City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York. Edited by Joshua B. Freeman,. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. x + 248 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover, $40.00. ISBN: 978-0-231-19192-0

Surely, as the book points out, labor activism helped create the broadly social democratic culture of mid-twentieth-century New York, when unions—in tandem with the New Deal order—crafted a range of public and working-class institutions that moderated the harder edges of New York capitalism. In particular, how have workers been shaped by the recent decades in New York City—from the budget cuts of the fiscal crisis in 1975 to the emergence of New York as a global symbol of urban inequality? Only with the power of the federal government, and funding from the federal government, can New York City hope to recover some of the equity that was once—however incompletely—part of its civic culture.