period when they were under serious attack, the municipal unions decided that they had no choice but to work within the constraints of fiscal austerity. At the same time, their decision not to directly oppose the newly emerging politics of fiscal austerity and instead negotiate with the business community and the state to protect their institutional power had an enormous and long-lasting impact on the city's politics. This dissertation examines how the municipal unions' actions during the fiscal crisis affected the city's electoral politics, race relations, and labor politics during the fiscal crisis and in the decades since.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
