Nearly Got Shot Dead,and He Didn’t Get His Little Check Yet: Workers,Crime,and Law and Order in New York City,1962-1970

In early August 1967, some 13,000 Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 1101 members in New York City walked off of the job against the wishes of both their employers and union leaders, shutting down local telephone installation and servicing. Unlike a typical strike, Local 1101 members were not calling attention to inadequate benefits or protesting their union leaders’ delivery of a weak contract. On July 31 in Bedford-Stuyvesant—postwar Brooklyn’s burgeoning black ghetto—a robber shot 22-year-old change collector Michael Kimmel, a member of the Telephone Workers Union. ¹ The following day, twenty-eight workers from Kimmel’s garage in East Williamsburg refused to work in Bedford-Stuyvesant unless they were sent out in pairs. As one wildcatter’s sign put it,

A coin collector lies a sufferin’

in his bed,

He tried to do the job the way Ma

Bell said.

He went into dear Ol’Bedford and

Nearly got shot dead, and he

didn’t get his little check

yet, yet. ²

While the shooting sparked the citywide walkout, behind the strike was a years-long conflict over working conditions in high-crime areas, which intertwined these law and order concerns with broader issues of pay, respect on the job, and adequate union representation. ³

Over the last fifteen years, a series of works have taken up the question of crime, incarceration, and law-and-order politics in response to the enormous social consequences of what is alternatively called “mass incarceration” or “hyperincarceration.” ⁴ The United States has the ignominious title of having the highest incarceration rate in the world, with race, class, and place largely determining who is incarcerated, and social media is awash in videos portraying the brutal and often racist efforts of American police. Elizabeth Hinton’s work on origins of the carceral state charts its rise in the federal policies of both Democrats and Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s, while Michael W. Flamm examines the discursive backbone of these important institutional shifts. According to Flamm, law and order gained national prominence in the early 1960s as politicians such as George Wallace and Barry Goldwater mobilized such rhetoric to attack the Civil Rights Movement. ⁵ Local political conflicts were instrumental in the rise of law-and-order politics, and in 1966, New York was the site of a politically polarizing battle over the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which monitored police abuses. The police and conservatives mobilized “racial, class, and gender code to tap into the widespread and well-founded fear of crime,” and white working-class New Yorkers were critical in winning the referendum. ⁶ Debates over crime and safety in postwar New York were well underway by then, and historian Marilyn Johnson has demonstrated how conservatives exploited women’s newfound freedoms—and potential dangers therein—in the aftermath of the 1963 “career girl” murders to reassert patriarchal relations and promote a discourse of racial fear. ⁷ Significantly, historian Michael Javen Fortner argues that scholars too often adopt a top-down approach when examining the rise of law-and-order politics, and they also minimize the degree to which violent crime was on the rise in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in places like New York City and its ghettoes. Fortner’s intervention, while equally critical of the dehumanization of the carceral system, points to the threat such crime posed to black working and middle-class New Yorkers and how that threat drove them to actively push for harsher punishment of drug addicts and criminals, including the notorious Rockefeller Drug Laws. ⁸

Interest in the lives and actions of postwar, working-class Americans has undergone a revival. Recent scholarship on labor upheaval in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s has deemed it the era of “rank-and-file rebellion,” a militant strike wave focused on work conditions, unresponsive union leadership, and political disempowerment. ⁹ In works large and small, historians have uncovered important sources of militancy, including youth rebellion, civil rights, black power, and feminism, and they have explored the wave’s broader economic and cultural foundations, building upon the renewed historical interest in the 1970s, prompted by Bruce Schulman’s concept of a “long 1970s” as well as the growing number of works on the rise of the Right. ¹⁰ Though recent scholarly works have broken important ground, thus far, historians have neither sufficiently studied rank-and-file upheaval in New York City—postwar America’s largest industrial center—nor have they significantly explored the upheaval as a phenomenon rooted in place. ¹¹ As Joshua Freeman has shown, New York City was a unique “social democratic polity” whose working class was tied together by a powerful class consciousness. In working-class New York, local circumstances shaped the labor struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and among workers, crime was a significant point of contention, affecting firefighters, taxi drivers, teachers, sanitation men, and telephone workers, among others. ¹²

This article works at the intersection of these important bodies of literature, exploring the salience of law and order concerns for militant workers in New York City in the 1960s. While many studies examine urban crime, more often than not they investigate crime at the level of public discourse and “popular fears” or they portray the politics of crime as an issue relevant to members of particular neighborhoods—in Flamm’s case those that were racially transitioning and in Fortner’s case those already ghettoized. ¹³ Rarely, if ever, do they study the experience of crime as a workplace affair. By examining CWA records, it becomes clear that workers white and black—though in the case of CWA Local 1101 mostly white men (the largely female telephone operators were in the Telephone Traffic Union)—suffered from the growing crime in New York City’s ghettoes. A rich, though small and incomplete, collection of CWA Local 1101 documents provides insight into dozens of incidences—harassment, muggings, shootings, and attacks—that impacted telephone workers’ daily lives between 1960 and 1970. In response to these ongoing threats and possessing a powerful class consciousness, Local 1101 members used militant action to demand job protections from New York Telephone (NYT) and more strident leadership from their union representatives on the issue. Significantly, robberies and attacks on CWA Local 1101 members primarily took place in the city’s poor black neighborhoods and were overwhelmingly committed by black men. Politicians and the media did not simply conjure law and order from above nor were workers speaking a coded language of racial hatred; rather, law and order spoke to the daily realities of many working-class New Yorkers, which through strike action became part of a larger collective experience.

