Teaching austerity to working-class students: Toward a new ‘common sense’

Introduction

As New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy in late October, 1975, the New York Daily News blared a now infamous headline: ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’. For years the city had borrowed to fund capital projects, but from the 1960s, the municipal debt ballooned as short-term bond sales were used to meet daily costs. Sensing trouble, Wall Street banks turned away from the business of underwriting city debt. The story accompanying the headline outlined why then US President Gerald Ford refused to help the city by backing new bond sales with federal guarantees. At the root of New York’s fiscal woes was the spending entailed by a liberal city government. To Ford, it was like an ‘insidious disease’ (Van Riper 1975).

However, grounding the dramatic metaphor of disease was something sounding like common sense. In providing overly generous welfare benefits, social services, and compensation for unionized teachers, police, firefighters, and sanitation workers, the city had lived beyond its means. Lest others find themselves in the same trouble, New York therefore had to be made an example. The remedy, Ford’s Treasury Secretary and former Wall Street bond dealer William Simon told the US Congress in late 1975, would be to make any deal for federal backing ‘so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down that the same road’ (quoted in Freeman 2000: 259). The words proved prophetic. In order for the city to regain access to the bond market, public jobs were slashed, hospitals defunded, clinics and firehouses shuttered, cops fired, parks abandoned, and the promise of free secondary public education at the City University of New York broken. What remained was a devastation that in 1976 led the New York journalist Jack Newfield to proclaim that a powerful elite ‘had seized power, made a desert, and called it New York’ (Newfield 1977: 314).

Few now question that dramatic cuts to public services were necessary. Indeed, the taming of the municipal welfare state in New York kicked off a trend toward neoliberal governance on the national and international stage (Freeman 2014; Harvey 2007; Moody 2007; Phillips-Fein 2013; Tabb 1982). When the more recent global financial crisis upended economies in the United States and Europe, we saw how austerity, as a guiding principle of economic ‘reform’, could rule the conversation. Even after the International Monetary Fund began to question its effectiveness in terms of reviving national economies, austerity maintained its hold on the political imagination (Wren-Lewis 2015). Austerity is a form of class struggle from above. As Blyth (2013) put it, austerity ‘relies on the poor paying for the mistakes of the rich’ (p. 10). Yet it has very seductive logic, precisely because it comes across as so rational. When public accounts are in the red and creditors come calling, isn’t the logical way out to cut spending to return to balance just as one would if one’s personal accounts couldn’t cover the rent and the gas bill?

I teach in a public university-based labor studies program that serves workers from New York–based unions. For 6 years I have been running a course called ‘The Political Economy of New York’ for Bachelors level students. Initially, the goal was to pose an historical contrast between the rampant inequality of today’s neoliberal ‘luxury’ city (Brash 2011; Moody 2007; Roberts 2013) and the period from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, a time when a strong labor movement led a unique experiment in urban social democracy (Freeman 2000; Moody 2007). Over the past few years, I have kept to the labor history. But given the international prominence of austerity in policy discussions and political discourse more generally, especially since the financial upheavals of 2008–2009, I have encouraged a closer analysis of the Fiscal Crisis of 1975.

For one, the crisis was the hinge that swung the city away from a localized form of social democracy. Second, it is a case study in the class-based ideological and political maneuvering that poses austerity as the right course, and indeed, the only course, in times of fiscal difficulty. In the most recent account of the Fiscal Crisis, Phillips-Fein (2017: 304) argues that the ‘framework of ‘crisis’’ served to organize the interests of debt holders and of capital more generally and, just as important, create ‘a sense of inevitability, making it seem as though there were no alternatives’ to austerity. Unpacking how this worked in the classroom, however, means working around the entrenched, common sense nature of some of the assumptions undergirding austerity politics. As Blyth (2013) put it, ‘austerity is intuitive, appealing and handily summed up in the phrase you cannot cure debt with more debt’ (p. 7; emphasis in original). This straightforward logic is one to which many working-class people struggling to make ends meet can relate. In other words, to many non-specialist, often hard-pressed working women and men – like those in my classroom – austerity makes sense as policy despite the fact that, well, it doesn’t.

To understand the contradictory power of austerity politics and, indeed, to teach about this contradictory power, the ideas of the Sardinian Marxist activist and educator of workers Antonio Gramsci provide an important guide. Austerity rests on a durable narrative, one that can be understood as hegemonic in the Gramscian sense: it portrays a pressing economic and political issue of the day and its only viable, common sense solution ‘from the vantage point of the rulers rather than the ruled’ (Crehan 2016: 51). The challenge, therefore, is fundamentally a matter of political education, Gramsci-style: that slow and difficult work of creating, through carefully facilitated dialogue among the ‘subaltern’ classes, the kinds of alternative perspectives which reveal austerity for what it is and point to more equitable futures. What is needed is the ‘intense labour of criticism’ (Gramsci, cited in Mayo 2008: 422).

In this article, I explore a piece of this critical work. For theoretical context, I will discuss some key Gramscian terms – Hegemony, ‘common’, and ‘good sense’ – and bring out their relevance for what Coben (2002) referred to as an ‘educative politics’. I then explore the particular field of cultural experience, narrative, and meaning – a working-class form of common sense to borrow from Gramsci – that shapes how the students I work with engage with college-level education and certain themes associated with austerity politics. From there I return to New York City in the 1970s, focusing on how in the classroom we begin to challenge the seemingly natural logic of austerity through historically and empirically informed dialogue.

My discussion of how this occurs is informed by the experience of teaching the course for eight terms, working with roughly 160 union-based students along the way. While my conclusions regarding where the course has taken students are necessarily partial, examples of student writing, culled from the Labor Center’s annual publication Labor Writes, provide solid indications that students are moving toward an alternative narrative. In recognition of the reality that whatever movement occurs in the classroom does not automatically translate into corresponding action outside it, in the last section I describe how we create opportunities to generate momentum at the Labor Center, as well as some of the obstacles we face in doing so.

