Making the *city work: Municipal employees and their managers in New York City and Philadelphia, 1880–1940

This dissertation explores the experiences of fire fighters, police officers, and sanitation workers in New York City and Philadelphia, and the municipal officials who sought to manage them, from the dawn of the civil service system in the 1880s to the start of the era of collective bargaining in the 1940s. In the nineteenth century, the nation\u27s cities dramatically expanded their services to meet the needs of their populations and, in the process, became employers on a massive scale. Yet scholars have given little attention to city governments as workplaces. Making use of official government documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and the records of unions and civic organizations, this dissertation examines the challenges that New York City and Philadelphia faced as employers, as well as the challenges that their employees faced working for public entities. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as reformers gradually made progress against the political machines in their struggle to control the state, they revolutionized the municipal workplace. By introducing civil service rules that rationalized hiring, promotional, and disciplinary practices, creating on the job training programs, and providing pensions to employees to promote careerism, they demonstrated a remarkable degree of sophistication as managers. The municipal employees in New York City and Philadelphia were not idle bystanders in this process, however. As early as the 1890s, they organized themselves into benevolent associations and unions in order to improve their working conditions. As employees of public entities, though, they faced a very different environment from private sector unions at the time, having to forswear strikes, picketing, and collective bargaining. Instead of using their power as workers, they had to make use of their rights as citizens, focusing their energies on developing into skilled lobbyists at the state and local level. One of the most significant accomplishments of this dissertation, therefore, is to elucidate that which is unique about the experiences of workers and their unions in the public sector