Organized labor and the black worker

In 1933 president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal handed over cartel power to labor unions from which blacks, with few exceptions, were totally excluded when he created the National Recovery Administration (NRA). The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write “codes of fair competition.” The codes were intended to reduce “destructive competition” and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold.

It was not unusual in the African-American press to see the NRA referred to as the “Negro Removal Act,” “Negroes Ruined Again” and “Negroes Robbed Again.” The NAACP, the National Urban League and other civil-rights organizations vehemently opposed it.

The NIRA was unanimously declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1935; the court ruled that it infringed the separation of powers under the U.S. Constitution.

When the NIRA’s collective-bargaining provisions were later resurrected as part of the Wagner Act, African Americans were dismayed. Labor laws were at the center of the contemporary plight of African Americans, from Reconstruction through the New Deal. 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 quickly turned to that use. You can trace the longstanding gap between black and white unemployment rates precisely from this moment of government intervention on labor’s behalf.

For example, working on the railroads was one of the chief tickets to middle-class status for black men and their families in the late 19th and early 20th centuries until the passage of the Railway Labor Act of 1926. This act succeeded where race strikes and intimidation by white labor failed. Some African-American railroad workers with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were able to turn the Railway Labor Act to their advantage, but overall the act precipitated a steep decline in African-American railroad employment.

If you take a look at the U.S. Census between 1920 and 1940, the number of black railroad firemen declined from 6,505 to 2,263. During the same years, the number of black railroad 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.

When the building trades were unionized and African Americans were locked out, they fought back by trying to undercut the union scales wages, but Congress passed the Davis Bacon Act of 1931, neutralizing the strategy of African Americans.

To date, no union has had a sustained focus on the particular needs and concerns of their African-American members. African-American labor groups such as the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and black caucuses within some unions have not been successful in applying the external pressure needed to increase equity for African Americans in their respective unions, with the exception of the 1960s and 1970s when internal union organizations such as the Ad Hoc Committee of Steel Workers and the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement pressed demands for justice within unions.

Over the past four decades, the job market for working-age African-American males has essentially collapsed. By the end of the 20th century, nearly half of working-age black males were not employed in many inner-city neighborhoods.

Since the 1960s, not only has the federal government provided a disproportionate amount of direct employment to blacks, but it has also enforced antidiscrimination laws against private employers and pressured government contractors to implement affirmative action programs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government, through a combination of executive orders and legislation, prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex and race in employment and the payment of wages. Studies of the hiring practices and wages of the state and local public sectors have shown the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies. Since the creation of equal opportunity and affirmative action programs, women and African Americans have seen greater employment opportunities in the economy as a whole, but particularly in the public sector.