On hegemony, ‘common sense’, and ‘good sense’

For progressive and radical educators, Gramsci’s writing has particular significance (Allman 2002; Borg et al. 2002; Buttigieg 2002; Mayo 2008, 2015). For one, as an activist and leader in the Italian communist party, Gramsci was directly involved in worker’s education, taking part in the formation of factory councils after workers took over Turin plants in 1919–1920, and promoting a broader educational program as integral to workers’ struggle not only for better conditions in the factory but also for power in society. Indeed, the predilection shown in the Prison Notebooks for what we now recognize as cultural analysis is very much in evidence in his earlier writings for journals of the Italian left. As Borg et al. (2002) put it, ‘Gramsci’s journalistic and political activity in Turin was animated first and foremost by a profound conviction that the most pressing task of the socialist movement was cultural and educational in nature’ (p. 4).

The political education envisioned required both critique of existing dominant ideas, habits, and narratives and the creation of alternative ways of thinking and therefore being in the world. Education was not concerned with the ‘solitary refinement of an individual’s sensibility, but with the transformative power of ideas, the capacity to bring about radical social change and construct a new order through the elaboration of a new philosophy …’ (Borg et al. 2002: 6–7). For Gramsci, education necessarily extended well beyond the formal structure of a school. It involved the workplace and the political party, the newspaper, the church and the community, and therefore trade union activists, politicians, journalists, preachers, and neighbors. In short, political struggle was educational in the broadest sense, just as education was a political struggle (Coben 2002; Mayo 2014).

But to understand the relevance of Gramsci in teaching working-class students about the politics of austerity, we need to look closer at Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony and then at exactly what the radical thinker meant by ‘common sense’. For many that have turned to Gramsci for theoretical guidance in understanding relations of power, the concept of hegemony has pointed to a kind of analysis that focuses on the ways in which subaltern groups, through the adoption of the ideological positions of those that rule over them, ‘consent’ to their own subordination (Crehan 2002: 165–176). But it is important to note that Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony is very fluid, and it emerged out of his own close historical analysis of the demise of working-class insurgency in Turin, a process which he experienced directly and led him in the Prison Notebooks to carefully revisit the attempts to create a unified Italian state during the Risorgimento period (Crehan 2002: 101; Gramsci 1971: 44–118). So care must be taken with the concept, as the particular character of hegemony is always specific as to time and place and therefore entailed a historically specific combination of force and consent.

What’s more, the concept of hegemony does not indicate class power and domination as an achieved state of ideological stability and coherence. As Raymond Williams (1977) has argued, to see hegemony as merely ‘consent’ or consensus is to ‘ignore or isolate’ those oppositional or alternative modes of political or cultural expression or activity that hegemonic power must ‘control, transform or even incorporate’ (p. 113). Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, ‘rather than being a precisely bounded concept’, is more about identifying the problem that needed investigation, which was, according to Crehan (2002), ‘how the power relations underpinning various forms of inequality are produced and reproduced’ (p. 104).

More specifically, hegemony is an historical process, one that involves, on the one hand, the ‘passive and active affiliation’ of subalterns ‘to the dominant groups’ and, on the other, more oppositional and autonomous activities by subalterns (Gramsci 1971: 52). According to the anthropologist William Roseberry (1994), Gramsci’s hegemony should be used

not to understand consent but to understand struggle; the ways in which the words, images, symbols, forms, organizations, and movements used by subordinate populations to talk about, understand, confront, accommodate themselves to, or resist their domination are shaped by the process of domination itself. What hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination. (p. 360)

Given the importance of imagery, language, and narrative to the process of ‘living through, talking about, and acting upon’ the social order, education in its broadest sense has a crucial function in the hegemonic process. ‘Every relationship of “hegemony”’, writes Gramsci (1971), ‘is necessarily an educational relationship …’ (p. 350).

How, then, does ‘common sense’ fit in? As Gramsci understood it, common sense has as an important role to play in the hegemonic process, in the creation and maintenance of this ‘common material and meaningful framework’. But we need to be clear about what Gramsci meant by the term. For Gramsci, common sense is not what English speakers often assume it is: a kind of intellectual gift or skill that allows an individual to draw basic, practical truths out of the mishmash of everyday life. As Kate Crehan (2016) stresses, in the original Italian, senso comune lacks the ‘strong positive connotations’ (p. 44) of standard dictionary definitions of common sense

The Notebooks, furthermore, did not put forth the notion that common sense was ‘a touchstone of truth’ (Crehan 2016: 51). To Gramsci there is no one common sense but rather a loose collection of ‘all those heterogeneous narratives that structure so much of what we take to be simple reality’ (Crehan 2016: 44). It is a historical and sociological phenomenon; that is, while common sense is determined ultimately by the structural inequalities of capitalist economies and is an expression of the power relations that develop therein, different lived circumstances within that broader context produce often overlapping but also different forms of common sense. And it is also important to note that Gramsci, as a committed Marxist intellectual and political activist, well understood the ways popular common sense could impede the work of social transformation. Gramsci was no romantic (Crehan 2016: 49–52). Common sense could be, as he put it, ‘crudely neophobe and conservative’ (Gramsci 1971: 423).

Some final points need to be made here, all of which accentuate the importance Gramsci placed on education. We need always to keep in mind that popular acceptance of these common sense truths does not mean that subordinate groups have necessarily consented to their own subordination. However, as these truths contribute to a broader narrative of the ‘world as it is’ and thereby take on the feel of ‘a fixed and unchanging reality it would be futile to oppose’ (Crehan 2016: 52), these ‘truths’ could be understood as hegemonic. When working-class consciousness seems to reflect elite conceptions of, say, the causes of poverty or the impact of state regulation on the economy, it should not be understood as the corruption or manipulation of an otherwise autonomous political and cultural force. Working-class political sensibilities and assumptions about how the world works are born out of the lived reality of inequality and laden with contradictions, not least because of minimal access to educational opportunities and resources that might challenge those assumptions and redirect those sensibilities. Indeed, Gramsci focused on common sense precisely because he felt it needed to be transformed, as part of the broader transformation of social and political relations. Here, his comments on Marx make this clear:

