Labor movement and race relations in the United States

Significance: The history of the American labor movement has both reflected and influenced racial and ethnic relations.

An unusually diverse mix of racial and ethnic groups have formed and replenished the labor force of the United States since the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. Former enslaved people and their descendants rapidly expanded the American labor ranks, with many entering agricultural and industrial production in both the North and the South. In a similar manner, immigration began to alter the appearance and form of American labor. In the late nineteenth century, the United States opened its doors to foreign migrants, in large part because the nation’s rapidly expanding economy needed labor. Between 1880 and 1924, more than twenty-five million immigrants (primarily from Asia and Europe) poured into the country to join people of other nationalities working in factories and industries. Through their collective labor as workers, their actions as union members, and their varied responses to exploitation and insecurity, this varied ethnic mix was a crucial element in shaping the American economy and labor force through the twentieth century.

Such heterogeneity has had both negative and positive consequences for the American labor movement as a whole. It has produced interethnic and interracial conflict among working people; such conflict has often been purposefully exacerbated by employers to lessen the threat of worker solidarity. Yet this heterogeneity has also fostered strong ethnic identification and has been utilized toward worker mobilization for protection and advancement. Both tendencies can be seen within some of the key labor organizations that emerged during the United States’ two “labor eras” (the 1880s and the 1930s) and in minority and immigrant labor activity in later decades.

Knights of Labor

The Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (KOL) was initially organized in Philadelphia in 1869; however, the period of its most successful accomplishment did not come until the 1880s. Led by Terence Powderly, a machinist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, the KOL aimed to unite all those who worked (except for liquor dealers, lawyers, gamblers, and bankers) into one huge union that would produce and distribute goods on a cooperative basis.

Recognizing the need for a broad-based labor solidarity to achieve this goal, the Knights of Labor opened its membership to men and women of all ethnic and racial groups. Powderly traveled the country gathering all those who advocated equal pay for equal work and the abolition of child labor. This recruitment campaign was quite successful, and more than thirty cooperative enterprises were established with membership that spanned national and racial boundaries. At its peak, the Knights of Labor included about seventy thousand Black members and thousands of Asian and European laborers.

The results of such multiethnic labor solidarity can be seen in the strike against the Missouri Pacific Railroad in 1885. Through work stoppages and interruptions, certain unions affiliated with the Knights of Labor forced railroad mogul Jay Gould to restore wages he had cut the previous year and to rehire hundreds of fired union members. This victory so raised the KOL’s standing that membership grew from about one hundred thousand to more than seven hundred thousand within a year.

American Federation of Labor

The American Federation of Labor (AFL), formed in Philadelphia in 1886, was a very different organization. Its members were not individual workers but rather craft unions encompassing laborers from specific trades. Regular dues from these members provided the federation with money to fund strikes and to hire full-time organizers and labor-dispute negotiators.

Although the AFL provided these supportive labor services, it did so for a narrow spectrum of workers. The way in which AFL leader Samuel Gompers structured the organization made it racially and ethnically divisive and restrictive. In his recruitment campaigns, Gompers made membership appeals only to the elite males of the working class, the skilled workers. Few group members of color fit this description; even those who did were excluded from membership. Gompers’s position was that allowing members of various ethnic and immigrant groups (especially African Americans) to join the federation would embroil the organization in the controversial issue of race in the labor movement; he wished to avoid ethnic entanglements at all costs. Believing that the AFL had more “imperative” and “concrete” matters on which to focus, he closed the ranks of the AFL to minority workers. By the early 1920s, the AFL was the dominant workers’ organization in the United States, but fewer than 10 percent of the nation’s wage earners were organized into unions eligible for AFL membership.

The Twentieth Century

Evidence of the ways in which racial diversity has been utilized both to help and to hinder the labor movement is not restricted to the nineteenth century. Similar examples can be found in the second wave of labor organization that hit the United States in the 1930s.

The American Federation of Labor had survived into this decade despite the continuance of its strategies of labor elitism and racial division. The descendants of the craft union leaders who had come together in the federation of the 1880s sought to retain the legacy of their power and standing as the “aristocracy of labor.” They continued to deny membership to unskilled or semiskilled immigrant labor from the mass-production industries; they also prohibited other leaders from organizing these workers in new unions.

AFL leaders doubted the ability of immigrant groups to provide valuable support for the labor movement. Racist and nativist ideologies led many to see these groups not as a possibly valuable coalition in the advancement of labor policies but as individual nationalities whose differences were potentially subversive to the labor movement. As a source of cheap labor, immigrant groups emerged as second only to capitalists themselves as organizers’ and native workers’ enemies.

Debate over this issue culminated between 1935 and 1938, when John L. Lewis and seven other AFL leaders broke from the Federation to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). They asserted that the same defensive mindset that manifested itself within the AFL in exclusionary impulses could also impart great cohesion toward resistance to employers. To this extent, the CIO was organized to solidify those workers whom the AFL ignored or overlooked: the semiskilled and unskilled immigrant and minority ranks. Altogether, more than 1.8 million workers were organized by the CIO, and they proved to be a valuable tool toward labor advancement.

