Abstract
Rising economic inequality has aggravated long-standing labor market disparities, with one exception: government employment. This article considers the puzzle of black-white wage parity in the American public sector. African Americans are more likely to work in the public than in the private sector, and their wages are higher there. The article builds on prior work emphasizing institutional factors conditioning this outcome to argue that employee mobilization can motor it. As public sector unions gained political influence postwar, their large constituencies of black, blue-collar workers, drawing on both militant and nonviolent tactics of the urbanizing civil rights movement, advocated for improved working conditions. Archival sources confirm this pattern at the federal level. The employment and activism of African Americans in low-skilled federal jobs pivoted union attention to blue-collar issues and directly contributed to the enactment of a transparent, universal wage schedule for the blue-collar federal workforce (the Federal Wage System). The result was greater pay parity for African Americans, as well as for other disadvantaged groups.
Despite the persistent rise of economic inequality, public employment remains an engine of mobility and opportunity. 1 Consider the example of black workers in the United States. In contrast to the acute inequities of the private sector labor market, the pay, status, and rewards of African American government employees are closer to those of their white colleagues. This relative parity, moreover, holds after controlling for public-private differences in occupation and education and after accounting for efforts to privatize government (which have eroded but not erased the trend). 2 Yet the public sector did not always protect African Americans. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal could still describe the “tenuous presence of blacks in public employment.” 3 Explaining this significant change is the objective of this article.
We trace the enactment of an important tool for pay parity—a transparent and universal wage schedule for federal blue-collar workers, known as the Federal Wage System (FWS)—to show how black mobilization within public sector unions directed attention to wage initiatives. 4 For much of the twentieth century, federal unions ignored the problem of racial equality in public employment. Initiatives to align black and white earnings were confined to the higher rungs of government service and expressed in executive attempts at affirmative action. But from the 1960s, public sector unionization, the expansion of the federal government, and the civil rights movement enabled the growing number of low-wage, unionized, and urban African American employees to demand better working conditions for blue-collar workers. Their activism pivoted the agenda of one influential trade union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), toward the enactment of the FWS in 1972.
Our analysis departs from previous explanations for public sector pay parity to emphasize how employee mobilization helped generate that outcome. In the case of the FWS, employees drew on both the militant and nonviolent “repertoires of contention” of the civil rights movement. 5 Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have argued that the power of the poor rests on militant disruption. 6 Whereas traditional forms of advocacy can restrain the full expression of poor interests, mass protest and mobilization do not. The disruptive tactics of black workers at the 1968 AFGE Convention are a case in point, we contend. Following those workers’ mobilization, the union adopted a pro-wage-parity stance—but adopted a nonviolent, and even color-blind, political strategy. The AFGE became the leading lobbyist for the FWS in Congress and ultimately made significant concessions for its enactment. Although standard institutional and functional explanations help explain the durability and efficacy of this legislation, political protest explains its genesis.
Institutional and Functional Explanations for Racial Wage Parity in the Public Sector
Extant studies emphasize the causal role of three interrelated institutional factors in creating the “occupational niche” of public sector employment for African Americans. Following the development of agricultural mechanization in the South and the mass migration of southern blacks to the North, competition over private employment increased. Discrimination, segregation, and outright violence regularly denied jobs to African Americans. Some analysts hence proposed that the public sector absorbed black labor in the absence of private sector alternatives. The concentration of those jobs in municipalities with large black or minority populations, moreover, made it both economically and politically expedient to hire African Americans in city government. 7
The second factor, noted by other scholars, is that the American state is now a “model employer.” The visibility, centralization, and autonomy of government practice, combined with the often-presumed absence of a discriminatory legacy, made these new positions fairer than those offered by older, more fragmented private industries. 8 As Walker and Bennett observe, “Although seldom acknowledged in public debate about the public sector, the public sector is a location for fairer treatment for non-white workers,” a quality that motivated some of the opponents of public sector unions in the 2010s. 9 The reputational costs of opaque hiring procedures and the impulse to standardize prompted officials to implement equal opportunity procedures widely, especially when facing civil rights demands. 10 The archetypical example of the wage schedule limits individual pay negotiations within each class of pay and thus prevents supervisors from indiscriminately raising pay for favored workers. Vulnerable workers, such as African Americans and women, are better protected from underpayment. The implementation of a similar practice in the private sector would require, at the very least, a strong directive from the labor department or, more realistically, strong legislation from Congress with regulatory enforcement.