References to common sense and the solidity of its beliefs are frequent in Marx. But Marx is not referring to the validity of the content of these remarks, but rather to their formal solidity and to the consequent imperative character they have when they produce norms of conduct. There is, further, implicit in these references an assertion of the necessity for new popular beliefs, that is to say a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs. (Gramsci 1971: 423–424)

Furthermore, the common sense of the working classes needed to be taken seriously because it did in fact contain more positive forms of thinking and being in the world, which cumulatively were referred to in the Notebooks as good sense. And indeed, the ‘good sense’ of the masses – which according to Crehan’s (2016: 48) analysis represented to Gramsci a kind of ‘clear-sightedness …, which is not fooled by sophistry of spin doctors’ – was the place to start in this process of creating a ‘new’ common sense This clear-sightedness might present itself in different ways; below I will discuss the ways in which this good sense presents itself in my own experience with trade union–based, working-class students. But the important point here is that for Gramsci, this ‘good sense’ was an aspect of the broader and inchoate narratives and meanings that constituted a working-class-based common sense As Crehan (2016) writes,

Gramsci does make a fundamental epistemological claim that the ‘good sense’ elements contained within common sense, which represent awareness born out of the concrete experience of subalternity, are the seeds from which new political narratives emerge. But these seeds, unlike plant seeds, do not contain within them all the genetic information they need to grow; they are no more than ‘rough and jagged’ beginnings. (pp. 48–49)

Good sense, therefore, represents less the autonomous basis of ‘a new culture and a new philosophy’ and more an opening, an opportunity to meet working-class individuals or groups ‘where where they are’, and begin an educational dialogue that would facilitate both the critique of dominant understandings of and ways of being in the world, and, through further dialogue, the development of alternative understandings and ways of being.

Last, Gramsci’s belief in the essentially educative nature of the revolutionary struggle produced a pedagogical approach that would now be defined as ‘popular’ or participatory. Gramsci well understood the ways in which children of the subaltern classes were denied the opportunities for intellectual development that came as a matter of birth for others (Gramsci 1971: 35, 42). The extension of a quality education that went well beyond training for the workplace, therefore, was a critical component of the struggle for substantive democracy. In words that would apply equally well in the contemporary context of educational ‘reform’, Gramsci (1971) noted the following about the proliferation of vocational schools in early 20th-century Italy:

But democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that an unskilled worker can become skilled. It must mean that every ‘citizen’ can ‘govern’ and that society places him, even if only abstractly, in a general condition to achieve this. Political democracy tends toward a coincidence of the rulers and the ruled (in the sense of the government with the consent of the governed), ensuring for each non-ruler a free training in the skills and general technical preparation necessary to that end. (pp. 40–41)

Like the approach developed by Paulo Freire later in the 20th century (Freire 1970), Gramsci’s educational goal was not the charismatic display of individual expertise or knowledge. It was to further develop subaltern ‘stratum of leadership’ (Gramsci 1971: 43) and, ultimately, the collective intellectual growth and empowerment of a whole subaltern group. Given the profound cultural difficulties presented by ruling class hegemony, Gramsci insisted, says Livingstone (2002), on the ‘centrality of working class self-activity and of responsive engagement with this self-activity by organic intellectuals …’ (p. 237). A participatory and dialogic approach, moreover, made this engagement productive, as it could best address the contradictory nature not only of the various forms of working-class common sense but also of the relationship between teacher and student. The goal is mediate the historical gap between the intellectuals who may ‘know’ but not necessarily ‘feel’ and the ‘popular element’ that ‘feels but doesn’t always understand’ (Gramsci 1971: 418).

The labor program

The students who enroll in the course on New York City for the most part come from Local #3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), whose leaders – along with those of Local 1 of the United Association of Plumbers – provide scholarships to cover tuition for our degree granting liberal arts– and social science–based program. The long-time business manager of Local #3 IBEW, Harry Van Arsdale Jr, not only helped found the program in the early 1970s, he made sure it had solid footing within Empire State College of the State University of New York (SUNY). Furthermore, after seeing the way a critical liberal arts education rooted in the experience of workers and the working class more generally could empower trade unionism, Local #3 instituted a requirement that all members acquire at least an associates degree in Labor Studies in order to complete their apprenticeship. The United Association of Plumbers, Local 1, also sends its apprentices through our program.

Our program, in other words, is not geared toward educating individual workers so that they can ‘move up’ by leaving their trade to join the ranks of management. Instead, we provide the space for rank and file workers to understand and critique the political and economic context of their lives, more fully identify with the labor movement, and develop as leaders. The purpose is to promote the collective political mobility of working men and women, rather than the social mobility of individual students. And while this in some ways sets the program apart from the current trends toward a more instrumental view of the purpose of higher education, it nonetheless places us very much within the rich tradition of progressive adult and worker education (Szymanski & Wells 2013).

While the students in the program are overwhelmingly male, they nevertheless constitute a fairly diverse group. Indeed, the notoriously exclusive and oft times politically conservative unions in the building trades have evolved significantly since the late 1960s and 1970s, when civil rights legislation and affirmative active policies forced open membership. In the class, the mix tends to be, roughly, 50% White ethnic, with the rest a blend of African American, Latino, Asian, and other groups. Increasingly, the apprentices are first-generation members of the trades, as the leadership of Local #3 IBEW, along with other local building trades unions, has worked hard to create a membership that reflects the demographics of the city and metropolitan area (Michel 2017).

There are roughly 1,500 students currently attending classes in our programs. Enrollment on a year-to-year basis fluctuates somewhat, depending on activity in the unionized sector of the construction industry in the New York metropolitan area. Like the most other colleges in the SUNY system, Empire State College, which houses the Center for Labor Studies, has dealt with ongoing cuts of state allocations to its operating budget. For many programs in the college, which has a footprint across New York State, this has meant an increasing dependence on tuition and a push by the college administration to boost enrollment. At the Labor Center, we have to a degree been insulated from this pressure, not only because of the mutually sustaining nature of our relationships with our union partners in the building trades but because the current boom in commercial construction in the city has meant the unions have brought on more apprentices.

