The American working class has often been misunderstood and misrepresented throughout the world. Many show them as apolitical and timeless, not taking into account what is going on around them to cause their reactions. They often don’t even see the political struggles going on around them, and say that the American working class isn’t “politically mobilized” or “class-conscious.” Others only explain the working class poor as minorities, putting them into different ethnic groups to explain their poverty, as opposed to acknowledging that there is a group of regular Americans who are a big part of the working class poor.
The author wanted to see what was really going on in the American working class, as opposed to these misrepresentations that were so common. She moved to Greenpoint-Williamsburg for one year and was involved in the community for a few years after. She wanted to make a full picture of their everyday lives to understand and see the political struggles they went through. These people had strong community solidarity, and through this, would take political action to improve their daily lives. This book is about analyzing the collective action of these people, how it started, and the results of it to see how they could be successful and what causes them to fail.
To understand these collective actions, we need to look at the “historical trends and changes…in political protest.” A number of analysts describe these collective actions as emerging from capitalism and as a response to the fact that people were becoming dispensable, and this collective action was the only way they could gain their rights. To fully see the American working class’s political consciousness and the struggles they go through, we can’t just look at what the unions did, but also what small groups did outside the unions.
Much of the collective action of the people in Greenpoint-Williamsburg is directed at the state, as they depend on the state for many of their necessary resources. These collective actions are quite frequent, showing the constant struggle going on. By seeing these small, local conflicts, you can see that the American working class is anything but apolitical.
This study was conducted during a fiscal crisis in New York City. Many people lost their jobs and many services that the working class relied on were cut. Their political activity during this time must be seen in context of the sudden hardships they were going through. This fiscal crisis was a turning point in the transformation of New York City from manufacturing to major corporations, which was more suited for the middle class than the lower class. The working class was hit very hard by this and this book is about their response.
Chapter 2 of this book explains the conditions which formed Greenpoint-Williamsburg. Chapter 3 describes the process that individuals went through to find jobs and the cycle of finding a job, losing it, and looking again. It also describes how the state influenced this. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the working class’s interactions with welfare, welfare officials, and welfare regulations, and the political consequences of it. Chapter 6 is about the different types of landlords in Greenpoint-Williamsburg. Chapters 7-9 explain how they developed a local block associations and how they used this network to influence federal funds in local programs and their successes and failures with this. Chapter 10 goes through a successful local movement and how it was started. Chapter 11 goes through the political oppression through racial divisions and electoral politics and why local movements were preventing from expanding outside of the community.
The poor working class are a fundamental part of our society and through understanding their struggles, we can see the basic issues in American society. She gathered most of her data using participant observation. She chose Greenpoint-Williamsburg because it been one of the most industrialized areas in New York City. She only worked with a small number of residents, specifically one block, and does not claim that this is true of all the people there. She personally saw how these people interacted with each other, with their landlords, and with social services and was able to work out a social organization. She understood particular actions through this understanding of support networks and the social context of what was going on. She spent a lot of time talking to people involved in a major protest against closing a local firehouse, the people involved in the school board elections, and p[people involved in the dispute over a local senior citizens’ center. Her observations are based on the people of Greenpoint- Williamsburg, and she does not have as clear a view on the other side, such as the welfare officials or fire commissioner who close the engine company. But she does have “detailed, complex, and significant information” about the way people in Greenpoint-Williamsburg lived in context with a “changing political economy.”
