What Happened to Working-Class New York?
Low-wage workers rally for better pay in Times Square. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Hurricane Sandy pushed into view echelons of working-class New Yorkers normally hidden behind workplace walls or in obscure neighborhoods, or made invisible by familiarity and indifference. There, suddenly center stage, was the old, heavily Catholic, white working class. Some of the most devastated parts of the city, like Breezy Point and Gerritsen Beach, seemed frozen in time, neighborhoods of Irish- and Italian-American policemen, firefighters, blue-collar workers and politicians, still reflecting a New York dominated by European immigrants and their children. As on 9/11, heroic rescue efforts by the Fire Department exposed how white and male it has remained, even as the city’s population has become ever more diverse.
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Newer immigrants, too, were thrust into the spotlight, like Philippines-born Menchu de Luna Sanchez, one of the nurses who carried sick infants down pitch-black stairways when flooding forced the evacuation of New York University’s Langone Medical Center. President Obama hailed her in his State of the Union address. Even much poorer New Yorkers received attention, like the thousands of public housing residents stranded for days and sometimes weeks in high-rise buildings without power, heat, water or elevator service. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, undamaged by the storm, well-heeled dads and moms found themselves in the unaccustomed position of trying to amuse their housebound children for hours on end, as the low-paid, immigrant child-minders who pour into wealthy neighborhoods each morning were themselves trapped at home.
New York, at least numerically, has long been a working-class city. Today, there are far fewer manufacturing workers than a generation or two ago and many more service workers, far fewer immigrants from Europe and many more from Asia and Central America. But perhaps the biggest change is that workers and their families are less socially visible than in the past, except when disaster hits or conflicts break out—like Sandy or the school bus drivers’ strike earlier this year. Increasingly, the image of the city as the home to great wealth or layabout hipsters (sometimes, as on Girls, living off their parents’ bank accounts) has camouflaged the struggle of middle- and lower-income New Yorkers simply to get by.
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Trouble Beneath the Surface
At first glance, workers in New York, compared with most of the country, are doing well. At the start of last year, nationally only a third of the jobs lost to the Great Recession had been regained, but New York City had already bounced back to its pre-recession employment level. In December 2012, the city had more than 3.9 million jobs, the most ever. And more of those jobs were unionized than almost anywhere else. A recent report by Ruth Milkman and Laura Braslow, put out by the City University of New York’s Joseph S. Murphy Institute and its Center for Urban Research, found that more than 22 percent of NYC workers belonged to a union, nearly twice the national level. With its huge mass transit system, government-regulated rents, low-cost public university, large public hospital system, generous Medicaid program, and sprawling network of government and nonprofit social services, New York provides working families with a set of benefits and opportunities few cities can match.
But scratch a little and things do not look so good. During the recession, the city had big job losses in relatively well-paid sectors, including government, construction, manufacturing, finance and insurance, and wholesale trade. The biggest gains since then have been in low-paid industries: restaurants, retail trade and home healthcare. Between July 2008 and July 2012, New York City had a net loss of nearly 60,000 jobs paying $45,000 a year or more, while gaining more than 130,000 jobs paying less than $45,000 [see chart, page 18]. The changing mix contributed to a nearly 8 percent drop in real median wage earnings between 2008 and 2011. An analysis by Hofstra University economists Gregory DeFreitas and Bhaswati Sengupta suggests that many newly created jobs have gone to commuters, exacerbating the difficulty city dwellers face in getting good jobs. For residents of the five boroughs, the official unemployment rate in February was 9.1 percent, well over the national level of 7.7 percent. Though New York is festooned with displays of luxury, its median household income is below the national median and falling. In 2011, 21 percent of New Yorkers lived in poverty, compared with 16 percent nationally.
The public services that generations of New Yorkers fought for are frayed, or worse. In the face of chronic government underfunding, CUNY has turned to raising tuition to balance its budget, increasing student costs (for those without scholarships) by nearly a third over a five-year period. The MTA just hiked bus and subway fares. Public housing is in such miserable shape after cuts in federal support and inattention by the city that the backlog of repairs has reached two years, with moldy walls, leaking ceilings, no heat and chronically broken elevators commonplace. Portuguese photographer Ana Brigida, who documented public housing conditions during a visit to New York, told The New York Times, “Sometimes you just can’t believe that people live like that…. How a place can actually be so destroyed.”
Image: Susie Cagle. Source: Fiscal Policy Institute's seasonal adjustment of CES employment data and QCEW 2011 annual average wage data from NYS DOL. Low wage industries are those whose annual average wage is below $45,000. Middle wage industries have annual wages of $45,000-$75,000. High wage industries are those whose annual average wage is above $75,000.
Shrinking union power has contributed to the slip in living standards and public services. While union density in the city remains high by national standards, it has fallen by 13 percent since the mid-1980s, when more than 35 percent of New York workers carried a union card. All of the recent decline has been in the private sector, where now less than 13 percent of the workforce is unionized. Some of the membership drop came in industries like manufacturing, where total employment fell, but much of it occurred in sectors like wholesale and retail trade and leisure and hospitality, where employment has been rising.
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