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Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities, even after years of decline. Labor continues to play a vital role in mobilizing urban residents, shaping urban conflict, and crafting the policies and regulations that are transforming our urban spaces. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address nonunion workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members. Unions and the City serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. The book presents the findings of a collaborative project in which a team of labor researchers and labor geographers based in New York City and Toronto investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. The contributors assess the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals'such as protecting employment levels, retaining bargaining relationships with employers, and organizing new workforces?as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), this book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents.
Contributors
Simon Black, Brock University; Maria Figueroa, Cornell University; Lois S. Gray, Cornell University; Ian Thomas MacDonald, University of Montreal; James Nugent, University of Toronto; Susanna F. Schaller, City College Center for Worker Education; Steven Tufts, York University; K. C. Wagner, Cornell University; Mildred Warner, Cornell University; Thorben Wieditz, York University

Ian Thomas MacDonald is Assistant Professor in the School of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal.

Ian Thomas MacDonald's profile page

Concise analysis of the approach developed by those of us deeply involved in the struggle to improve working and living conditions in Canada's largest urban centre.... A clear analysis of unions and the dialectics of renewal.

Our Times: Canada's Independent Labour Magazine

The essays in this uniformly strong collection present a highly nuanced account of successes and setbacks of union campaigns to shape the direction of two changing cities: New York and Toronto.... Readers will learn much from this book about union engagement with urban space, policy and politics.

Labour

Unions and the City is a well-written and well-edited account of labor challenges in an urban context. It fills a significant gap in the union renewal literature by raising important questions about how unions must transcend their traditional roles and address societal ten- sions around class, gender, and race.

ILR Review

This volume provides a timely and infor- mative exploration of the role of unions in urban politics and fills a gap in the litera- ture. MacDonald has done an excellent job of introducing the reader to the importance of unions as urban actors and the dynamics of urban politics.

Industrial Relations

Unions and the City is successful in showing that union demands are not merely workplace concerns... It is hoped that MacDonald's book will encourage future scholarship on the efficacy of unions in this broader urban terrain.

Journal of Urban Affairs