Race,Repression and the Future of New Labor Activism

In their 2021 Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN) report, Kochan and coauthors (Kochan et al., 2022) offer several important and provocative notes about the future of labor organizing. Noting that union membership has undergone a consistent and pronounced decline since the 1970s, the authors draw attention to a recent surge of labor activism. Relying on data from their 2017 survey, the authors discuss the growing number of workers who support not just collective bargaining, but also desire increased voice and representation in workplace matters and value organizational investment in labor market services, such as job training or retirement assistance. A pronounced shift in the way workers describe their interests as well as their willingness to advocate for their goals is under way.

Consequently, union membership is on the rise, but labor activists have also utilized other approaches to realize their goals. They have returned to tried-and-true methods such as launching strikes and relying on worker centers that organize at the local level to advance workers’ interests around issues, such as employee health and safety; however, they have also pursued newer forms of labor activism, such as organizing across a sector (seen in the Fight for $15 campaign), mobilizing independent contractors (the Independent Drivers’ Guild), or targeting workers based on shared identity rather than employer (the National Black Worker Center).

These dynamics raise the question that concludes Kochan et al.'s (2022) paper and guides the discussion here. We know that labor activism is surging, with workers pursuing and supporting union membership and seeking out new ways to organize for different working conditions. But what will be the long-term implications of these efforts? Are they the beginning of sustained change, or do they amount to a “flash in the pan?” In this paper, I consider how this rise in labor activism has implications for Black workers and identify two major concerns that would need to be addressed in order for the current wave of labor activism to have long-term potential for change: the importance of directly addressing racial bias and inequality in workplaces and the historic private sector and state-level resistance to efforts to produce racial equity vis-à-vis work and employment.

Race and Racism in Today's Workplaces

In order to consider whether contemporary labor activism can potentially improve Black workers’ occupational position over the long term, it is key to consider the current challenges, issues, and obstacles Black workers face in the labor market and in organizations. In general, Black workers are overrepresented in low-wage, low-status jobs in the service industry, and much more scarcely present in more influential, high-paying, prestigious work. In the health care sector, for instance, Black workers are represented at a mere 5% of physicians, but 30% of home health care workers. Data reveal a pattern of vertical segregation where Black workers are concentrated in the lower-paying jobs, while the most highly paying and prestigious positions within that same industry are often disproportionately held by white employees.

Similar patterns are present across industries as well. Black employees constitute 33% of the nation's transit workers and 18% of custodians and janitors, yet they are a minimal percentage of engineers, tech workers, financial service providers, and other occupational categories that have high status and reward highly skilled work. These data indicate that representationally, the challenges that Black workers face are twofold. Within industries such as education and health care, they are underrepresented at the top levels, yet occupationally, they are also concentrated in jobs (transit work, food service) that tend to be lower status and less well-paid.

Within many of these occupations, Black workers encounter some common challenges. Discrimination continues to remain a persistent factor, particularly at the hiring stage. Much of the disparity between Black and white workers can be attributed to hiring discrimination, adverse stereotypes, and assumptions about Black employees’ work ethic, which continues to shape the ways hiring managers respond to their applications (Pedulla, 2020). Additionally, meta-analyses of hiring discrimination reveal that it has not declined since the 1970s, meaning that the challenges Black candidates face finding work have not abated even with major advances, such as widespread diversity and inclusion initiatives or even the public visibility of the first Black president (Quillian et al., 2017). In short, we know that Black workers encounter significant added barriers simply trying to find gainful employment.

For those who do manage to leap this hurdle to find work, issues and problems persist. Once hired, many Black workers are excluded from the networks and relationships with managers and supervisors that could lead to advancement (Melaku, 2019). They also encounter racialized organizations where whiteness functions as an invisible credential, and commitment to racial equity is negligible, even nonexistent (Ray, 2019). Even though diversity and inclusion policies are now commonplace, many organizations still fail to devote resources towards the types of initiatives that actually improve the numbers of underrepresented workers (Dobbin & Kalev, 2022). Instead, they rely on Black professionals in their employ to find, recruit, and support Black employees and otherwise make organizational spaces more amenable to Black customers and clients (Wingfield, 2019). Ultimately, these patterns leave Black workers coping with burnout, alienation, and often stalled at middle levels with limited opportunities for advancement and mobility.

Addressing Race Directly

What impact can the new wave of labor activism have on these issues? Black workers are open about how these dynamics adversely impact their occupational opportunities, and Kochan et al. (2022) find that employees cite a voice gap in which they lack input into workplace procedures that affect them. Some of the areas where workers cite the largest gaps–abuse protections, antidiscrimination initiatives, and measures of respect towards employees—are sites that are likely to be fraught for Black workers. For the current wave of labor activism to last and make significant and meaningful change, it will have to address these and other racial disparities head-on.