But still, the Center’s budget has been cut over the past few years, and its leadership, faculty, and staff have had to scramble to maintain the quality of the program as it currently stands while strategically seeking out new partnerships with other unions. Austerity politics itself thus looms over the program in contradictory ways. Certainly, it has squeezed the college’s budget and strained its academic programs. At the same time, the shift away from investment in public sector institutions and services toward the incentivization of private sector accumulation – a process that has been pronounced in post-fiscal crisis New York (Moody 2007) – has led to real estate development that creates construction jobs and thus brings us students.

Of these students, many are ‘legacy’ members of the union, that is, second- or third-generation tradesmen or women, but many others have come to the union after bouncing around low wage service or non-union construction jobs, often trying to squeeze in courses at local community colleges at the same time. Getting the ‘call’ from the union, which can happen several years after initially applying, can mean a real turning point in their lives, as a spot in a building trades union means not only good wages and benefits but a career. The apprenticeship program, however, is an intense and demanding 5-year process. In addition to daily on-the-job training that amounts to a full work week, often in difficult outdoor and sometimes underground conditions, the apprentices are required to attend rigorous in-class education in electrical theory at the union training center one evening a week. Attending to the work entailed by another evening of classroom-based study in our labor-focused liberal arts and social science program comes on top of all this.

Indeed, getting ‘buy-in’ from our students can be difficult. Understanding why this is so helps to situate the particular kind of common sense our students not only bring to the topic of austerity but to the experience of attending college. As we will see, this common sense also contains ‘rough and jagged’ elements of a working-class ‘good sense’.

Education, politics, and austerity: the union apprentice view

Students’ resistance to the course work involved with the Center’s academic program at least in part comes from a class-based feeling that college – the pursuit of ‘book knowledge’ so to speak – is not for them. In one of our introductory courses, where we encourage students to discuss how they came to join the union, they often speak of how a long-standing interest in things mechanical led them to a career in the trades. Others tried college, but struggled to balance work and school, were drawn away by the need for a bigger paycheck, or left college wondering whether it was a waste of time.

Indeed, their skepticism does align with a more general view, and one that is arguably becoming hegemonic (Wells & Ramdeholl 2015), that education in today’s economy must necessarily have some ‘value added’: in other words, if a college degree does not amount to the human capital that gets one a job, or at least a better job, it does not amount to much at all (e.g. Friedman 2012; Goldin & Katz 2008). But they come by it honestly, so to speak. First, they already have a job, one that provides in-class and on-the-job technical training. Furthermore, they are exhausted by long days at work, the grind of lengthy commutes, and struggling to get by in a very expensive city and region. Understandably, many students feel put off by the added obligation of taking courses that do not have an immediate practical application on the job now or in terms of their careers in the industry. There is also a well-earned pride in gaining access to a career that demands training, skill, and endurance – but not, at least in most people’s minds, a college degree.

Most students do have a basic appreciation of the union’s role in creating and sustaining the pay, security, and satisfaction that come with the job. However, this does not mean that they readily accept the idea, promoted by both the union leadership and the faculty at the Labor Center, that the purpose of college program like ours is the political and cultural empowerment of workers, their unions, and the labor movement as a whole. In our own eyes this represents counter-hegemonic educational strategy; to our students, the Center’s ‘mission’ seems an abstraction or a kind of high-minded sloganeering from union leadership and faculty (Mantsios 1984; Szymanski & Wells 2016). While both the leadership and the faculty embrace and believe in this purpose, I would argue that this resistance from the students represents a strand of Gramscian, working-class ‘good sense’. It is a sensibility, in other words, that is driven less by the wholesale acceptance of notions of educational purpose which ultimately serve ruling class power (i.e. education in service of human capital and corporate demands for labor instead of working-class liberation), than a healthy skepticism for the pronouncements of those in positions of authority – the union leaders and faculty – but little apparent connection to the immediate realities of their daily lives. While certainly caught up in the discursive field of those more hegemonic, instrumentalist, ‘common sense’ understandings about what a college should be about, the students’ resistance nonetheless presents an opening for a critical conversation of what their college education should and could deliver for them as union workers.

This opening widens still further when we take a close look at how the oft-noted political and cultural conservatism of craft unions, such as those in the building trades, presents itself among our apprentice students. While they are older than the typical college goer, our students share with other young people the experience of a social world shaped by 30+ years of neoliberal policy and the ‘you’re on your own’ weltanshauung that has emerged alongside. Knowing firsthand how difficult it can be to make it in a labor market where good jobs are increasingly scarce, they tend to see their journey into the union, and then through the rigorous training of the apprenticeship, in the frame the common sense narrative of individual hard work and triumph. Certainly, our students are not the only ones whose outlooks have been impacted by the broader ruling class–driven shift, in political and cultural life, away from the social, a shift that over time has facilitated the emergence of conservative populist movements such as the Tea Party, and one could argue, the surge of discontent capitalized on by Trump (see Crehan 2016: 118–145; Hochschild 2016; Skocpol & Williamson 2012). By committing to the rigors of the apprenticeship, they have earned their position on the metaphorical line described by Arlie Hochschild (2016: 135–151), not at the front, but somewhere in the middle, with access to a career and stability and a willingness to defend it.

Complicating things further is the legacy of building trades unions, which combines a militant sense of solidarity with those within the occupational community and a very territorial attitude toward workers outside that community. What attracts workers to the union, at least initially, are the bread and butter gains membership promises and the power over one’s circumstances those gains imply. But being part of a storied craft union like Local #3, despite its essentially collective identity and purpose, can also feed back into that more individualized narrative of accomplishment. Membership in the union certainly brings the apprentices together, but it also sets them apart as individuals and as a group, both from non-union, often immigrant workers in the construction industry and from other workers in fields perceived to be less ‘skilled’.

When taken out of context, expressions of this sensibility can make our students seem like pure conservatives, if not reactionaries (e.g. Moccio 2009; Szymanski & Wells 2016). But more to the point, this rough-edged, contradictory attitude should be understood as a particular working-class component of a broader framework of assumptions that places the individual at the center of narratives of socio-economic success or failure. While this attitude can align this segment of the working class with hegemonic power, it is critical to acknowledge, especially in a pedagogical context, that it emerges out of an experience of struggle and adaptation in a labor market that is increasingly defined by low wage, insecure, and often informalized work.

