New Yorkers at Work

Airing on WNYC over an 11-day stretch in November of 1981, New Yorkers at Work drew from over 150 interviews with workers, union members, and activists, as well as their friends, families, and supporters to create a history of the working men and women of New York City in the 20th century.

The miniseries was conceived, produced, and directed by Debra E. Bernhardt, Head of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, with each episode focusing on a particular aspect of the past and present plights of the labor movement in New York. Tracing a worker’s arc over the American century over its eight half-hour episodes, the series used oral history interviews taken by staff members of the Wagner Labor Archives and funded by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities to create the program in collaboration with WNYC in 1980 and '81.

In addition to the talents drawn from NYU and WNYC, New Yorkers at Work enlisted narrators and musicians whose pedigrees were as strong within in the labor movement as within their own chosen fields. Narrators Martha Greenhouse and Frederick O’Neal, respected actors both, were heavily active in AFTRA and the AEA (as well as Nixon’s enemies list), while Marty Burman, Bobbie McGee (née Barbara Wren), and WNYC's own Oscar Brand, whose musical selections break (or build) the tension throughout, each had impressive labor credentials of their own, with albums, performances, and programs to prove it.

The true stars of this series though are the men and women who contributed their time and their stories to NYU’s New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection and, indeed, to the labor movement itself. Collectively, their words chronicle the history of the working men and women of New York City. From workers adjusting to the whims of progress that increased automation, pushing their work from skilled to unskilled, to immigrants, pulled by America's great promise, facing exploitation in that unfamiliar new land, New Yorkers at Work follows the history of the labor movement from the formation of the CIO in the thirties through its struggles with post-war witch-hunts and seventies' municipal crises, and on to the ‘hours’ before the dawn of Reagan’s dark Morning in America.

New Yorkers at Work is a testament not only to the faith and fading power of organized labor in New York and beyond, but also to the individual men and women who struggled and persevered, who fought for their rights, and who found strength for their fight in organizing and building coalitions, and to those who hope to carry on the labor tradition in the modern day.

Recordings appear courtesy of Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU thanks to Timothy V. Johnson, Director, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives