Drawing on the influential global cities paradigm, this article derives three hypotheses about the future of organized labor in major urban centers of the advanced capitalist world. Hypotheses are structured around Erik Olin Wright’s concepts of structural and associational power, plus that of employer power, and explored through comparative analyses of the last three strikes by New York City transit workers in 2005, 1980, and 1966. Examination of these conflicts supports two global cities predictions about the evolution of workers’ power in major urban centers while contradicting doomsday arguments about a supposed one-way decline of workers’ power.