And importantly, these attitudes toward the non-skilled and the ‘illegal’ immigrant can converge with a quite cynical attitude toward the government, politicians, and the practice of politics itself. More specifically, our students are living through what Richard Seymour (2014) has argued is ‘a long-term generational shift’ in attitudes toward the government and, in particular, toward the role the state had in terms of providing a ‘social wage’. Generations of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Seymour added, experienced spending on schools, on various forms of social support and provision, basic public services and infrastructure as components of a broader collective purpose and identity. Now, he argues, whatever social spending that remains – thanks to the politics of austerity – is understood more as a ‘zero-sum competition’, in which investment that benefits one group necessarily represents a loss for another.

This ‘zero-sum’ context makes for ripe terrain when it comes to one of the basic rhetorical moves for those pushing austerity, which is to equate the public budget of the federal government, a state, or a municipality with the private budget of a household (Bernstein 2011). The two kinds of debt are only rhetorically alike; private households do not have the public obligations the state has and do not have the legal power to tax. And unlike the federal government, they do not have the sovereign power to print money. Yet still, the conservative, pro-business gospel of austerity policies has benefited politically from most people’s understandable and rational wariness of debt and most people’s quite real struggle to keep themselves and their households out of it. While the political maneuverings of elites are behind the fact that ordinary Americans are bearing more and more of the risk of an increasingly financialized economy (Hacker 2006), most do not have access to the kinds of analysis that shows this to be the case. If on the level of the everyday, they are wrestling with the hard reality of what is actually in the bank account, why shouldn’t the government?

No wonder, then, that many students feel that money spent by the government is either ill-gotten or wasted and perhaps even both. This does not mean that they have simply absorbed an ideological position put forth by elites. It is their position, emerging from their own variegated struggles to secure a decent job and the security it entails, which can converge with a hegemonic narrative about irresponsible state spending that those with political-economic and cultural power have done much to construct, disseminate, and control. This convergence must always be put in context and the various class-inflected strands of a hegemonic discourse pulled apart. After all, there is much cause for cynicism, given the fact that the influence of big money on US politics is not an academic question, but empirically verifiable and the subject of much popular discussion. From a worker’s point of view, is it not common sense but good sense to be wary of the intentions of politicians and the general direction of the whole system?

What’s more, viewed over time austerity policy itself has starved the state’s ability to adequately provide the full range of services that constituted the post–New Deal social wage – education, health, unemployment and retirement insurance, safe streets, and clean air. It should not surprise that for the vast majority outside the closed circuitry of political power, the diminished quality and quantity of these services have stoked suspicion of any suggestion of a positive role for the state (see Amy, n.d.; Mettler 2011). For our students, it is important to stress again that this negative assessment of the state, while representative of a more general structure of feeling, is embedded in a particular class experience, that of harnessing a sense of security and stability, through a hard-won union apprenticeship, in an otherwise insecure and unstable landscape. They have, in a sense, made it and are understandably protective of the gains they have achieved (Szymanski & Wells 2016).

There are overlaps, therefore, between this particular form of working-class common sense and the more hegemonic common sense that frames the more general political discussion about the best path for the state to take when the public coffers run low. This should not be seen as evidence of a clear and stable political alignment between working class, trade union apprentices, and the ruling class originators and drivers of austerity politics. As Gramsci argued, working-class common sense is relatively incoherent, even contradictory, emerging as it does out of specific experiences of struggle, of making do, but also of adaptation to and incorporation of more elite sensibilities and discourses. It can contain elements that are ‘crudely neophobe and conservative’, but it also contains indications of ‘good sense’, which in this instance amounts to a fairly deep-seated suspicion of those holding political power. Our students sense that the game is rigged, to borrow a phrase commonly used in the media coverage of the 2016 presidential election, and in important ways they are right.

The presence of this good sense reminds us that, while certainly dominant, the hegemony of austerity politics ‘is never either total or exclusive’ (Williams 1977: 113). It also represents an opening, an opportunity to reframe, historically, sociologically, politically, the ‘back story’ of austerity and begin to see it as part and parcel of a wider reconfiguration of class relations and class power. How then do we create an alternative historical and analytical framework, one that is empirically grounded and accessible for hard-pressed, often frustrated working-class students? How can we bring together ‘feeling’ and ‘understanding’?

Revisiting the Fiscal Crisis

The stock explanation of the 1975 Fiscal Crisis in New York City (Auletta 1980; Morris 1980; Seigal & McMahon 2005) should now have a familiar ring. Facing a debt crisis, the only ‘real’ choice the city had was to cut public spending and lay off municipal workers. The orgy of liberal indulgence, in the form of generous welfare benefits and union contracts with teachers, social workers, cops, and firefighters, not to mention free tuition at the City University of New York and low subway fares – an arrangement that Auletta (1980: 30) called ‘a partial experiment in local socialism and income redistribution’ – had to end.

Auletta, a well-known New York Journalist, was merely echoing the views of those much closer to power. Walter Wriston, Chairman of Citicorp and a major player in formulating the set of arrangements that set New York City on austerity’s path during the Fiscal Crisis, told a Senate Committee in October 1975 that a simple equation lay behind New York’s brush with bankruptcy (cited in Lichten 1986: 185):

I don’t think there is any question we have asked more of our society than it is capable of delivering, and we have told everybody that the money is unlimited, the resources are unlimited, and we have promised more than we can deliver.

Of course, the story is more complicated, involving broader shifts in the local, national, and global political economy and a corporate elite that found opportunity for enhanced power in the disruptions those shifts entailed. But coming to terms with this more complex version can be difficult for non-traditional students like those in our program, who are uncomfortable with the often dense, academic analyses that serve as the main counterpoint to the stock narrative of the Fiscal Crisis. Indeed, Wriston’s more homespun, rational sounding presentation can, at least at first, be more compelling, despite its rootedness in what became a ruling class project to dismantle a municipal welfare state (See Lichten 1986; Moody 2007; Phillips-Fein 2017; Tabb 1982).