The third factor is that the security of government work is related to the vitality of public sector trade unions. Despite the generalized narrative of organized labor’s decline, public sector unions have high membership rates. The union membership rate of American government workers (33.6 percent) is more than five times that of private sector workers (6.2 percent). Compare these contemporary statistics to those of 1973, when rates of public and private unionization were approximately equivalent (23 percent in the public sector, 24 percent in the private sector). 11 Public sector unions have raised their political profile, too. The largest campaign spender in 2010, for instance, was the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, whose contributions exceeded even those of the US Chamber of Commerce. 12 While the trade unions that represent private sector workers, once vigorous, have attenuated nearly to the point of disappearance, those that represent workers in the public service have tended to maintain and develop their position (although, of course, encountering attacks from Republican leaders). 13
Each of these explanations has its limits, however. Some scholarly research challenges the perceived certainty of racial fairness in government employment. 14 Some of the most densely unionized public administrations were reluctant to include black “newcomers” and deliberately limited opportunities for advancement. 15 Furthermore, the standardization of wages across the public sector is still aspirational. 16 Pay for public employees remains differentiated across and within municipal, county, state, and federal levels. Moreover, the mere vitality of public trade unions cannot independently explain the security of public employment, particularly for black Americans. Not only were some government unions historically hostile to black workers, but the acceleration and accretion of attacks against public unions since the 1980s now threaten the viability and quality of government work. 17 In fact, the bile toward public sector unions described in Arlie Hochschild’s and Katherine Cramer’s books is, in part, code for African Americans who belong to them, mirroring a long-standing white view that blacks disproportionally consume welfare and state benefits. 18
The institutional and functional explanations instead work in consort when we introduce the mechanism of employee mobilization—a crucial political factor. 19 As the federal government expanded in the District of Columbia, as state governments expanded in the capitals, and as municipal governments expanded in cities, so too did demand for low-skilled public labor. Increasingly, urbanized African Americans filled that demand, against the political backdrop of mounting civil rights and public sector labor movements. These otherwise-marginalized workers drew on the more militant repertoires of contention of the civil rights movement to direct union attention to the inadequacies and irregularities of their employment. After some deliberation, the strengthening unions responded with a firm commitment to standardizing pay and practice across government, particularly for low-skilled blue-collar workers. In so doing, the union leadership drew on other (nonviolent, and even color-blind) repertoires of the civil rights movement. Consistent with the theory and practice of social protest articulated by scholars such as Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and Piven and Cloward, this protective black occupational niche is substantially the product of African Americans’ activism in their unions.
The Case of the FWS
We document the influence of employee mobilization on the pay parity of black public sector workers by tracing the creation of a government pay scale. Wage schedules can promote equality in earnings by offering workers transparent benchmarks of wage minima and by leveling the overall distribution of earnings. The effects of such scales can go beyond their industries, too. In fact, Rebecca Oliver finds that the maintenance of a given level of macroeconomic wage equality is more likely in countries with extensive pay scales. 20 Trade unions hence tend to favor wage schedules, although they are not always responsible for their creation.
For over a century, the US federal government has relied on wage scales to set the wages of its employees according to the prevailing rate of pay for comparable work in the private sector. But implementation of this principle has been neither universal nor uniform. The government first established the prevailing wage for federal navy yard workers during the Civil War. Congress then extended it to the Government Printing Office in the 1924 Kiess Act; to Tennessee Valley Authority workers in the 1933 TVA Act; and to nonindustrial (classified) federal employees in the 1923 Classification Act, the 1949 Classification Act, and the 1962 Salary Reform Act. Procedures for setting pay include unionized collective bargaining, a wage conference process that includes employee representatives, and an executive committee of political appointees.