New York City’s telephone workers joined the CWA in 1961 after a hotly contested three-way election between their former organization, United Telephone Organization (UTO), the powerful International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the CWA. ¹⁴ Local members dissatisfied with the UTO’s leadership had led the charge, but immediately after winning representation rights to the largest telephone local in the country, the CWA too came under threat. Throughout the 1960s, leadership turnover was high and various internal opposition groups threatened to take the massive local out of the CWA. ¹⁵ Behind the internal tumult was a craft-based militancy infused with citywide class consciousness. Plant workers had intimate knowledge of the prone-to-breakdown telephone equipment. Older workers were the best source of knowledge within the industry, and most managers lacked requisite knowledge of how the system actually functioned. ¹⁶

Skilled, older workers tended to be stewards and chief stewards, and in some locales, like Northern Manhattan, they led militant action. For example, in 1961, when four men took off work to celebrate Columbus Day, NYT suspended them. In response, some three thousand men wildcatted for two hours to protest the suspension. ¹⁷ In 1962, a two-day wildcat interrupted work on the NYT system, and Local 1101 leaders ordered their men back to work. ¹⁸ CWA militants had a broader class consciousness and were willing to defend it. In 1961, a chief steward in Brooklyn’s Local 1109—which later merged with Local 1101—refused to cross a United Auto Workers picket line at the Intertype Company. He was subsequently suspended, and the threat of a citywide strike led the company to reinstate him and submit the issue to arbitration. ¹⁹ Solidarity with other strikes was but one component, and many CWA workers were aware of labor politics in the city and compared their pay and work conditions to skilled trades like plumbing and electrical work. ²⁰

While the union’s star was ascendant, the future of New York City was in flux. The city was a massive industrial center in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but by 1960 its white-collar future was in plain sight. Banking, finance, and government employment surged, but the city’s industrial base was eroding as thousands of manufacturers closed up shop, moving to the suburbs and the South or falling under the pressure of international competition and slum clearance programs. ²¹ The city’s neighborhoods were also dramatically transforming after New Deal policies “armed banks, insurance companies, and developers with public money and government authority,” incentivizing white outmigration and funneling hundreds of thousands of black migrants into the increasingly crowded, underserviced, and capital starved neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. ²² The structural forces transforming the job market and fostering racial segregation of neighborhoods largely limited black prospects, and discrimination in the booming commercial construction industry only compounded the problem. Many black New Yorkers ultimately made their way into various lower strata of both the white- and blue-collar sectors, but it was a contradictory time in which there were “new opportunities for black advancement combined with a collapse of the bottom end of the labor market.” ²³

Whites still made up the bulk of the city’s poor, but blacks were disproportionately poor and black ghettoes became locus of many resultant ills including increasing crime. While scholars hotly contest crime’s causes, consequences, and significance, historians have unequivocally demonstrated that crime, and violent crime in particular, was on the rise in 1960s New York. Over the decade, murders increased by 286.4 percent with some 390 in 1960 and 1,117 in 1970. In that same time, rapes and assaults tripled and robberies grew an astounding 1100 percent. ²⁴ Importantly, an uneven geography of race and class determined one’s encounters with crime, and black people comprised 50 percent of all homicide victims, and neighborhoods like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant were among the most dangerous. While most violent crimes involved perpetrators and victims of the same race, as Eric C. Schneider notes robbery was a major exception, and it was robberies and muggings that ultimately affected workers in New York. ²⁵

From the CWA’s successful representation election in 1961 through the end of 1962, safe working conditions for telephone workers in Harlem became a focal point for company-union negotiations and rank-and-file activity, but crime was not the immediate flashpoint. In November 1961, Morton Bahr, then Area Director, contacted Jerome Wilson, the assistant to the Manhattan borough president concerning what he called the “serious problem the Communication Workers of America had with the New York Telephone Company in the Harlem area concerning safety and sanitary conditions.” ²⁶ Though a record of this communication does not exist, a follow-up letter to his subordinates in the CWA and NYT management recounts that workers assigned to Harlem were upset by the lack of proper garbage disposal in some of the apartment buildings and businesses. In New York City apartment buildings, maintenance and waste disposal was and remains the responsibility of the landlord and a building supervisor, but they were negligent in their duties—as was the Department of Sanitation—and especially so in the city’s burgeoning ghettoes. ²⁷ Mayor Robert Wagner’s administration was strongly pro-labor, and Wilson suggested an informal program, run through Bahr, in which the CWA would relay the information to his office. Wilson would, in turn, have the Department of Sanitation clean up the environs, even though it was not normally within its purview to clean up private residences. ²⁸

