By Robert Zieger
Professor of History, University of Florida
Robert Zieger, professor of history at the University of Florida and author of the classic The CIO, 1935-1955, recently published For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America Since 1865. The book examines what Georgetown University history professor Joseph McCartin describes as "the long and difficult history of African Americans’ struggle for opportunity and justice both in the workplace and the labor movement."
The following Question and Answer was compiled by Zieger based on the most common questions that have arisen over the past year by students and members of book talk audiences about the historical experiences of African American workers and about their relationship to the labor movement.
Question: What have been the most significant achievements of African American
workers since 1865?
Zieger: Physical and cultural survival amid periods of horrific racial violence; sustaining families and resisting negative cultural stereotypes in a wide variety of geographical settings; the struggle to secure real civil, political and legal rights—these are great achievements of African Americans generally, most of whom have been wage-earners. A key theme in my book is the role in civil rights struggles played by black labor activists such as A. Philip Randolph and [AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer] William Lucy and of the connection between civil rights and labor activism voiced by Dr. King and other movement leaders.
Question: What about the major setbacks they have experienced?
Zieger: The failure of the Reconstruction-era federal government to provide former slaves with the economic opportunities for land-holding and access to jobs and education is one of America’s great historical tragedies. The long record of job discrimination, as practiced by employers—and by unions at times—and as countenanced by government was a setback of long duration. The continuing impact of generations of discrimination in housing, education and economic opportunities, as reflected in the inner city crisis of the African American working class, continues to compromise the positive effects of the great victories in civil and political rights gained in the 1950s and 1960s.
Question: To what extent were issues relating to labor factors in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s?
Zieger: The main thrust of the civil rights movement was to secure equitable treatment in the legal system, the right to vote, equal educational opportunities, equal access to public facilities and accommodations. The movement did have a job-related component—after all the March on Washington of August 1963 was a March for Jobs and Freedom. But economic issues tended to get sidetracked in part because during the Cold War era, a focus on economic inequality might have seemed somehow subversive or un-American. By the late 1960s, however, economic issues were coming to the fore, as evidenced by the militancy of black workers in industry, public employment and other sectors.
Question: Why has affirmative action proved a source of controversy ever since its inception?
Zieger: “Affirmative action” is short-hand for a wide variety of efforts to bring real—as opposed to merely formal—equality to the American workplace. In attempting to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which called for an end to discrimination in employment, the new U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) found it had to go beyond banning refusal to hire African Americans. In pressuring employers to make special efforts to advertise their new non-discrimination hiring policies, for example, the EEOC undertook “affirmative action.” In insisting that employers and unions identify and provide training for minority job candidates, it also was promoting affirmative action. In recognizing the need to bring the proportion of police officers and other public workers into rough alignment with the racial composition of communities, government officials were engaging in affirmative action. Affirmative action was quite successful in desegregating employment and progression lines in the southern textile and pulp and paper industries, and in urban police, fire and public service work. In the 1970s, affirmative action played a significant role in improving the relative income of African American workers in comparison with the labor force overall.
Since the mid-1980s, however, affirmative action programs have come under sharp political and judicial attack. Public opinion, as measured in election returns and polls, has a particular animus against affirmative action as applied to African Americans since on the whole, there has been little protest against it with reference to women, people of Asian and Hispanic descent, veterans, “legacy” applicants for college admissions and other specially designated or treated categories of citizens.
Question: How is it that, in view of the union movement’s historically checkered record on racial issues, black workers are more inclined to belong to unions than members of other racial and ethnic groups, including white workers?
Zieger: Black workers, who continue to be over-represented in low-paying and insecure jobs, have a particular need to have a powerful voice in their dealings with employers and with the state. Since African Americans and other minority workers, along with disproportionate numbers of women workers, toil in service industries—places such as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, restaurants, entertainment complexes—the contemporary U.S. economy in some ways offers unique opportunities for organized labor to reverse its long-term numerical decline. Thus, black workers are at the heart of organized labor’s hopes for revitalization in the 21st century.
Question: What do you hope readers will gain from your book?
Zieger: I hope that readers of For Jobs and Freedom will come away with a broader and more critical understanding of the struggle for equality; with a renewed appreciation of the tenacity and fortitude of working people, black and white and with a more accurate understanding of the complexity and diversity of the role of African Americans in the labor movement.
Question: To what extent are unions relevant to African American workers in the 21st century?
Zieger: A major premise of this book is that a vigorous labor movement is a critical component of any democratic society. So-called globalization, with its relentless insistence that the “market” is the only appropriate measure of human achievement, poses unique challenges. The labor movement’s historic insistence that workers’ rights—to organize; to gain a powerful voice in the workplace—are, after all, human rights, is particularly relevant today. And particularly relevant to people of color struggling for a better life in an economic order that often seems to regard people as replaceable cogs in a the impersonal economic machine.