The FWS, the wage schedule for federal blue-collar workers and our empirical focus for its racial implications, was a relative latecomer to federal pay setting. 21 Enacted in 1972, the scale sets pay by determining the local prevailing wage in comparable private sector occupations. 22 Although pay varies by area (and Congress restrains system-wide pay increases), earnings and protections under the FWS can be more attractive to black workers than those of the private sector, where racial labor market disparities are sharper. Of particular note is how this system protects workers in rural labor markets, including those of the Deep South. In Alabama, for example, black-white wage differences are smaller for federal blue-collar workers than clerical and white-collar workers (who benefit from a nationally set pay scale, the General Schedule). 23 Here, FWS employees earn the prevailing wage afforded to private sector employees in metropolitan areas, but apply it to areas with a lower cost of living.
Trade unions help to protect this system in two ways. First, they are involved in setting pay by conducting local wage surveys of comparative private sector jobs. These surveys advise agencies on pay determination procedures in their local wage area. At the national level, a joint labor-management Federal Prevailing Rate Advisory Committee—whose members also include labor unions and an independent chairman (as well as agency representatives)—oversees these activities. Second, trade unions can use the system as a reference point to hold management accountable in instances of pay discrimination. 24 The system provides a standard by which workers can advocate for fair compensation.
Among the most involved unions is the AFGE, which, as we will show, played a historic role in the system’s enactment. The following sections document how the mobilization of black AFGE members prompted the union to pursue the enactment of the FWS. Although the union sought that goal through institutional channels, the sharp shift in union attention to the demands of black, blue-collar federal workers is explained by the militant mobilization of those employees at the union’s contemporaneous conventions. We confirm this development through the extensive analysis of primary archival sources, most notably a memoir of union leadership documenting its history, 25 the published legislative and regulatory material that led up to and followed the enactment of the Federal Wage System (1967–82), and a survey of the Washington Post column “Federal Diary,” which followed developments in the federal workforce closely during this time.
Whites and Women in Federal Trade Unions: The Origins of the AFGE
In its early years, the AFGE paid little attention to black or blue-collar issues, in part because the group ironically had opted out of organizing craft workers. Its predecessor within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), had attempted a large-scale organizational drive in 1931 to recruit craftsmen in the federal service. Other AFL craft unions, however, successfully challenged the move. When the AFL ruled in favor of the craft unions, most of the NFFE membership voted to leave the AFL via referendum. A few members—mostly white-collar members of the DC-area locals—opposed the exodus. Appealing the decision, they earned an AFL charter for a new affiliate: the AFGE. The result was a federal trade union whose membership was overwhelmingly white.
Recruiting new members was difficult. Clientelism pervaded the civil service. Although the Pendleton Act of 1883 helped to establish more meritocratic employment, much of the spoils system was still in place. Furthermore, the onset and protraction of the Great Depression constrained the union’s potential membership. Consider the severity of the personnel cuts enacted in 1932 and 1933 (the Economy Acts): pay reductions of 15 percent for most federal employees (including the president and vice president); one-month, no-pay furloughs every year for employees earning more than $1,000 per year; and suspended promotions, limited vacancies, terminated overtime pay, and compulsory retirement. 26
Note that those government practices drew the AFGE’s attention to women’s issues. Women were among the most affected by the Economy Acts, as Congress ordered that agencies lay off members of married couples jointly employed by the federal government before any others. 27 Wives, whose labor the government often undervalued and underpaid, were more likely than their husbands to receive a pink slip. The AFGE began to represent female federal workers and even promoted them to high levels of union leadership, including the Executive Council. 28 Prioritizing gender discrimination issues, the union’s policy agenda included, for example, a maternity leave bill that passed in the Senate in 1949. 29
The AFGE’s engagement with gender equity did not translate into a concern with racial equity. Racism was no more foreign to public sector unions than to private sector unions, where both animosity from white workers and the segregation of American workers into “black” and “white” jobs purposefully prevented interracial organizing. 30 Within the AFGE, locals appear to have maintained more integrationist policies—a practice that distinguished the union from some of its sister organizations. 31 The union’s self-published historical account identifies only one attempt to promote the rights of its African American members during this period: a Bill of Rights drafted in 1938 “for the protection of some 8,000 Negroes employed by the Federal and District of Columbia governments.” 32 The absence of additional information about the charter in the account suggests that those plans soon evaporated.