The course on the 20^th-century political economy of New York City provides an opportunity to move from students’ own piecemeal and sometimes contradictory understanding of the political-economic context of their lives to more critical, but evidence-based and concrete, assessment. For one, it presents a labor-centered story, in that it shows workers and the institutions they created as protagonists in a narrative of structural transformation. Just as important, by carefully and deliberately taking students through the Fiscal Crisis, the course exposes them to a straightforward, empirical analysis of this critical moment in the history of austerity politics. Out of this analysis, students can begin to make sense of austerity, in new way.

At the start of every term, I gather students into small groups and ask them to list the characteristics that they think makes a city a good place to live and work. What emerges is a set of expectations: good union jobs, housing that one can afford, safe streets, good schools, markets, parks, good and cheap restaurants, access to entertainment, and other forms of culture. The lists present no big surprises. By and large, the students like and appreciate the richness of the city’s culture, its general excitement, and sense of opportunity that it engenders. But it takes no prompting for them to lay out the city’s limitations, particularly the fact that access to so much of that opportunity depends on the money one has in one’s pocket. More to the point, this sort of good news/bad news activity opens another conversation, about what might make a better, more livable, and more democratic city possible: an organized working class, a lively public sphere, a balanced economy, a strong public sector, a state that is responsive to the interests of working people.

Today, these forces – the structural foundations of a social democratic society – are by and large abstractions, often construed as liberal flights of fancy. By identifying them, though, we can then consider a period in which they were not merely theoretical. While we do this through a monograph, Joshua Freeman’s (2000) Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II, the process is not so much about drilling labor’s past triumphs into the heads of new unionists. It is more about discovery, about parsing Freeman’s detailed narrative for elements of urban life in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that seem out of place in the present.

From here, the class makes connections between these unique elements and structural conditions and forces. For example, Freeman’s account nicely describes how the ‘non-Fordist’ nature of the city’s economy enabled a highly diverse and militant labor movement which, in the 1950s, numbered between ‘a quarter and a third of the city’s workforce’ (p. 41). Unions did not always work in concert, and many were parochial and exclusive, including those in the building trades. But through sheer numbers and the political dynamism that infused the movement as whole, a left progressivism came to characterize the city’s politics and culture. As Freeman put it, the ‘New York labor movement led the city toward a social democratic polity unique in the country in its ambition and achievements’ (p. 56).

The blame game

Freeman (2000: 143–176, 228–287) also provides an account of how the foundations of social democracy weakened. As the class works through the basic themes through group presentations, the students discover how unions scrambled to fight off automation, and as early as the 1950s, the phenomenon of runaway shops, as firms left the city in search of cheaper real estate and labor. Importantly, the outflow of investment and jobs occurred just as a large-scale demographic shift took place, as the disruption of agricultural economies brought African Americans from the US south and Puerto Ricans to the city and ‘white flight’, encouraged by both outright racism and a discriminatory housing policy, sent large numbers of White New Yorkers to the outer boroughs and beyond. Again, the city’s labor movement struggled to adjust, gaining through the unionization of public workers, but losing to de-industrialization and suburbanization. In the city, this meant a municipal budget deprived of critical tax revenue and a more racially polarized and less politically confident working class. As the students in the course work through these trends, the stage is set for the Fiscal Crisis.

We first rehearse the basics: the practice of heavy borrowing through the bond market to cover day-to-day expenses of the city, persistent and ever-growing budget shortfalls, more borrowing, Wall Street says no more, and ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’. The party is over, time for austerity’s harsh medicine. But then students take a closer look at the impact of that harsh medicine. To get this started, we view and discuss a little known 1980 documentary about the Fiscal Crisis and its aftermath, entitled Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet. While the film does offer a truncated class analysis of the forces behind the crisis, its effectiveness for the purposes of the class comes from its capture of the voices of those on the front lines of austerity: workers at a public hospital struggling to serve working-class communities after major budget cuts; the men and women of a still working-class Williamsburg, Brooklyn, coming together to fight the closing of a neighborhood firehouse.

We then rely on a study – William Tabb’s (1982) The Long Default – that offers an rigorous alternative explanation of the lead-up to the crisis and a careful explication of what Tabb referred as the ‘conservative re-privatization’ of the urban political economy. While Tabb’s account is theoretically Marxist, as a group we do not dwell on that aspect. Instead I encourage the students to identify the facts Tabb (1982) presents to counter what he describes as an ideologically based ‘political economy of blame’ (pp. 55–68). This resonates with the students’ ‘good sense’ suspicion of power. For one, Tabb offers a clear explanation of how elected officials mismanaged the city budget, which comes as no surprise to them! But more importantly, Tabb shows how the city’s corporate elite, backed by state and national elected officials, spun a story of how liberal profligacy alone had exhausted the city government’s ability to govern. From there, titans of finance – the likes of Wriston, William Salomon, and Donald T. Regan – quietly stepped in and with the help of state legislation that ‘hemmed in local elected officials with new, unelected bodies’ (Freeman 2014) essentially seized control of the city budget and ensured austerity would become the new normal.

But to bring this bigger shift in class politics into focus requires that students put some of the claims of the city’s critics to the test. William Simon, the Secretary of the Treasury, said the city’s per capita spending on social services and support for the poor far exceeded the average of all other major cities. ‘‘Only New York’’, he said, ‘‘spends more than $20.00 per capita on welfare and related social services’’ (cited in Tabb 1982: 56). Simon also complained about the ‘‘absurd’’ salaries of municipal workers and their ‘‘appalling’’ pensions (cited in Freeman 2000: 59). We then look at the numbers cited by Tabb (1982: 56–65). While Simon was right that per capita spending on welfare services in New York was high, what he failed to note was that in comparable cities the state government had helped defray costs more so than in New York. What’s more, in New York City ‘actual public assistance payments – $94 per capita per month in 1974 – were lower than those in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Milwaukee’ (Tabb 1982: 56). New York also had a lower percentage of its residents on assistance than other sizable cities, and those getting payments were not getting much. Furthermore, the notion put forward by President Ford that 1 out of 10 was cheating the system in New York was largely fiction. If anything, the system was cheating the poor by denying support to those who were eligible (Tabb 1982: 57). In New York, a firefighter made an ‘absurd’ salary of over US$15,000 a year in the mid-1970s, while in Los Angeles and San Francisco one made over US$21,000 and US$17,000, respectively. Public school teachers in New York did not fare any better, earning less than teachers in Detroit and Chicago, despite dealing with a cost of living that was 13% higher (Tabb 1982: 61).

