As Mayor from 1933 to 1945, La Guardia encouraged the growth of private-sector unions but opposed them in the public sector, a position based partly on a New York State Supreme Court ruling that labor unions in government were intolerable. Only one major strike, of 10 newspaper unions led by the International Typographical Union in 1962-63, was entirely in the private sector, reflecting New York's decline as a manufacturing center. Since the war, the city has lost a staggering 600,000 manufacturing jobs, most of them union. Rising real-estate prices, automation and the city's high wage scale have forced some companies to close and encouraged many more to leave. These days, the city's largest private industry is finance, and Wall Street has been unionized only lightly.
Strikes are likely to come from sanitation workers or from hospital employees.