Economy, Politics, and Labor in Three Cities

Abstract

Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus were chosen for study not only because they were accessible but also because they were appropriate for the research problem. Greenstone selected Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles because they were large and their patterns of union-party relationships differed. He did not consider the extent to which the relationships might depend on the structure of the metropolitan economy. When Greenstone gathered his data in the early 1960s, the Detroit metropolitan region, a specialized automobile manufacturing center, was the country’s fifth largest with almost four million inhabitants. The Chicago area, with six million inhabitants, was second largest. The Los Angeles area, third largest, contained almost six million people. Both Chicago and Los Angeles were world trade cities, centers of vast hinterlands.