Affirmative Action for White-Collar Service
Racial equity was not a genuine priority for the federal government, either. The postwar expansion of the federal workforce did, however, compel President Kennedy’s Democratic administration to project an image of fair employment in the federal service. 33 Previous administrations had taken an interest in minority hiring, but it was Kennedy’s initiatives in 1961 that responded to the growing demands of the civil rights movement and gave some ballast to reforming hiring practices. Executive Order 10925 merged the Committee on Government Contracts and the Committee on Government Employment Policy into a new presidential committee: the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. 34
The executive order was a calculated, top-down political move. The appointment of Lyndon Johnson, the vice president, as the initiative’s chairman intended to build the Texan’s liberal reputation—even though he himself was reluctant to devote resources to the policy. 35 In an interview, the executive director of the committee (later, commission), John G. Feild, recalled the vice president stating at one meeting, “Let’s be careful about that damn budget. Let’s reconsider that whole question. I never had any notion [that] we [were] going to be getting into all of that money right now.” 36 Raising the issue with President Kennedy, who “accepted” the budgetary strain, made little difference. 37
Accordingly, the executive order was concerned more with advancing a race-conscious image of the executive than with attending to the demands of African American civil rights groups. 38 Feild admitted that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had only limited involvement in the development of the order. When asked if any civil rights leaders were “brought in” to the project, Feild responded that only “at the very later stages” was Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP, consulted to give it an “extra push.” 39 Control over the earlier stages of the process, from the conception to the drafting of the order, remained in the White House.
Promoting African Americans to higher levels of federal service, strategists believed, could result in electoral gain. In an interview with the political scientist Samuel Krislov, Louis Martin, the African American director of the minorities division of the Democratic National Committee, admitted that high-profile appointments had a far larger political impact than statistics. “Hell, I even had a [black] candidate for Secretary of State,” Martin remarked. 40 These elite, white-collar appointments diverted both the presidency and the public from the racial inequities present elsewhere. The limited attention and political will of the executive on the issue, combined with the reluctance of federal unions to advocate more forcefully for African Americans, therefore restricted the commission’s ability to transform black federal employment. 41
The Expansion of Black Federal Employment
Despite the commission’s limited goals, the black federal workforce ultimately expanded—but for other reasons. First, the postwar expansion of the federal government significantly increased the number of available public positions. The growth of government during the Second World War (and then again during the Vietnam War) produced greater opportunities in public sector jobs for women, whom the government mobilized in the absence of white men, and African Americans, who had limited enlistment opportunity in the Armed Services in the 1940s (and lost out on the GI Bill benefits); African Americans were of course conscripted for Vietnam. Crucially, as Jennifer Laird has noted, the large supply of new jobs did not displace white men. Otherwise, the expansion would have faced the possibility of reversal. 42
The enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 justified the distribution of many of those new jobs to African Americans. The act, which empowered the US Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute discrimination and other abuses of citizens’ rights, extended those rights to federal government employees under Section 717. To monitor and enforce that directive, Congress charged the US Civil Service Commission with the task of investigating complaints and issuing judgments and created a new agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to regulate against discrimination in employment. The new agency’s modest enforcement authority, however, compelled Congress to strengthen its powers in the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunities Enforcement Act. That second act allowed the EEOC to “sue employers in Federal district courts who failed to respond to orders.” 43 Taken together, the postwar federal legislation helped to protect black workers from discrimination, in both the private and public sectors.
