Crucial but Unheralded Actions: Puerto Rican Workers and the New York City Labor Movement, 1953–60

During the mid-1950s in New York City the struggles of low-wage immigrant citizen workers from Puerto Rico were central to the efforts of the industrial unions and their allies to activate a new wave of factory organizing and alliance building after the costly divisions and repression of the preceding years.  In the post-war period, tens of thousands of Puerto Rican workers, most of them recent migrants but many second generation New Yorkers, had entered the industrial and service workforce.  A good number of these workers ended up trapped in highly exploitative factories that systematically manipulated or violated labor laws or simply signed back-room deals with ghost or mob-connected unions who then suppressed any rank and file demands for improvements.  The emerging coalition and its initial successes contributed to the efforts to organize and improve conditions in service work (private hospitals and cafeterias) and culminated in the fight for a City minimum wage in the early 1960s.  This paper will discuss how a rank and file revolt of low wage mostly Puerto Rican workers was organized between 1953 and 1958.  It will give special attention to the alliance of organizations and leaders that was built and how it set the stage for major strikes and organizing drives in 1957 and 1958.  The central goal of this paper is to clarify what role Puerto Rican workers and leaders played in what might have been the last attempt by an alliance of unions—historically organized and controlled by skilled, better-paid workers--to rescue the downward slide of industrial wages and jobs in New York City, a process that disproportionately affected Black and Puerto Rican workers.