According to Bahr, the sanitation issue ceased to be a significant point of union-management contention during the winter, but it reemerged in the aftermath of a wildcat strike in early April 1962. On Saturday April 7, Joseph Kilduff was sent to install a telephone at 1649 Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem. Though he was able to work in the apartment unit requesting service and the adjoining hallway, he refused to work in the basement when he found it filled with rotting garbage and rats. Kilduff called his supervisor who came to the site to inspect. The supervisor ordered the telephone installer to carry out his work, but Kilduff refused and was sent home and suspended for the coming Monday. When Kilduff’s coworkers learned of the suspension, they walked off the job, prompting the CWA leadership to once again beseech the city for help and call for a meeting with NYT to end the wildcat. ²⁹ In response, Wilson called on the city’s Department of Buildings to investigate the matter. Bahr considered the response a small victory, arguing to Local 1101 President Hank Habel that “The City, as you know, is very interested.” ³⁰

By the end of 1962, telephone workers’ concerns about working conditions in Harlem had transformed, and crime moved to the forefront. In late November 1962, a thief, armed with a knife, mugged a CWA craftsman, leaving the man injured. ³¹ Though there are no other contemporary documents detailing incidences in 1962, in a letter in 1967, Bahr claims that in the year following the CWA’s 1961 certification there were a “a series of beatings, holdups, threats and other indignities suffered by our members in the Harlem area.” ³² Clarence Taylor incisively describes how some black New Yorkers in the 1930s and 1940s struggled to battle a demeaning narrative that inaccurately portrayed Harlem as a crime-ridden neighborhood, but by the 1960s Harlemites had changed course. ³³ For example, in June 1962 Reverend OD Dempsey of the Upper Park Avenue Baptist Church organized a thousand-person march against crime. Later that year, the Nation of Islam organized a similar march. More broadly, a variety of Harlemites viewed the area as declining, beset by an array of problems including crime, violence, drug addiction, and substandard housing, many of which were understood to be part of a broader pattern of racial discrimination in the city. ³⁴

With this powerful incident and an increased focus in the city, Local 1101 leaders, with the backing of the CWA International, threatened a strike. The strike never materialized, but resulted in negotiations with Bell Telephone and the hammering out of a small but significant agreement with the help of Mayor Wanger. The agreement stated that

When a man is assigned a job and if he feels that the situation as it concerns his personal safety warrants accompaniment, he may call his foreman. He will be accompanied to the job by a foreman or another craftsman and the second man will stay with him all the time he is on the job or until the craftsman feels the second man is no longer required. ³⁵

The agreement was elegant in its simplicity and a coup in worker-management relations. As the agreement stated, the installer, linemen, or servicer had the right to decide whether they needed an escort, not their bosses or supervisors.

Worker safety in Harlem became a more pressing concern in the summer of 1964, when Police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan shot and killed black teenager James Powell after a minor altercation with a property manager on the Upper East Side. Nights of riots followed in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, evoking the riots in Birmingham the year prior and sparking a wave of unrest across the country in the weeks that followed. ³⁶ Amid the rebellion, telephone workers were expected to carry out their duties, and when workers were dispatched to the area to make repairs or install telephones, they passed through police lines and hostile crowds. Rank and filers complained of the lack of safety, and Local 1101 leadership responded with statements imploring its members to demand escorts from NYT as per the 1962 agreement. Since much of the rioting was concentrated in Harlem, the 1962 High Crime Area Agreement already covered many telephone workers there, though the agreement was meant mostly to address individualized danger. Acknowledging the increased volatility, Local 1101 leadership issued another statement, putting the stakes plainly: “Your life and limb is your responsibility, do not risk it for management, they would not risk theirs for you.” ³⁷ Significantly, Local 1101 leaders used their safety demands to attack an internal opposition group, the 1000 Club, accusing them of doing nothing while “Harlem burns.” ³⁸

Harlem and other black neighborhoods continued to be a problem for telephone workers in 1965. In late May, two workers in Manhattan had a pot full of wine thrown at them, but managed to avoid getting hit; the race of the attackers was not listed, and in this case, the two-man pairing was no deterrent. Earlier that month, three men attacked repairman Thomas Mahoney as he entered a company locker at 141st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, leaving him unconscious. Less violent, though, threatening behavior abounded as well. In one incident, two black men harassed a white telephone worker, who retreated to his truck. Shortly thereafter, a larger crowd surrounded the truck, trapping the man inside for an hour. In another telling incident, a group of young men threatened two telephone workers, telling them not to come back to “their neighborhood” again. ³⁹ While Jerald Podair has argued that the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike was the flashpoint that shifted New York toward a much more acrimonious black-white polarization, for telephone workers, such relationships were already deteriorating in the years prior and in much less public battles. ⁴⁰