Especially important, the geographic concentration of these jobs in Washington, DC, promoted opportunities for the city’s African American residents. In his study of black federal employment, Krislov notes the “striking” difference between the employment of African Americans in central headquarters and in the regions. He reports that African Americans constituted about one in eight federal employees in 1965; in the Washington area, they constituted nearly one in four. 44
The prominence of DC-based public sector jobs for African Americans nationally stands out against more general labor patterns as well. Black federal employment also grew in other northern cities and in specific agencies. For example, one of the present authors tracked the number of black federal workers in Chicago employed under the General Schedule, and found that it more than doubled, jumping from 94 to 219, between 1956 and 1960. Meanwhile in Mobile, Alabama, where discriminating labor markets had expelled African Americans northward, the number stayed the same: zero. 45 Moreover, disparities in hiring practices within the federal service led to more favorable conditions for black workers in some agencies than in others. Krislov compared the centralized and aggressive system of settling complaints at the Veterans Administration, for instance, to the opaque promotional practices of the Patent Office. The former reduced discrimination, promoted African Americans to higher rungs of service, and raised the agency’s profile as an equal opportunity employer—so much so that Ebony magazine called the Veterans Administration “the government’s most integrated agency.” 46
Most of the newly hired African Americans, furthermore, worked in blue-collar jobs. Between 1965 and 1967 the percentage of African Americans employed at lower grades (General Schedule 1–4) increased by over 10 percent at the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Information Agency, and the Government Printing Office, while their representation at higher grades (General Schedule 12–18) in these agencies rose by less than half a percentage point. 47 That said, Washington contained nearly half of the black high-skilled federal workforce (General Schedule 12–18) at the time; but that was a function of the higher overall employment of African Americans in DC-based federal agencies. Washington also contained, by extension, greater numbers of black low-grade and blue-collar employees than elsewhere. 48
Black Mobilization within the AFGE
The growing presence of African Americans in blue-collar jobs offered federal unions the opportunity to expand their membership by organizing these new workers. Few unions stirred, however. In the case of the AFGE, the decision to integrate black members and to incorporate black demands was the product of contentious black politics within the organization. Against the backdrop of the fomenting civil rights movement of the 1960s, racism paralyzed the largely blue-collar Local 361 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, to the point of receivership. Ralph Biser, a former auto repairman and Metal Trades unionist, decided to establish a multiracial board—despite the anxieties and protests of some colleagues. The initiative succeeded, and it propelled Biser to the leadership of District 14 (the greater Washington area), in which role he prioritized the needs of African American and blue-collar members. He also diversified district leadership. During Biser’s tenure, the national representatives of District 14 included white and black men, as well as white and black women. Subsequently, Biser prepared the African American unionist Major Travis to take his place as head of the district. The promotion of workers from underrepresented groups to higher levels of office was not immediately welcomed by the national office, but it assured the development of District 14.49
A race-conscious protest vote by Biser and his DC allies in 1962 was the first step toward changing the union’s national-level strategy on race and blue-collar wages. That year, the group opposed the election of John Griner. But they ultimately agreed to accept his leadership in exchange for several concessions—including, critically, the union-wide adoption of black and blue-collar policy issues. According to Biser, that ensured that Griner could “open many doors to my people which had been denied to them before.” The Griner-Biser agreement moreover produced the union’s “pioneering” Fair Practices Department, a black-led national office to protect union members from discrimination and unfair treatment, as well as the Wage Board Department, whose “most important and major objective” was the enactment of a transparent, unified wage schedule for blue-collar workers. By channeling the priorities of black members in District 14 to the national union policy agenda, the Biser-Griner agreement redirected union attention to blue-collar issues.
Several other factors supported Griner’s decision to direct union attention to African American and blue-collar issues. The first was a jurisdictional void left by the AFGE’s rival union, the NFFE, whose membership was largely white-collar and at management level. 50 Second, the recent enactment of civil rights legislation empowered African American federal workers (and the unions that represented them) to protect their gains. 51 Third, an executive order signed by President Kennedy in 1962 extended some collective bargaining rights to federal unions and, in doing so, permitted a shift in tone and tactics. 52 These factors laid the groundwork for the AFGE’s landmark campaign to enact a wage schedule for blue-collar federal workers.
