Aruna D’Souza
An exhibition at ICP tells the people’s history of US labor
from 1940 to 2011.
American Job: 1940–2011, installation view. Courtesy International Center of Photography.
American Job: 1940–2011, curated by Makeda Best, International Center of Photography, 84 Ludlow Street, New York City, through May 5, 2025
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American Job: 1940–2011, organized by Makeda Best, noted photography curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, mines the International Center for Photography’s collection to present a sweeping visual history of work in this country as seen through the eyes of more than forty documentary photographers and photojournalists. The first sections of the show focus on the early decades of the postwar labor movement; the later galleries capture the effects of the slow but steady dismantling of workers’ rights and the inequities that accompanied such erosions, despite the genuinely heroic efforts, and not insignificant successes, of organizers and activists. Now, when it feels like we’ve hit rock bottom (god, I hope it’s rock bottom)—when billionaires dream of replacing us with AI bots, and Donald Trump and Elon Musk break the law to put tens of thousands of us out of jobs while simultaneously stripping away the paltry workplace protections we have left—this record of the power labor once wielded operates a bit like a time machine. Or maybe a “what could have been” machine. If I weren’t suffering such complete political exhaustion thanks to the first two months of this administration, I’d say it was also a “what could still be if we put some muscle into it” machine.
Susan Meiselas, A Marine instructor shows young recruits how to salute, with their fingertips at eyebrow level, Fort Jackson, South Carolina, 1975. Courtesy International Center of Photography. © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos.
Let’s start with an unassuming picture by an unidentified photojournalist from 1948: four union men, two white, two Black, stand on either side of a blackboard that reads, “Longshoremen & Seamen: Employment Inside.” The caption states, in part, “Acting on instructions from their CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] bosses, these longshoremen hold their noses and turn thumbs down at a sign outside the Army transport hiring office at Fort Mason. Later, pickets were formed to urge longshoremen not to accept.” These dockworkers were riding a wave of strikes across industries that swept the country in the 1930s, were put on hold for the sake of the war effort, and then resumed in the postwar period—so much so that, in 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which severely restricted union activities, even requiring labor leaders to affirm they were not communists. The law was oppressive enough that Harry Truman tried to veto it, calling it “a dangerous intrusion on free speech.” The new proscriptions didn’t stop the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) from calling a strike that lasted ninety-five days and won major concessions from employers.
Unidentified photographer, Thumbs Down—Acting on instructions from their CIO bosses, these longshoremen hold their noses and turn thumbs down at a sign outside the Army transport hiring office at Fort Mason. Later, pickets were formed to urge longshoremen not to accept work., 1948. Courtesy International Center of Photography. © International Center of Photography.
The strikers in the photo are kind of sweet, the embodiment of a dad joke. From my purview, almost eighty years later and in the midst of the slash-and-burn destruction of, well, everything, their goofy gestures feel like a particularly naïve form of political theater, akin to wearing pink to protest the speech of a president who has quite literally declared himself above the law. But maybe the longshoremen could afford to be goofy—they were operating in a vastly different media and political environment. The photograph, by the looks of the handwritten markings on it, seems to have been published somewhere—a local or national paper, maybe, or one of the many photo magazines that flourished in the era. Somewhere probably not owned, that is, by a craven billionaire or media conglomerate, and not on a platform whose algorithms encourage the most reactionary, crabs-in-a-bucket, only-rock-the-boat-if-it’s-going-to-tip-to-the-right mentality. “This deal stinks” was an easy and effective message to communicate back then, and the longshoremen’s little charade got the point across.
Unidentified photographer, Employer Pickets—Proprietors and managers of other grocery stores picket a San Rafael grocery, one of five stores refusing to join in a shutdown called by the Marin Retail Grocers Association in its fight with the Clerks Union., 1947. Courtesy International Center of Photography. © International Center of Photography.
Today, when almost every form of protest has been made illegal—we’ve been living for years under laws that ban the mere boycott of Israeli products, Trump is trying to deport green-card holders for taking part in peaceful action in support of Palestine, and New York’s governor just fired two thousand prison guards who walked off the job (I mean, abolish prisons and ACAB and all, but everyone should be able to strike)—it’s good to remember this was not always the case. In fact, it was not so long ago that striking was treated as so legitimate, even business owners and managers did it: take a 1947 photograph, in which grocery store proprietors—yes, you read that right—march in front of a shop in San Rafael, California, that was refusing to participate in a mass shutout of striking checkout clerks. Their placards say, “Don’t patronize grocers who bow to unreasonable demands,” “Think what a 50% wage boost would do to prices,” and so on. (The target of their ire? The unfortunately named, but excellently facade-ed, “Elite Foods.”)
Unidentified photographer, Photograph of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963. Courtesy International Center of Photography. © International Center of Photography.
One of the exhibition’s most effective moves is shifting our view of labor history away from the narrow stereotype of the white working-class man, instead demonstrating that men and women of all races were integral to solidarity movements. Seymour Snaer, for the San Francisco Examiner, photographed telephone operators—a job almost exclusively done by white women—being herded up by police in San Francisco during a 1947 strike, the largest women’s walkout in American history. A series from 1941 by John Vachon, made under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, shows Black men and women picketing businesses in Chicago that refused to hire or severely underpaid African American employees. Another suite, by an unidentified attendee of the rally in Washington, DC, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech in 1963, attests to the fact that this watershed moment in Civil Rights history was also a mass labor action: the event was billed as a march “for jobs and freedom,” and of the 250,000 participants, unions sent along forty thousand in support. (The best of these photos is of one of the protesters’ signs: “Segregation has outlived its uselessness.”) Images like these are an essential reminder that, far from just being a culture war, the attack on DEI that we’re living through is an attack on labor—what if more unions treated it as such?
American Job: 1940–2011, installation view. Courtesy International Center of Photography. Pictured: photographs by Accra Shepp.
Ernest Withers’s iconic photograph of garbage collectors striking in Tennessee in 1968 hoisting identical signs reading “I AM A MAN”; photo books by Paul Fusco and Jon Lewis, from 1970 and 1967 respectively, that bear witness to the California grape strike led by César Chávez; Susan Meiselas’s pictures of the newly feminized workplace and the politicians (including Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm) fighting for equal rights and equal pay at the 1976 Democratic National Convention; Louis Stettner’s Workers series (1972–74): all demonstrate the porous line between documentary and activist photography. It is a form of journalism we desperately need now, even though the question of where such image-making would find a home in today’s news outlets is no less critical than it was a generation or two ago. That crisis—and it truly is a crisis—is most poignantly revealed by the most recent photographs in American Job: Joseph Rodriguez’s East Side Project from the 1990s, which chronicles the daily lives of people in LA impacted by joblessness, gang violence, and poverty; Dylan Vitone’s post-9/11 series of the white, working-class neighborhood of South Boston, devastated by the decline of unionized manufacturing jobs; and Accra Shepp’s photographs of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. All three artists published their work not in the media but in galleries and books with limited print runs. The arc of the show drives home two messages I really needed to hear: that solidarity is the only way forward, and that art is more crucial than ever—it remains one of the only places where certain things can be said, and certain voices can be heard.
Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press last summer.