Without the words and thoughts of the individuals who robbed or harassed telephone workers, it is difficult to decipher their precise motivations, but the economic and racial motivations of the attacks were rooted in the fact that the world of black life and labor in 1960s New York was one of intense discrimination. Black men found themselves excluded from most of the skilled trades in the city, particularly construction, and in 1963, activists with Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led protests and nonviolent direct actions for the hiring of black workers in city’s construction industry, shutting down city and state construction sites in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. ⁴¹ But in 1964, Local 2, the plumbers union that worked in Manhattan, had less than twenty-five black members out of some four thousand, and with only minor exceptions in Carpentry and the Drillers Union blacks were largely excluded. ⁴² Bell Telephone was not much better. In 1967, only 2.1 percent of all NYT craft workers in the city were black, and they were mostly framemen, the lowest paid craft rank. In the words of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) report, “black employment was being concentrated in the lowest-paying, least-desirable, dead-end jobs in the Bell System,” and the CWA was not overly concerned with confronting the problem. ⁴³ While the various attacks and harassment were not pleas for employment or integration into the CWA workforce, they ought to be understood within a world of highly circumscribed opportunity for black working-class men as discussed above. Resentment and, in some cases, crimes of necessity were a predictable result.

Though the 1962 agreement plainly stated that workers decided their own safety needs, foremen still challenged their attempts to obtain escorts. These challenges, however, were part of a broader pattern of supervisor-craftsmen conflict. Oral history confirms the prevalence of such disputes, much of which was grounded in a mutual disrespect between highly skilled craftsmen exercising their own autonomy and undertrained, but often imperious, managers. According to Rust Gilbert, who worked for NYT in the late 1960s to the early 1970s, many workers considered their managers inept, “stupid authoritarians.” ⁴⁴ A 1966 Bell System study of employee discontent concurred, positing that discontent was sometimes explosive because workers often felt that their direct supervisors were not only less aware of the job needs but also uninterested in solving problems. Ironically, the same study argued that “there is a pervasive unrest among employees of the Bell System that is not limited to non-management employees, but runs up through levels of management to a very surprisingly high level.” ⁴⁵ These persistent conflicts gave a stronger edge to safety issues because escorts were negotiated directly between workers and their direct supervisors. In March 1966, managers tried to roll back the use of escorts in Harlem, threatening to write workers up as “uncooperative.” ⁴⁶ Safety concerns persisted, however, and in September of that year, three young black men shouted “racial slurs” at a white repairman and a female NYT employee as they looked for parking before work. When they parked in front of the buildings, the three youths then threw bottles and rocks at them, and the police were called. ⁴⁷

In 1967, the high-crime issue came to a head, but Brooklyn was now the focus. Between 1940 and 1970, half a million black people moved into the borough, primarily to Bedford-Stuyvesant and adjacent neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Brownsville, and East New York. With both continued divestment and ongoing deindustrialization, these areas were increasingly racially segregated and destitute with the bulk of the inhabitants living in “geographic, political, and educational isolation from white society.” ⁴⁸ Bed-Stuy remained the neighborhood with the highest crime in Brooklyn, but nearby areas saw a jump as well, in some cases prompting the formation of civilian patrol groups like the largely Chasidic Maccabees group in Crown Heights. In February, a telephone installer working in the Albany Houses, a public housing project in Crown Heights neighborhood, was not only mugged but also threatened with death and humiliation. As the Local 1101 steward’s letter vividly recounts, two men and a woman accosted the installer, pulling a gun on him and forcing him into a stairwell where “he was forced down on his knees and with the gun to his temple was relieved of his wallet. He was verbally abused by his assailants and was almost forced into an unnatural sex act.” ⁴⁹ The attack shocked many CWA members, and in its aftermath, the victim, Salvatore Curcio wrote both management and his union representatives to complain of the violence and fear that permeated his work. Curcio wrote,

the whole incident has left its mark on me. Every patrolman & detective that I have described the event to, have stated most emphatically how extremely lucky I was that I did not get, if not murdered, at least a severe beating. I am terrified to even enter any of the streets of this high-rated crime area. ⁵⁰

Local 1101 President McCabe backed Curcio’s letter with a communication of his own to plant managers in downtown Brooklyn. McCabe stated that “genuine fear such as expressed in Mr. Curcio’s letter is something that no working man or woman should have to live with or tolerate,” and he suggested that NYT managers in Brooklyn implement a two-man pairing agreement in Bedford-Stuyvesant and East New York and begin the process of defining other high-crime areas in the borough. Furthermore, McCabe also suggested that it was up to the union to also educate its members, emphasizing the dangers of carrying large sums of cash on the job, which might tempt would-be robbers. ⁵¹