The AFGE and the Campaign for Racial Wage Parity
By 1967, the union made the leap from agenda setting to action. Drawing on the nonviolent repertoires of contention promoted by civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., it aimed to reform the nonstatutory method of setting pay for blue-collar federal employees (the coordinated FWS) through an institutional channel: congressional legislation. The initial bills (H.R. 318 and S. 2303) proposed that local-area wage boards, led by chief agency officials, conduct regional surveys of the prevailing rate of private sector pay across the blue-collar occupations. From the results of these surveys, area wage boards would propose a ten-step wage-grade plan for each occupational category to the Federal Wage Board Council—composed of employees and representatives and led by the Civil Service Commissioner—for approval. Although the NFFE (whose membership had also moved further to the left by then) protested the weak role of the council, neither the administration nor private labor unions favored centralizing the wage-setting system. The AFGE opted to appease private unions on this issue in exchange for their political support in the broader legislative campaign. 53
So enthusiastic was AFGE membership about this campaign that the hearings drew an unprecedented number of observers. “Over 150 people,” estimated Senator Mike Monroney (D-OK, chairman of the Committee on the Post Office and Civil Service), were “unable to find seats.” 54 The raucous crowd represented the many black and blue-collar members of the AFGE. By then, nearly half the union’s membership worked low-skilled and blue-collar federal jobs (45 percent of their 245,000 members). 55
Although the union attempted to present its activism as color blind (a strategy the AFGE adopted in these times of bitter civil rights struggles), this outward stance belied the strong racial implications and overtones of the union’s advocacy. Explicit allusions to race are notably absent from the legislative hearings. Instead, the testimony of Royal Sims—the union’s most prominent black member (a national vice president) and a perceived racial moderate 56 —highlighted three areas of the Veterans Administration (his employer) that called “rather emphatically for improvement[:] the laundry service, the housekeeping service, and the dietetic service.” 57 Few areas of the American labor market were more profoundly racialized than such “domestic” services. In fact, holders of these jobs were historically excluded for racial motives from participating in the social programs that otherwise improved American work and welfare conditions. 58 Moreover, when Sims cited the below-poverty rates of pay for laundry service workers in Dallas, Nashville, Roanoke, and Shreveport ($1.37 an hour, more than 10 cents below the poverty line of $1.48 an hour), he depicted a piercing image of wage inequality in the segregated South.
The implications of the trade union’s agenda for racial equality notwithstanding, many black members were critical of the timidity of its color-blind approach. At the next AFGE convention in the tumultuous year of 1968, African Americans mobilized again in protest, drawing on the power of disruption and the more aggressive repertoires of contention promoted by civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X. Dissatisfaction was spreading across the organization: this time, militants from Philadelphia joined those from Washington. Convening secret meetings that threatened to “blow this convention wide open,” 900 black delegates charged Griner with ignoring racial issues, Sims with color blindness, and the AFGE as a whole with conservatism. 59 When the union voted to adhere to its no-strike pledge, nearly a hundred black delegates openly protested. 60
Sims and Griner responded immediately. Almost overnight, they hatched a program that satisfied the black workers’ demands. By the convention’s conclusion, black delegates from Washington once again supported Griner, whereas those from Philadelphia withdrew their disapproving comments about Sims. 61
The limited documentation of the Sims-Griner plan obscures its details, but it is clear that the pace and progressivity of the federal wage board reform escalated after the protest. 62 The following year, the number of wage board bills introduced in Congress was almost double the number introduced in the prior two years. 63 The new bills also went further than before by extending the wage schedule to 100,000 nonappropriated-fund employees, 64 increasing pay for night shifts and travel time, and weakening the authority of the Civil Service Commission in wage setting. The revised council, these bills proposed, would replace the Civil Service commissioner with an impartial chairman (drawn from neither labor nor management).
