Working to Undo the Machine: NYC Building Trades Unions and Workers’ Politics from the 1880s-1890s

• In Event: 2229 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #5

Abstract

This analysis of building trades unions in New York City at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrates how the progressions of race, class, and ethnic formation, and its organization around party politics, moved workers towards a radical practice of unionism that shifted preexisting and emerging categories of identity towards the transformation of a worker movement. Although worker radicalism often adheres to an essentialist version for how class is struggled over, the formation of the labor movement in New York City at the end of the Gilded Age poses a counter-example. Rather, the artifacts of previous struggles, amassed through workers’ experiences, shape the subject, allowing it to challenge the historical progress of capitalism. Such discourses, I show, challenge preexisting structures through struggles over identities, politics, and the labor process; then reorient them towards the ascendancy of worker collectivism. However, discourses are also present within the practice of doing, or working by the rules in order to break them. To illustrate the idea that everyday practices and experiences constitute as radical actions amongst New York City’s building trades, I argue that workers’ participation in, and struggles over work, lead to further participation in intersections which form part of a constant dialectic between the logic of abstract value and the logic of doing.

Author

• Thomas Corcoran, University of Massachusetts Amherst