Curcio’s robbery and letter also prompted CWA District 1 Assistant to Vice President Morton Bahr to reach out to Mayor John Lindsay concerning the high-crime issue or what he called “a potentially explosive situation that would have racial overtones.” ⁵² In his letter, Bahr detailed the long history of the problem in Harlem, and he hoped to push the company to formally accept the two-man pairings in high-crime areas of Brooklyn. ⁵³ A year earlier, CWA Local 1101’s official publication, New York Generator, ran an article entitled “Protection,” which noted a persistent pattern of racial animosity when its members were attacked. ⁵⁴ Bahr wanted Lindsay’s intercession because Local 1101 members and its leadership had declared that they were imposing the two-man pairing whether the company liked it or not, which Bahr knew would certainly lead to strikes and walkouts.

The CWA attitude was that crime was largely rooted in economics, and after the attack on Curcio, Bahr argued that the “CWA recognizes its responsibility to both our membership and the community” and that the organization “fully appreciates the anxieties, desires, frustrations, and hopes of the Negro Community.” ⁵⁵ As such, he and the CWA suggested that NYT create a jobs program to fight unemployment in black ghettoes and explained that his members will not refuse to work in such neighborhoods for fear that it would stigmatize those areas and worsen racial problems in the city as a whole. Given the deep structural roots of black inequality in New York, such measures would be unable to actually solve the problem. The union’s stance also had other motivations. According to a former member, Local 1101’s union hierarchy and stewards were also keenly aware that a large influx of black workers into the ranks was inevitable in the mid-1960s given both the transitioning demographics of the city and the demand for more robust telephone service. While that would mean upheaval within the union, some stewards who were racially proprietary about the union believed they needed to accept blacks so as to not create a bloc of workers loyal more to the company than the union. ⁵⁶ Lindsay forwarded the hiring proposal to Phil Ruffo, the Commissioner of Labor, and when Ruffo met with NYT, the company refused to accept the two-man pairing offer, and attacks and robberies of telephone workers continued. In mid-March only two blocks from where the installer was robbed, two black men attacked a female operator (race unknown) as she left work, punching her in the face and robbing her of $71. ⁵⁷

Ironically, disputes in Harlem would bring the issue to the fore again. On May 16, NYT management attempted to dispatch a worker to a telephone plant on Convent Avenue in Harlem. When the worker refused to do the job without an escort, the supervisor tried to send another man, who also refused, and both men were suspended without pay, one for half an hour and the other for 15 minutes. ⁵⁸ While management concurred that Harlem was a high-crime area, the supervisor did not believe that workers needed an escort because they were being assigned to work within NYT facilities. By 1967, workers both inside and outside of the plants disagreed with this stance, insisting on accompaniment in the area. After all, several incidences had taken place on or just outside of company property, and the CWA indicated that a worker was attacked every other week in New York. The union argued that by suspending the workers, NYT was acting in violation of the earlier High Crime Area agreement. In the words of Local 1101 President Jim McCabe, “the police won’t put a lone policemen on patrol at Convent Avenue and 146 Street, even though he’s armed, but New York Telephone will send an unarmed man there all alone.” ⁵⁹ On May 17, the union responded to the issue, demanding that NYT agree to arbitration, but after the company refused, the union led a walkout of some five thousand workers in Manhattan.

The strike continued the following day, and CWA Local 1101 organized a rally outside of City Hall to bring attention to their conflict with NYT and gain Mayor Lindsay’s support in resolving the conflict. While thousands of members rallied, Herbert Haber, the City Labor Relations director met with Local 1101 officials to discuss the matter, eventually speaking with NYT representatives to help move the situation forward. The company wanted the men back on the job before it began arbitration, but the union refused and several hours later the company agreed. On May 19, CWA workers were back on the job with the dispute under arbitration. ⁶⁰ Ultimately, union leaders were disappointed that liberal Republican Mayor Lindsay, who was at City Hall at the time, chose not so speak with the rallying telephone workers. And while the mayor did not show his support, city Comptroller and Democrat Mario Procaccino used the opportunity to speak to the striking union members. According to Local 1101 officials,

The Comptroller clearly went on the record in support of our position when he said to the press that our grievances were valid and that the City had a responsibility to see that citizens can go to their jobs with a feeling of being safe. ⁶¹

When Procaccino ran for mayor two years later, he heavily emphasized law and order. Though he has been characterized as a symbol of white backlash, only months after speaking out against attacks on CWA workers he brought his message to a black audience in Harlem. Flanking Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Procaccino denounced criminals and called for punitive measures to stem the rising tide of violence. Rather than being denounced as a racist backlasher, the crowd in Harlem applauded him repeatedly. ⁶²