As the pace of hearings accelerated, so too did the Republican administration’s opposition to the bills. Management preferred a system of administrative control to one of legislative obligation. 65 Although the initiative generally found favor in the Democratic-controlled Congress, virtually every representative of the American state—ranging from the chairman of the Civil Service Commission to an assistant secretary of defense—denounced the “inflexible” bills. 66 An eight-day wildcat strike in March 1970 by US postal workers stoked tensions further. When Nixon terminated the strike by granting workers both a pay raise and the right to collective bargaining, bullish blue-collar workers within the AFGE pressured their representatives to capitalize on the president’s apparent turn of mind. 67
The ninety-first Congress hence hurried to pass legislation “tailored” to meet the approval of the president in its closing days. 68 The bill that passed on December 15, 1970, reduced the number of steps from ten to four, excluded nonappropriated-fund employees, and offered no additional compensation for night-shift employees. 69 Yet a veto followed two weeks later. A monetarist, President Nixon asserted that the “fires of inflation are fueled” when the rising federal wages compelled private wages to do the same. 70 Increasing spending, he also argued, would lead to job cuts—particularly in the heavily blue-collar defense department, where employee support for the bill was high. (Nixon frequently gave lip service to progressive social policies and then either sidelined or rejected them.) 71
The presidential veto, however, did not stop the legislative momentum. On the contrary, House members introduced eighteen new bills from January to March 1971. Other unions (machinists, post office employees, and even the Service Employees International Union) joined the AFGE in solidarity. Labor leaders drew explicit attention to the agitated mobilization of employees, too: “We are being faced with a grave situation,” Griner implored. “Militancy among this group of employees is on the increase. All they are asking for is justice and equity. I say to you, they are not getting justice and equity.” 72 The workers’ renewed vigor won results. A second bill, more progressive than its predecessor, passed Congress in August 1972. This one included five within-grade pay steps, the night-shift differential, an impartial council chairman, and, very important, the nonappropriated-fund employees. Congressional and union enthusiasm aside, observers doubted whether Nixon would approve the new bill. 73
In a startling about-face, the president signed Public Law 92-392 on August 19, 1972. Contingency intervened. Griner had made an arrangement. Bidding for second-term votes in the early days of the Watergate revelations, Nixon agreed to sign the bill in exchange for the labor leader’s personal endorsement of his candidacy. 74 (Griner did not go so far, however, as to tender the union’s formal support for a Republican campaign.) The bill had immediate effects for African Americans in federal service. In the 1970s, about half of lower-grade blue-collar employees were black (double the statistic for white-collar workers). 75 The significant achievement for the union’s mobilized black members was a product of both disruptive and institutional techniques of social protest.
Discussion and Conclusions
The Federal Wage System undoubtedly improved the quality of blue-collar government work, but it retained deficiencies. First, labor leaders conceded several desirable policy changes (e.g., travel and overtime pay, the inclusion of contracted private employees), and, in the case of AFGE president Griner, a Republican endorsement as well. Second, the implementation of the FWS permitted some pay disparities to remain. Employees in rural areas benefit more than those in urban areas, where limited wage increases struggle to keep pace with the high cost of living. Moreover, the government’s subsequent expansion of private contracts and market-oriented approaches to public management has narrowed the influence of the FWS (especially in the crucial departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs). 76 Third, some wage schedules reduce inequalities more than others. 77 Although the white-collar General Schedule suffers from cumulative underpayment problems and a significant pay disparity against private sector work, racial wage differences are less than in the blue-collar FWS. 78 On average, African Americans in the General Schedule system earn 89 percent as much as whites, whereas those in the FWS system earn 84 percent. 79 Local determinations of pay in the FWS exaggerate the disparity for blue-collar federal workers (the General Schedule, by contrast, sets uniform pay rates at the national level). Finally, those “good government jobs,” as Frederick Gooding Jr. has written, rendered black public servants “better off than those blacks who remained trapped in depressed southern economies, [but] they were nonetheless consistently restricted from upwardly mobile economic and social growth opportunities.” 80 In short, equality cannot rest on the prop of public sector work in an otherwise racially unjust economy.