Getting the facts right moves the conversation in productive directions. As noted above, like many Americans, our students often understand poverty or joblessness in an individualist frame, in which one’s choices or hard work determine success or failure. And indeed, the particular working-class experience of gaining membership in a powerful craft union like Local #3, which in itself is often understood as a personal triumph, can reinforce those elite-based, hegemonic common sense narratives that denude the state of any social or redistributive purpose. For complex reasons, then, the students can be very wary of welfare, just as they are wary – in a ‘good sense’ kind of way – of the politicians who control the purse strings of public life.

But armed with analysis that challenges the official story, students can identify as ideology the claim that New York’s overgenerous social spending almost bankrupted the city and thereby bring more historical context and analytical coherence to their understanding of political and social change. Working from Tabb and other sources (Moody 2007), we examine how different kinds of welfare – generous programs of subsidized private real estate development and the systematic low-balling of tax assessments for big commercial landlords, for example – deprived the city of revenue just as de-industrialization, global recession, and shifts in federal urban policy did. Importantly, students can then reframe the crisis as the result of a revenue problem rather than a spending problem and allow them to ponder the politics of austerity in a different frame.

Austerity and the ‘strange reverse’

While this course is historical, we aim to use understanding of the past to explain a present-day city that is increasingly short on good-paying jobs and affordable housing. In 2014, the top 5% of households in Manhattan earned 88 times more than the bottom 20% (Roberts 2014). The current Mayor, Bill de Blasio, was elected on a progressive agenda but has struggled to find his footing. It remains to be seen what he can accomplish in a town where private interests, especially in real estate, have dominated city government and planning policy since the 1970s (Brash 2011; Gonzalez 2017; Moody 2007; Paul 2014). Using the fiscal crisis as a case study in austerity politics goes a long way toward explaining how this came to be.

It comes out as class discussions evolve over the semester. Students work through their suspicion of politics, politicians, and government armed with a new perspective on the working-class presence in the city’s past, and in particular the labor movement’s layered influence on the municipal state and social programs addressing public health, education, housing, and culture. Common sense assertions about how the city cannot spend money it does not have merge with discussions about how tax abatements, subsidies, and other means by which the public expenditures subsidize private accumulation and in the process make the city a less hospitable place for workers like themselves. An emerging critical and historical perspective is brought to bear on the individual frustrations students feel after long commutes to work in the city from more affordable neighborhoods and towns. More and more, students wrestle with their own contradictory position as union construction workers who have, in quite real terms, built the city but have also been displaced by it.

It also comes out in student writing. In reading their work, I see students wrestling with the details of what happened. Received notions about extravagant social spending sometimes co-exist with explorations of fresher terrain. A new narrative is emerging, one that captures the social democratic possibilities of the post–World War II period and traces out the rise of a different, less generous polity. ‘Through their struggles, hard work, and social support’, wrote a student in Labor Writes, the Labor Center’s student magazine, ‘the working class made New York into a reformed society of their own’. This society included, he added, ‘the non-for-profit City [Opera]’, for the working class believed they should ‘enjoy the same pleasures, such as arts and entertainment, that the wealthy enjoyed and at a reasonable price’ (Smith 2015: 57). After noting the fact stretching tendencies of the political economy of blame and the ‘steep cutbacks in the ‘social wage’’ that followed from it, and the neighborhoods ‘recycled’ through gentrification, he concludes, ‘As time progresses, the quality of life standards in New York change with each new social class that calls it home’ (p. 59).

Another student noted how ‘Freeman’s presentation of the past shows how committed this city can be to fighting for our rights’. To her, the more upscale city of today represents a ‘strange reverse’ (Cunningham 2014: 112). What to do? After reflecting on the reading and discussions of the whole semester, another student suggests ‘that the basics for quality of life all boil down to a fairly governed economic platform’, one that includes ‘good jobs’, ‘affordable housing’, and ‘a tax scale not slanted so heavily in the direction of the wealthy and businesses’’ (Gramazio 2014: 115). A film that was shown toward the end of term on the transformation of downtown Brooklyn seemed to sum it all up for one apprentice. After noting how recent policies granting subsidies to corporations were built off this ‘idea of trickle down economics’, he adds that the latter really took hold

in the years following the financial crisis in New York. As time went on, the city changed from a working class city to more of an ‘elite’ city where property values skyrocketed, taxes increased, and cost of living expenses made it virtually impossible within to the city proper. (McLoone 2017: 57)

Some of best writing comes when students reflect on a field trip we take to the High Line, a visually striking, world-renowned park constructed on an out-of-use elevated rail bed on the west side of Manhattan. We go there every term, precisely because it captures that ‘strange reverse’ in the political economy and culture of the city since the fiscal crisis. One student recalls its beauty and the images of a bustling industrial past that it conjures. And yet, surrounded by the ‘starchitect’ designed condo towers and high-end boutiques that now dominate the area, he ‘almost immediately felt out of place in my own city’ (Antonetty 2015: 61; emphasis in original). Because of the luxury development that has sprung up all around the High Line, another student warns that ‘behind the stones and a stainless steel railing is a message of mockery from the ranks of the wealthy elite’ (Leonard 2015: 60). In another volume of Labor Writes, a student notes the discussion among the others about which buildings under construction are union jobs and which were not (Cawley 2012: 27), while a fellow apprentice grasps the irony at play for workers like him, whose labor is essential at one point in the process of making a city, and forgotten at another: the glassy, high-end facades remind him of ‘window shopping’ and ‘gives the area a ‘look-but-don’t-touch feel …’ (Chung 2012: 29).