Local 1101 members saw crime as a threat and used collective action to push for their safety, but they had conflicting beliefs about the crime. Black workers resisted casting the crime as a racial problem, with one black CWA wildcatter declaring in 1967, “There’s more crime in poor neighborhoods, and it has nothing to do with your race. A junkie or hood will hit anyone.” As another put it, “decent people of any race don’t throw things at telephone men.” ⁶³ As Fortner has pointed out, a “black silent majority” increasingly found itself victimized by and in conflict with rising crime in New York City. While many blacks connected the issue to structural issues including discrimination, they also blamed drugs and the black underclass. Such conclusions led to increasing support of strong law and order policies, which would later be narrativized as primarily a result of white-driven backlash politics. ⁶⁴ Some black CWA members agreed that racial difference played a role in the attacks on telephone workers, and on the wildcat pickets of 1967, one black CWA worker remarked that he had an easier time working in ghettoes than his white coworkers because of his ability to physically blend in. ⁶⁵

In many ways, white CWA members were confronting the violence that blacks were already disproportionately facing in the 1960s. Befitting their preexisting racist beliefs, some white workers attributed the crime to the fact that the areas were largely black. According to Joshua Zeitz, Catholic New Yorkers, particularly Irish and Italian, had strong law and order beliefs and had strongly backed the Police Benevolent Association’s (PBA) drive to defeat civilian oversight of the New York Police Department. The PBA used a variety of advertisements to link the threat of street crime and the 1964 riots, but such connections telephone workers would have already made. ⁶⁶ In NYT plants in both upper Manhattan and Brooklyn, there were large contingents of Irish and Italian-Americans, respectively. Of course, such ethnic groups were not monolithic. As Julily Kohler-Hausman notes, by the early 1970s white New Yorkers often linked the increase in crime to liberal politicians’ “permissiveness” concerning the era’s many protests and civil rights campaigns, but she also notes the real fear that informed such sentiments. ⁶⁷ Some white workers did not draw racist conclusion about the high-crime areas, but they knew that the job required that men on the job be more attentive and fearful than normal. ⁶⁸ Furthermore, the union’s position was that although racial animosity drove some of the attacks on telephone workers, the root of the problem lay in the economic and social conditions that black people faced. Regardless, as Schneider argues, intraracial robberies worsened ethnic and racial tensions in New York, and likely such experiences on the job contributed as well. ⁶⁹

Arbitration ended the May dispute in Harlem, but violence on the job in Brooklyn led to a paradigm shifting wildcat later that summer. On Thursday, July 27, 22-year-old Michael Kimmel was working at Bedford-Stuyvesant collecting coins from an NYT telephone booth when an armed man tried to rob him. As Kimmel tried to run back to his truck, the man shot him in the back. The following day, telephone workers walked off the job at the Stewart Ave garage in East Williamsburg, which serviced the area in which Kimmel was shot. The servicers and installers had initially requested two-man pairing after the Kimmel incident, but management refused since the high-crime agreement only covered Harlem. While managers understood that there were many dangers, their main concern was paying more workers to do the same job, and in the words of one it was “a question as to whether we could afford doubling the work force.” ⁷⁰ Kimmel was hospitalized over the weekend, and on Monday, July 31, all two hundred workers in the Stewart Ave garage walked off despite the fact that management offered that they would be allowed two-man pairs as part of a one-week provisional study. The workers and the union refused the insufficient concession, demanding all high-crime areas be covered. With management’s efforts rebuffed, the strike spread to service garages and offices across North Brooklyn. ⁷¹

By August 1, most of Local 1101 had walked off of the job in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and members of CWA Local 1150, the so-called long lines division, honored the pickets as well. At issue was not only the danger on the job, but the pace of union-company arbitration. The brief walkout in May, which was led by the union, resulted in an arbitration agreement, but the company and the union were only scheduled to discuss the issue in mid-September. In the aftermath of the Kimmel robbery, the issue had reached a breaking point for telephone workers. To emphasize the point, a group of coin collectors and women operators—members of independent telephone unions—went to Brooklyn’s headquarters of the New York Police Department to apply for gun permits, which the police refused. ⁷² In Manhattan, CWA leaders organized rallies at City Hall and at NYT’s Broadway headquarters. When members blocked traffic on Broadway, mounted police waded into the ground, with workers fighting with police resulting in two arrests. At the City Hall rally, workers sported homemade signs, wore bull’s eyes on their shirts, and brandished opposition group signs. ⁷³

By mid-week, CWA Local 1106, which represented Queens NYT workers, and CWA Local 1102 in Staten Island also walked off the job. With wildcats in all five boroughs, NYT offered CWA officials a forty-five-day pairing study for six different garages that covered North Brooklyn. At issue now was the disciplining of three rank-and-file leaders of the strike, John Feldermeyer, Vincent Tarricone, and Herb Renniger. ⁷⁴ NYT wanted to fire the wildcat leaders, but the union needed to reduce the penalty to get the more than fifteen thousand men back to work. After more negotiations, NYT offered not to fire the men though it insisted on the possibility of suspending them without pay. The union had been willing to agree to a North Brooklyn–only extension of the high-crime-area policy, but with the company insisting on punishment, it called for a citywide agreement. ⁷⁵ Furthermore, the union’s position did not simply try to address crime through protection. CWA leaders, as in May, called on NYT to create a jobs program to train residents of the city’s poorer neighborhoods for telephone work, which they hoped would solve some of the underlying economic problems that led to the robberies and attacks. ⁷⁶