Even with these limitations, however, the reforms illustrate important dimensions of social movement theory. Drawing on both the militant and nonviolent repertoires of contention of the civil rights movement, protestors first shifted elites’ political agendas and then allowed them to compromise with their adversaries. 81 Systems of oppression are unlikely to meet all the demands of the protestors. Moreover, concessions are likely to disarm a movement; and the mobilization of the AFGE’s black militants appears to have peaked during the campaign to enact the FWS. Nonetheless, the protests of the poor or politically marginal can result in a tangible political change: in this case, it was the legislative enactment of a wage schedule for blue-collar federal employees. That the protestors were black union members forbidden even from striking demonstrates the potency of disruption for shifting public discourse and policy. 82 Although the FWS strayed from the movement’s radical origins, even “modest concessions,” as Piven and Cloward wrote, “demonstrate that protest ‘works.’” 83
This is not the first article to demonstrate how identity-based social movements within the public sector can redress economic and social injustices, if only to a limited degree. In fact, research has renewed attention to this pattern. In There’s Always Work at the Post Office, Philip Rubio demonstrates how black postal workers drew on the political techniques of civil rights activism and labor unionism to protest inequality in the workplace. Their advocacy played a critical role in the wildcat strike of 1970 and in the subsequent enactment of collective bargaining rights for postal workers. Gooding, too, documents the postwar struggle of DC-based black federal workers to secure and protect quality employment, despite ongoing resistance from whites, administrators, and the structural biases of the broader political economy. Moreover, this line of research goes beyond black mobilization. Lee Ann Banaszak shows how women in the public sector stealthily advanced gender equality; and, in a forthcoming book, Rick Valelly examines how LGBT activists used similar tactics to level inequalities in public sector work as well. 84
The renewed scholarly attention to the historical mobilization of marginalized public sector workers also draws attention to how weak organization could affect contemporary America. Unions in the public sector reduce wage inequality by 16.2 percent for US males and by 10.7 percent for US females—far more than unions in the private sector (which reduce male inequality and female inequality only 1.7 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively). 85 Attacks on public sector unionism threaten to reverse these trends. 86 Moreover, the restructuring and privatization of public employment could endanger the black middle class, whose economic mobility rests disproportionately on that sector. 87 This very disproportionate return to African Americans’ working in the public sector, many of whom belong to unions, informed the GOP-orchestrated, anti-public-sector-union strategy manifest in several states in the 2010s, notably Wisconsin and Indiana. 88 Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor between 2011 and 2019, was a key protagonist whom many critics accused of fanning racist politics in his prolonged efforts to dilute public sector union rights and power. 89 Walker mobilized around the “right to work” antiunion law, a scheme originating with a racist antiunion movement orchestrated by far-right white supremacists in the Texas oil industry and their supporters in the 1940s. 90 In Wisconsin, right-to-work laws weakened unions and the public employees they represent. 91 Hannah Walker and Dylan Bennett find that appeals to racial animus by the Walker administration informed its attack on public sector unions, with large African American memberships, and on collective bargaining rights. The administration’s rhetoric and proposals were “inherently racialized,” contrasting “public employees as lazy” with the moral superiority of private sector workers: elite narratives constructed “private workers as deserving and public workers as undeserving,” articulating a “new expression of an entrenched thread in American political history, situating the white workers in opposition to the nonwhite worker.” 92
The public sector is an important occupational niche for other groups as well, including women, people with disabilities, and veterans. 93 For example, female workers in the general labor market earn about 82 percent of what their male counterparts earn. The ratio is more favorable for those in government employment: under the FWS specifically, women earn about 85 percent as much as men. 94 As the organizational clout of public workers declines, so too would opportunities for the advancement of several marginalized groups.
What Michael Katz characterizes as the “most powerful vehicle of economic mobility for African Americans”—the public sector and public employment—was not always so, in our view. 95 Nor is the black occupational niche of public employment simply the product of institutional conditions. The migration to urban centers of public work, the vitality of public sector unions, and the tendency of government to “model” fair employment facilitated, but did not guarantee, the improvement of wage equality in government work. Rather, that outcome results from the contextually specific mobilization of black, blue-collar federal employees and their union leadership. To substantiate our thesis, we documented the development of the FWS. Growing numbers of black, blue-collar federal workers in Washington, DC, pivoted the attention of their newly empowered trade union, the American Federation of Government Employees, toward racial workplace concerns, and with them, the enactment of the Federal Wage Schedule: a crucial policy tool for securing fairer pay.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the comments of those who attended the panel “A Good Government Job? Racial Equality and the Public Sector” at the 2018 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, especially Paul Frymer, and of Trevor Brown, Wayne Coleman, Brian DeWyngaert, Katie Rader, Sidney Tarrow, and George Wilson. Errors remain our own.
Authors’ Note
Isabel Perera is currently affiliated with Cornell University.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.