For another student (Cunningham 2014), the trip to High Line brought pleasure, but then, as she stepped back from the experience, critical insight. After reading a class handout about the impact of the High Line on real estate development in the neighborhood, things took on a different feel, of encroachment on the city and its people. The High Line was, on one hand, an ‘inspiration’ and, on the other, a cautionary tale. It shows that ‘we can refurbish and recycle what is already visible and going to ruins and make it useful, … as long as it isn’t a means to an end of pushing people out of their homes to build ones they can’t afford’ (p. 119).

Conclusion

To be sure, these are small steps, but they do speak to the vital importance of creating participatory educational space for workers to explore and understand how historical and structural circumstances have shaped their lives. Given the rise of Trump and other representatives of rightwing nationalism in Europe, the cultivation of such critical understanding is as urgent a political project as ever. As Gramsci insisted, this requires intense educational work, but not in the sense that the teacher merely shares the knowledge he or she has accumulated with students. Instead, the ‘teacher’ needs to understand popular forms of common sense in the context of particular forms of subaltern experience and then through careful dialogue connect students to evidence that allows them to begin piecing together a new kind of common sense.

Of course, this educational work must move out of the classroom, on to the jobsite, to the union hall, the community, into the public sphere itself. At the Labor Center, there are few ways we are working toward this. For one, there is the journal in which the student writing above appears. On the one hand, Labor Writes allows us to assess the student learning that occurs across our curriculum, in courses on writing, literature, and workers’ art, inequality, immigration, globalization, and the Political Economy of New York, and share that learning with our union partners and the wider college community. We also bring our students together in ‘Food for Thought’ sessions to expand on the conversations occurring in particular classes or to provide opportunities to apply what they have discovered in those classes to a public issue of importance to the labor movement.

For example, as fast food workers in the city were campaigning for a US$15 an hour minimum, a fellow faculty member organized a Food for Thought session which included presentations from workers active in the struggle. While the majority of the 50+ students on hand were very supportive, a few questioned whether fast food workers, with presumably little training or education, could realistically demand such a raise. Indeed, the common sense narrative around education, training, and skill noted in the above analysis of our students’ perspective had surfaced here, in a discussion about the wages certain kinds of workers did or did not deserve (Szymanski & Wells 2016).

These comments, while uncomfortable to hear, presented an opportunity. It allowed our students, who through a combination of good timing and hard work had gained entry into an established trade union, to hear firsthand the stories of other workers who were learning – on the job, so to speak – about the power of collective action. This then opened the door for a more fundamental question about what, in reality, determined wage levels. The fast food workers in a sense became the teachers, reminding the apprentice electricians that, while education, training, and skills are important when it comes to wages, being organized was just as important if not more so (Szymanski & Wells 2016).

While we have ways to expand on what occurs in the classroom across the Center, moving this kind of educational politics to the jobsite and beyond is more challenging. For its part, the union clearly believes in ongoing education for its members; indeed, we have designed and run workshops for Local #3 members on diversity that break from typical human resources models, focusing instead on themes common in the Labor Center’s curriculum: a historical analysis of racism and misogyny as tools of class power; an expansive discussion of the basic union values of respect and dignity for all workers (Szymanski & Wells 2017). But developing more workshops which might carry forward the Labor Center’s successes in its college program, while certainly desirable, is difficult in present conditions.

Like most unions in the United States, Local #3 is on the defensive. While union density in commercial construction remains relatively high in New York City, non-union firms have made significant inroads into the once secure high-rise market, and the contracts and work rules the building trades have fought for are an easy mark for those looking for explanations of why costs are high in the industry (Bagli 2011; Rosenthal 2017; Vitullo-Martin & Cohen 2011). In such circumstances, the leadership is understandably focused on what happens in the field, on organizing, preparing for bargaining. Indeed, as of this writing, Local #3 members in its cable division have been engaged in a bitter strike against the cable corporation Charter/Spectrum for over a year. Nationally, union density is at 10.7%, down from 20.1% in 1983. With a case pending before a conservative Supreme Court that may well destroy what is left of the political and legal framework supporting collective bargaining, investment in the slow burn of educational politics is a hard sell (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Liptak 2017; Schmidt 2011; Tarlau 2011).

Just daunting are the challenges derived from austerity itself, as cuts to public universities continue to force a re-definition of the social and political purpose of a college education. While the withdrawal of state funding to public universities across United States in the immediate aftermath of the great recession of 2008 was dramatic, it followed on a long-term trend. State spending has rebounded somewhat in the last few years, but it is still below 2008 levels and therefore still well below historical commitments. According to a report by the American Council of Education (Mortenson 2012), the decline in per state support for public colleges and universities in the United States between 1980 and 2011 has ranged from 14.8% to 69.4% Tuition rates have risen to cover the gap, putting the onus of financing state universities squarely on students. Individual institutions have become increasingly enrollment driven; programs new and old, in other words, must pay for themselves, usually through tuition and fees paid by students. Other trends have followed: the increasing reliance on contingent faculty to save on labor costs, spiraling student debt, increasing emphasis on vocational-style programs that offer the prospect of career advancement, and the related strain on the liberal arts (Mitchell et al. 2017).

The upshot, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, is that institutions that were once viewed as worthy of collective investment for the greater good are increasingly treated as vehicles delivering a personal benefit to students, who ought therefore to foot the bill themselves (Fischer & Stripling 2014). Of course, it is never put so plainly in the context of the daily life of an American public university. But what is clear, from our situation at the Labor Center, is that our program seems to confound administrators who, given declining enrollments across the college and stagnant if not declining support from the state of New York, are single-minded in their search for efficiencies. At the Center we often discuss possible extensions of our degree granting labor studies programs: certificate programs and/or workshops on organizing, leadership, alternative economic development strategies, or popular economics, for example, which might provide ways to re-connect with former students still in the union, and perhaps carry our mission of political education to other workers in the area. But it risky for us to commit time and resources to such projects when both are already spread so thin. Austerity is the shaping context of our work, just as it is for our students.