When Victor Gotbaum, who for two decades led the largest municipal union in New York, died on April 5, accounts of his life centered on his role in helping resolve the city’s fiscal crisis. “Union big Victor Gotbaum, who saved NYC’s finances in 1975, dead at 93,” read the headline in the Daily News. Veteran New York Times reporter Lawrence Downes wrote in an op-ed that “it is hard not to be nostalgic for people like Mr. Gotbaum, and Gov. Hugh Carey, and other leaders who recognized the need for shared sacrifice. Thanks to them, the city prevailed.”

It is not surprising that establishment institutions remembered Gotbaum as a table thumper who, when the chips were down, subsumed the interests of his working-class constituency to the needs of New York as a whole.

But the characterization of Gotbaum as a labor statesman obscures as much as it reveals. It perpetuates the myth of shared sacrifice during New York City’s fiscal crisis — in reality the wealthy sacrificed almost nothing and used the looming bankruptcy to shift power away from elected officials and ordinary citizens to the financial elite. It also reduces the creation of collective worker power — in which Gotbaum played a large role — to a minor subplot.