January 16, 2007
Racism and Wages II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:20 PM EST Regarding my feature article on Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Smoler asks whether Jim Crow necessarily drove down the wages of white workers as well as black workers, and, if so, why. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that was the case, as did W. E. B. Du Bois, and as did most members of the loose Popular Front–era coalition of civil rights activists allied with organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Fred asks, “wouldn’t white workers’ wages rise as a consequence of racial discrimination in the labor market? If the potential pool of applicants for a set of jobs is limited by racist exclusion of black workers, the law of supply and demand ought to drive up white wages. Did white workers really receive only psychic income from their racial privilege, but no real income?” Of course, white workers benefited from Jim Crow inasmuch as their wages almost always exceeded those of black workers. Moreover, as I’ve argued on this website, the white working class also received a host of generous public sector subsidies—particularly federally backed mortgages—which were largely closed to African-Americans and which facilitated the rise of hundreds of thousands of families to the ranks of the middle class. That said, if Jim Crow placed whites at an advantage vis-à-vis African-Americans, it did not necessarily place them at an absolute advantage. Take the following famous example: During the 1934 gubernatorial election in Georgia, Eugene Talmadge visited Rome, Georgia, the state’s center of textile manufacturing, where he delivered incendiary speeches that appealed to raw race prejudice. He sharply criticized FDR’s National Recovery Administration for issuing wage scales that placed black and white workers on parity. Talmadge won the election and carried Rome’s white working-class districts. Three days later he declared martial law in order to protect the “right to work” and sent 4,000 troops to bust the textile union. No union equaled stagnant wages. By the same token, most Southern congressman ardently opposed New Deal measures like the National Labor Relations Act, which provided legal mechanisms for workers to unionize, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which introduced maximum hours and minimum wages; they also joined Republicans to block FDR’s proposed wartime expansion of the New Deal. At the insistence of Southern congressmen, the Social Security Act initially excluded farm workers and domestic workers, as did the FLSA. These exclusions hit African-Americans, who were concentrated in both sectors, particularly hard, but they also affected hundreds of thousands of white families. On the local level, most Southern states in the Jim Crow era were marked by a low-tax, low-service, low-wage mentality that benefited large landowners and owners of the region’s limited industrial base but did nothing for the larger population of farmers. One must consider public provisions like education, health care, and infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, levies) as part of the “wages” that white Southerners forfeited when they repeatedly elected allies of the Black Belt barons and Big Mules to state and federal office. One needn’t concentrate just on the Jim Crow South to appreciate these dynamics. Look, for instance, at the famous 1919 steel strikes in Chicago. They failed, in large part because employers were able to import black strikebreakers to bust the union, which had never seen fit to include black workers. The prevailing wages, hours, and working conditions in steel remained appallingly low, high, and dangerous, in that order, until the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, later renamed the United Steel Workers of America, organized black and white workers in the mid-1930s. Until the rise of the great CIO industrial unions, white workers in industries like steel enjoyed a comparative advantage over black workers, but they fared much better—in terms of wages, hours, working conditions, insurance, and state benefits—when they joined hands with African-Americans, formed strong labor unions, and flexed their muscle inside the Democratic party.
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