A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public-Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

For those who came of age within driving distance of Baltimore's National Aquarium in the 1980s, a field trip or family vacation to the gilded new harbor was a rite of passage. Decades later, The Wire offered an award-winning, precedent-breaking counterpoint, depicting the systematic corruption and institutional failure that deindustrialization and divestment had wrought.While scholars have long recognized the interrelationships between the two souls of cities like Baltimore, they have rarely been explored with the kind of nuance offered by Jane Berger. Artfully integrating analysis of the political economy of the Rust Belt city with the community activism of predominantly Black welfare and human service workers, A New Working Class turns on the most unusual of declension narratives. The book's drive comes less from the erosion of a once-proud manufacturing sector than from the rise and fall of a public sector—led, “redistributive approach” to local development (3). In part a response to frustrations born of the midcentury movement's struggle to access positions in a dwindling industrial sector and in part a reflection of the ambitions of growing Black political power in the city, this vision turned on more than simply securing enough government posts to offset the manufacturing job loss, Berger argues. Rather, it reflected a deeply held belief among Black activists that public employment could serve as a mechanism to shape social policy implementation and improve the quality of public services.Though that idea had older roots, Berger argues, the Great Society's combination of increased funding and cooperative decision-making lent an unprecedented opportunity to Baltimore's Black activists to shape social policy at the local level—much to the chagrin of the city's still predominantly white elected leadership. The story of how radicals seized on the mandate for “maximum feasible participation” and transformed antipoverty initiatives like the Community Action Program into further-reaching challenges to the status quo has been told before—by Susan Ashmore, Noël A. Cazenave, Alice O'Connor, and others. What distinguishes A New Working Class is how it weaves its account of bureaucratic infighting and civil rights protest with that of a rising public sector labor movement. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 44 and the Baltimore Teachers Union emerged, sometimes awkwardly, as among the most effective critics of the very programs its members were employed to deliver. Though insufficient to meet the challenges created by decades of underinvestment and industrial job loss, the efforts of organized, militant, and disproportionately Black women workers helped secure meaningful advances in socialized services and partially alleviated the racialized and gendered burdens of life in the city.Yet even at its height, the solidaristic alliances between unionized “client advocates” and the city's low-income communities rested on the most tenuous of foundations (98). One of the book's most important contributions is that it shows in clear, accessible, and human terms the local stakes of other abstract national debates over revenue sharing and other urban policy initiatives during the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan years. The more direct the control exerted by elected officials, Berger shows, the harder it was for worker-activists to exert their influence. The “New Federalism” inaugurated by Nixon and realized under Reagan diluted antipoverty funding, eroded the mandate for inclusive participation, and shifted decision-making power from rank-and-file human service workers to agency heads and elected officials. Beyond simply taming “hell-raising” worker-activists and rendering them less effective as advocates for the city's working poor and unemployed, Berger argues, these new power dynamics tipped the balance away from a bottom-up vision of economic development (126).Though occasioned by a national retreat from the War on Poverty, Berger shows that this transformation owed at least as much to the machinations of local elected officials like William Donald Schaefer, who dominated city politics during his four terms as mayor (1971–87). The embodiment of David Harvey's concept of the “entrepreneurial turn” in executive governance, Berger's Schaefer boosted the city's commercial appeal by imposing austerity on its most vulnerable citizens and insulating the political process from public scrutiny (162). In so doing, Berger shows, Schaefer essentially inverted Great Society–era arrangements, using personal charisma, patronage politics, and increasingly opaque funding and decision-making processes to usher in a tourism-centered vision of urban renaissance. Public sector unions (and civil rights groups) critiqued the new direction at every turn, using the “tattered playbook” to reforge coalitions that might restore the redistributive agenda, but struggled to transcend the scapegoating that blamed them for the city's plight (199). While the strength of the unions preserved public employment as an island of economic stability for Black Baltimoreans, the decades-long retreat from the Great Society era's redistributive approach left the city increasingly vulnerable to cycles of service cuts and privatization schemes.It is a compelling account, yet one wonders whether a unified future was as possible as Berger suggests. The redistributive vision that appears here is reactive and relative. Black activists sought, and for a time won, more robust benefits and more participatory mechanisms than federal architects may have intended or state and local elected officials were keen to allow. Their tireless efforts won important improvements for both workers and recipients, but it is less clear, absent a much more fundamental reworking of the fiscal structure of the American state, that their redistributive approach could do more than soften the worst edges of the emerging economic order.To acknowledge as much is not to criticize Berger. Indeed, the irony, and perhaps tragedy, shown in A New Working Class is the degree to which the very local activism most capable of sustaining a bottom-up, inclusive vision of public sector–led revitalization depended not simply on the existence of federal programs but also on a particular structure of federal funding. By showing how both the grievances and the aspirations of even the most locally bound workers were tied up with dense, shifting layers of global industrial transformation and national political intrigue, Berger has offered us a model of labor, working-class, and urban history that should be read for decades to come.