The CIO utilized its large membership (and the ethnic and ideological solidarity it often represented) to challenge repressive labor practices in the steel and automobile industries. In these challenges, the tool of the CIO was the sit-down strike: Instead of walking off the job and picketing, workers went to their posts in the plants and stayed there, making it difficult for others to replace them. In 1937, successful sit-down strikes against General Motors, Chrysler, and US Steel won the CIO recognition as the bargaining agent for workers previously thought unorganizable.

The eventual merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955 was of great interest to laborers of color. CIO leader Walter P. Reuther and AFL leader George Meany worked declarations of opposition to racial discrimination into the new organization’s merger agreement and subsequent constitution. Members of both organizations hailed these statements, but they still waited anxiously to see if the words would be backed by actions. These members would be both pleased and disappointed. The AFL-CIO won respect in the Black community early in its career when its executive council called on President Dwight D. Eisenhower to comply with the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision on school desegregation and deny school-construction funds to any state that defied the ruling. Yet it also antagonized the Black community by remaining aloof during the great Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and 1956.

The 1950s were charged with racial strife, and racial tensions often exacerbated difficulties in labor organization and negotiation. Specifically, most AFL-CIO union leaders feared regional political and economic repercussions and avoided adopting a stand clearly in favor of egalitarian racial principles. The ultimate result was the alienation of Black workers from the AFL-CIO. Indeed, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a report in 1959 announcing that the AFL-CIO had not achieved its merger goals, having failed to unify racial and labor issues.

African Americans

Even before the CIO’s split from the AFL, A. Philip Randolph had welded a powerful union from the many African Americans who worked on the nation’s passenger railroads. Randolph’s organization, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, won significant concessions from the Pullman Company in the 1930s and later provided a solid base from which Black labor could challenge discrimination on a variety of fronts. In 1941, Randolph organized a march on Washington to protest discrimination in the defense industry; he canceled the march when President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to issue an executive order forbidding employment discrimination by defense contractors. Further pressure by Randolph and the union helped prompt President Harry S Truman to end segregation in the armed forces in 1948. After the AFL-CIO merger in 1955, Randolph became the only Black member of the union’s executive council.

The 1960s and 1970s saw more African American and Mexican American laborers attempt to assert their political, economic, and social identities. During these decades, a movement was begun to unify labor and civil rights issues and to extend that cause through the nation. Such a movement began locally, however, with significant labor strikes among Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, and Black hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina.

The strikes at Memphis and Charleston were among previously unorganized, heavily exploited, poverty-level workers who desired safer working conditions, better pay, and job security. Both strikes were bitterly opposed by the power structure in the communities involved, yet both were supported by top civil rights leaders, including Ralph Abernathy and Coretta Scott King. The strikes also won the support of powerful unions, including the United AutoWorkers’ Union, the United Steelworkers of America, the United Rubber Workers, and the Tobacco Workers’ International Union. Further, the Black community at large bolstered the strikers through marches, mass meetings, boycotts, and financial aid. Despite their overall success, both strikes received only limited support from White workers.

Latinos

This struggle for Black equality was paralleled by the rising aspirations of Latinos, including Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Mexicans. Although these groups were linked by similar ethnic roots and by a common language and religious heritage, their labor experiences differed. Mexican American laborers, in particular, advanced under the leadership of César Chávez, the son of migrant farm workers. In the early 1960s, pressure from Chávez and other activists helped force the end of the Bracero program, a government-sponsored importation of Mexican laborers that had undercut the agricultural labor market since the early part of World War II. In 1965, Chávez’s leadership launched the Delano Grape Strike,which brought national attention to the plight of migrant farm workers; he subsequently became head of the newly formed United Farm Workers. Chávez continued to use strikes and national boycotts against fruit- and vegetable-raising agribusinesses to win concessions from California grape growers. Yet as important as the victories of the United Farm Workers were, in both an economic and a cultural sense, the union, in an increasingly urbanized nation, could not become a major organizational base among the primarily rural Mexican American population as a whole.

Asian Americans

In recent decades, Latino and Black workers have continued their struggle for labor and ethnic recognition and have been joined in this effort by other minority labor groups. One of the most active since the early 1990s has been the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), founded in 1992 to address the needs of the Asian and Pacific Island American (APIA) labor community. APALA’s commitment to labor includes the empowerment of all APIA workers through unionization on a national level and the provision of national support for individual, local unionization efforts. The organization actively promotes the formation of AFL-CIO legislation to create jobs, ensure national health insurance, and reform labor law. It also supports national governmental action to prevent workplace discrimination against immigrant laborers and to prosecute perpetrators of racially motivated crimes.

These efforts of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance are certainly not the final word on the relevance of racial and ethnic diversity to the labor movement. Their successes have not resolved the debate about the role of immigrant and minority workers in American labor, but they have ensured the continuance of discussion. Indeed, many of the same issues that have captured the attention of American labor organizers since the late nineteenth century continue to spark debate: the means to secure humane treatment, higher wages, and other improvements in working conditions, and the role of workers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds in those efforts.

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