Compounding the problem for NYT was the fact that CWA unions across New York voted to join the strike if an agreement was not met by Sunday, August 6. The strike garnered statewide support because workers in many of New York’s industrial cities also experienced violence and harassment on the job. In Buffalo, for example, organized by CWA Local 1122, white telephone installers and servicers experienced physical attacks and verbal harassment from younger black men in that city’s ghettoes. In 1967 in Utica, one white worker reported to his superiors that while on duty a group of black men who were drinking in an alley confronted him, attempting to block his way. He was able to complete the work, but the men shouted at him, telling him “No Fucking God Damn white man is going to walk around our alley” and calling out “God Damn whitey.” ⁷⁷ As a result, many of them had demanded to work in pairs and others had requested transfers out of the city and into the suburbs where the work was safer. ⁷⁸ NYT faced down the strikers, and on Saturday, August 5, they issued a three-day suspension to three of the union leaders involved in negotiations, McCabe of Local 1101, Arthur Schulhoff of Local 1102, and John Renck of Local 1106. ⁷⁹ With the company ramping up its anti-strike activity, CWA members walked out statewide, and CWA International officials became further involved, calling on the company to provide a statewide agreement for working in high-crime areas. ⁸⁰

While the company ostensibly tried to stop the strike from spreading statewide, it had gone too far in its disciplinary efforts. The union was willing to allow the suspension of three wildcatters to go to arbitration, as required by the contract, but the suspension of the union leaders could not be tolerated. When thousands more CWA members statewide walked out, NYT quickly agreed to rescind the suspensions of the three union officials, but not the rank-and-file wildcat leaders. More significantly, it agreed to a forty-five-day pairing agreement with CWA Local 1101. The “Commodore Agreement” covered roughly fourteen company garages and lockers across the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, massively expanding on the 1962 agreement and covering areas of the city that had either long been or recently transitioned into majority-black neighborhoods. In addition, it covered four titles that would receive protection, including the servicers, repairmen, installers, and linemen who had borne the brunt of crime in neighborhoods. The union had tried for several years to negotiate such an agreement, and with a massive wildcat on its hands, they finally had the leverage to push the demands through. ⁸¹

When the forty-five-day pairing agreement expired in late September, the CWA pushed to make it permanent and extend it not only in New York City but also in the entire state of New York. ⁸² After five years in which Harlem was the only area in which workers could use their own discretion to gain accompaniment, the CWA leadership, at the behest of worker complaints and incidences of violence, pushed to include a series of Brooklyn neighborhoods including Bedford-Stuyvesant, East New York, and Crown Heights to its southern border on Eastern Parkway (where the neighborhood transitioned into more white and Jewish). ⁸³ Negotiations dragged on, and in late October, the issue was submitted to arbitration with the Manpower Education Institute (MEI). Arbitration itself dragged on, hinging on the question of job titles covered. Bahr hoped that the panel would accede to covering all workers, preventing future walkouts and assuaging his restive membership, but James McFadden, former labor negotiator under Mayor Robert Wagner and head of the MEI, pushed back against Bahr’s demands. ⁸⁴

By the late 1960s, crime on the job was a concern to more than just New York City’s telephone workers. In late May 1967, an altercation between a police officer and a meter maid sparked a wildcat strike by 20 metermaids. The women complained not only of this incident but also of widespread harassment by both the police and civilians. After a two-day strike, meter maids won a pairing agreement. ⁸⁵ During the Taxi Drivers Union 1965 organizing campaign, two drivers, one white and one black, were murdered in Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in the first three years of the union, eight cabbies were murdered on the job. ⁸⁶ Murders and crime against taxi drivers grew significantly in the final five months of 1969, with four cabbie murders and 660 robberies. The robberies themselves were often quite violent, with drivers recounting knives put to their throats, punches to the face, and threats. When 1970 began, two more drivers were murdered, and there were three thousand robberies in the first six months of the year. ⁸⁷ Importantly, the leader of the taxi drivers was Harry Van Arsdale Jr., the head of the New York City Central Labor Council and one of the most powerful union leaders in the country. While cabbies are an extreme example, transit workers and firemen also faced repeated attacks as well. ⁸⁸

