Blacks and labor: the untold story

Public Interest, Summer, 2002 by Ken I. Kersch

THE National Recovery Administration, or "NRA," a linchpin of Franklin Roosevelt's First Hundred Days, did not fare well in the African-American press. "Negro Removal Act," "Negroes Ruined Again," and "Negroes Robbed Again," were only a few of the epithets launched at what many blacks took to be a poisoned spoonful of alphabet soup. The NRA, a component of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), was a giant step toward a European-style welfare state: It created national minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, it guaranteed collective- bargaining rights and industrial production codes, and it poured vast amounts of tax dollars into public-works projects. When, on "Black Monday," the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA as unconstitutional, no one cheered more heartily than American blacks. And when the NIRA's collective-bargaining provisions were later resurrected as part of the Wagner Act, African Americans were dismayed. The National Urban League, the NAACP, and other civil-rights organizations vehemently op posed it.

This history is recounted in Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal, a recent book by David Bernstein that offers a short and sharp challenge to the prevailing narrative of the emergence of the contemporary American welfare state. Bernstein places labor laws at the center of that development and of the contemporary plight of black Americans. He makes a strong case that many of those ostensibly neutral laws, from Reconstruction through the New Deal-- e.g., emigrant-agent laws, professional-licensing laws, prevailing and minimum-wage laws, and collective-bargaining laws-- were either directly aimed at stymieing black economic and social advancement, or, if not so aimed, were quickly turned to that use. Thc NRA was a classic illustration of this dynamic: It cartelized a huge swath of the American labor market and handed over that cartel power to labor unions from which blacks, with few exceptions, were totally excluded. The American F ederation of Labor was one of the most discriminatory, and as it and other exclusionary unions gained power, African Americans were put out of good work, and, in many cases, out of all work. The now longstanding gap between black and white unemployment rates dates precisely from this moment of government intervention on labor's behalf. In short, Bernstein argues that the victories of organized labor were the undoing of American blacks.

ONE Place of Redress chronicles a series of assaults on African Americans that, on the surface at least, lack the moral drama of the patently odious Black Codes and the exhaustively discussed Jim Grow laws of the 1890s. The 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which asserted that "no state shall ... deny to any person the equal protection of the laws," all but guaranteed that the attack would come in low, under the cover of legal neutrality. The author turns first to southern efforts to stem the exodus of blacks out of the region by the passage, at the end of Reconstruction, of a wave of emigrant-agent laws. These laws, whose constitutionality was upheld in a series of court challenges, assessed everescalating taxes and licensing fees on employment agents who came to recruit southern (black) workers. Next, the author traces the way in which professional-licensing laws for plumbers, barbers, and doctors, even if not drafted with an "evil eye," were quickly marshaled as weapons to drive blacks out of the respectable and better-paying professions and trades to which they had resourcefully gravitated in the half century following emancipation. Minimum-wage laws cut into blacks' ability to counterbalance racism by offering their labor for lower pay. No assault on black economic advancement, however, was so damaging as the relentless unionization of American railroads.

Working on the railroads was one of the chief tickets to middle-class status for black men and their families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When Woodrow Wilson's progressive administration decided to reach a modus vivendi with the railway unions during the First World War, this door to a respectable, middle-class life began to swing shut. The subsequent passage of the Railway Labor Act of 1926 (an important precursor to New Deal collective-bargaining laws) helped to seal the fate of black railway workers. The Act succeeded where decades of racially exclusionary union constitutions, "race strikes," and physical intimidation had failed, as the unions used their new state-sanctioned power to negotiate racially discriminatory agreements with railroads. While some black railroad workers, most notably those associated with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, were able to turn the Railway Labor Act to their advantage, the act's overall effect was to precipitate a steep decline in African -American railroad employment. The U.S. Census reported that between 1920 and 1940, the number of black firemen declined from 6,505 to 2,263. During the same years, the number of black brakemen, switchmen, flagmen, and yardmen fell from 8,275 to 2,739, and the number of black trainmen fell from 7,609 to 2,857. These numbers represented declines both in absolute and percentage terms.