Crime on the job also had national implications. In February 1968, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) convened a national meeting to discuss the threat of crime to its members, and Morton Bahr of the CWA gave the major address of the meeting because in his words he was considered the “expert” on the issue. Prior to the meeting, he pushed McFadden to resolve the issue, stating that “the New York settlement will establish a nation-wide pattern for providing protection for those workers who require it.” ⁸⁹ While McFadden could not speed the process, the many unions participating in the AFL-CIO meeting, including a variety of utility, retail, and service unions as well as police and firefighter organizations, acknowledged the CWA’s pioneering efforts to achieve a settlement. The various unions discussed their own problems, including assaults on postal workers, attacks on school teachers, or robberies of utility workers in poor areas. Firefighter leaders decried the increasing attacks in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Watts Riot. Some unions in New York had begun to implement similar pairing arrangements modeled on the CWA’s 1962 safety agreement. Participants were short on answers to the problem, but they resolved to publicize their meeting and the law and order concerns of workers and to bring state and local bodies together to combat growing crime. ⁹⁰

At the end of February, the arbitrators reached a decision that was acceptable to both NYT and CWA leaders. Set to take effect on March 16, 1968, this new agreement outlined high-crime areas in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, as well as high-crime areas in Syracuse and Niagara Falls. Just as importantly, it contained a clause for negotiating and adding new high-crime areas. The agreement also curtailed workers’ own initiative in that it clearly outlined that any CWA member who took action outside of the previously agreed-upon high-crime areas would be subject to discipline. Furthermore, it also established that workers in high-crime areas would not obtain protection when working in New York Telephone buildings, government buildings, religious institutions of any type, or any “reputable retail shop.” ⁹¹

Records of incidences of crime decrease in the record for the 1970s, but given the partial nature of the records themselves, it is difficult to decide how effective the plan was. One former CWA 1101 member recalled that crime remained a potent threat and that in some areas of Brooklyn, workers operated within what he called an “informal 3-man area” to deter attacks, with one person watching the truck for break-ins and the other two working as a pair to watch each other’s backs on site. ⁹² In 1970, Local 1101 member Arthur Browne, a telephone repairman, was held up at gunpoint and shot in the face. After the attack, he applied to transfer and wrote to George Meany himself for help because he wanted to get away from New York but could transfer his accumulated service. Browne’s on-the-job experience with crime was so devastating that it prompted him to want to flee the city altogether. ⁹³

Conclusion

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in the United States and specifically New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well. In the case of the CWA Local 1101, these concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. It was not just that New Yorkers experienced crime as residents of neighborhoods or readily imbibed the rhetoric of law and order through media organs. Instead, they experienced crime as workers doing jobs in a city whose racial and economic geography was rapidly transforming. Repeated incidences, some severe and others less memorable, largely in the city’s black ghettoes prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action. As Fortner has suggested, demands for safety in New York City came from below, and years-long union negotiations and rank-and-file-driven strikes involving tens of thousands of workers are critical.

Such firsthand experiences of crime on the job are essential to understanding the rise of law-and-order politics in the United States. Many working-class New Yorkers, though more whites than blacks, gravitated to tough-on-crime policies and politicians. In 1968, some CWA members as well as other militant workers in New York supported George Wallace’s presidential campaign. Around sixteen thousand New Yorkers attended Wallace’s rally at Madison Square Garden that year, repeatedly cheering his denunciation of criminals and protestors. ⁹⁴ In New York City’s 1969 mayoral race, law and order was once again center stage, with Lindsay fighting off the challenges of Procaccino and conservative John Marchi; Lindsay only won by plurality. ⁹⁵ But crime on the job was more than a local problem. It affected scores of unions representing hundreds of thousands of members across the country. Exploring how unions and union members in other major cities dealt with the threat of crime could prove equally fruitful in the examination of not only the rise of law-and-order politics but also alternatives to punitive policies. After all, the CWA in New York advocated a jobs program to fight crime, and though their efforts were piecemeal and probably doomed to failure given the structural forces outside of their control, they still suggest a potential alternative to policy measures like the Rockefeller Drug Laws.

Telephone workers’ strikes in response to crime on the job also suggest a different way of understanding the labor upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s. At the nexus of deindustrialization, ghettoization, labor insurgency, and growing political polarization, telephone workers used militant strikes and protests to push their employers, government officials, and union leaders to action on rising crime. Workers were not just taking actions within their organizations, trades, or workplace; their struggles were situated within a complex and transforming urban environment, and their strikes and protests in turn shaped that political environment. Significantly, such political effects have largely been ignored. Though some historians might be dismayed by these strikes because they did not address the root causes of crime, these battles nonetheless reveal how some working people used what leverage they had to wage a political battle for their own safety and that of their fellow union members.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the nationwide rebellion it sparked, it is urgent that historians dig deeper into the question of law and order, policing, and incarceration in the United States. It also requires that we eschew simplistic narratives as well as the moral certainty founded in a time in which we experience lower rates of crime and bear witness to the destructive and ineffective nature of America’s carceral system. Safety and crime, variously defined, remain critical questions in people’s lives the world over, and often there is very little recourse except to systems that are both rooted in and uphold rank inequality and coercive violence.