Kochan et al. (2022) hint at several ways this can happen. They note that as labor activism has shifted to meet the needs of today's workers in the current economy, one approach has involved organizing workers around categories related to identity. The National Black Worker Center is one example of this. Organizations like this highlight the lack of racial equity in workplaces, particularly at top levels. Additionally, they can lobby elected representatives to institute laws and regulations that would help to minimize disparities.

Labor activism that focuses on organizing in sectors can also attend to racial issues that may be present among these workers. For instance, organizations that advocate for health care workers can take a broader, more expansive view of how racial dynamics impact providers across the professional sphere. Black doctors face challenges in health care that they perceive as more structurally rooted, relating to the lack of mentors, nepotism in hiring, and underrepresentation that creates heightened visibility. Yet Black technicians argue that the issues they encounter have more to do with managers’ personal racial biases that lead to disparities in work assignments and difficulty getting hired (Wingfield & Chavez, 2020). Organizers that represent and advocate for workers in health care would need to take the breadth of these experiences into consideration and be attuned to various ways that everyday practices in the health care industry adversely affect Black care providers differently. For labor organizers to make sustained change, activists will have to acknowledge and confront disparities like these directly.

This approach will likely mean a multitude of organizations actively seeking to make racially equitable workplaces a priority. For instance, nurses already have a fairly robust union that advocates for their interests. Yet in a study of Black health care workers, I found that Black nurses observed multiple workplace dynamics that disadvantaged them relative to their white colleagues. They found that they tended to be concentrated on less-desirable night shifts and faced blocked routes for advancement and mobility. They also found their unions singularly unhelpful in addressing these or other race-related obstacles (Wingfield, 2019).

Black doctors, like many other professional workers, are less likely to be unionized at all. They also encountered different challenges than the nurses with whom they worked. When considering whether and how race affected their work, Black doctors described being excluded from key networks and dispassionate colleagues who were often indifferent to or unaware of ways patients experienced medical racism. Without a union, it would fall to powerful professional associations like the American Medical Association (AMA) to make these issues central in efforts to improve physicians’ work experiences. These are examples from a single industry, but they highlight that multiple organizations and activists would need to take these issues seriously in order for the new labor activism to change workplaces in ways that could have far-reaching outcomes.

Anticipating Backlash

Transforming work and workplaces is no easy feat. Doing so with an eye towards establishing more racial equity is a particularly daunting task. For that reason, organizers should also be attuned to the lessons of history and remain fully cognizant that efforts to create more racial equity in workplaces have often been met with vitriol and violent repression. In order for the new wave of labor activism to have long-term consequences, organizers would need not only to be attuned to the need for racial equity at work, but to prepare for the myriad ways management, media, and the state will enact measures to undermine their efforts.

There are already some contemporary examples of how anti-union efforts leverage racial stereotypes to undermine organizers’ efforts. In 2022 ex-Amazon worker Christian Small successfully managed, against enormous odds, to organize employees at his former plant. In response to his efforts, executives in a closed-door meeting derided him as “not smart or articulate” and pledged to make him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” (Wong, 2020). Executives did not mean this as a compliment. Rather, they were drawing from long-held stereotypes of Black Americans as lazy, ignorant, and dumb. These depictions cast Black workers as people who do not belong in or qualify for leadership roles. In this case, Amazon's characterizations did not deter Small's fellow workers from unionizing, but their executives’ remarks are a disturbing reminder of how anti-union business owners can easily leverage racist attitudes in an effort to curtail organizing efforts.

It is also useful to consider the ways violent repression has served as a check on individuals and organizations seeking to advance racial equity through labor reforms. While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr is revered today, his popularity tanked when he began not just to criticize the Vietnam War, but to advocate for economic reforms as well as racial ones. King's assassination during a visit to Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike underscores this particular turn in his thinking and political analysis and highlights how objectionable it was to some segments of the population.

The Knights of Labor are another instructive example of how the state mobilizes to crack down on labor reforms, particularly when they have the potential for cross-racial solidarity. This group, founded in 1869, included Black and white workers, women as well as men, and sought equal pay, an end to child labor, and an eight-hour workday, among other reforms. While they had some successes, they also attracted negative responses and attention from both business executives and the state. This culminated in the response to the 1877 Great Southwest Railway Strike, which attracted violent police attention and eventually led law enforcement to crack down on the organization, contributing to its demise in 1949. Less than a decade later after this strike ended, President Grover Cleveland would send in federal troops to quell another rail workers’ strike, contributing to riots that left 30 people dead. A hundred years later, the Black Panther Party's economic critiques of capitalism and their demands for “full employment for our people” would form a core part of their platform. This attention to the economic aspects of racial inequality, coupled with their embrace of their 2^nd amendment rights, also drew violent state repression and harassment.

While it is certainly possible, the historical record does not necessarily mean that today's labor organizers are guaranteed to face federal troops or state-sanctioned murders. The extent of state resistance may differ depending on the political climate in which organizers operate. For instance, the Biden administration has taken steps to make work more equitable and fair for employees. These include an Executive Order signed in 2021 that raised federal contractors’ minimum wage to $15/hour and indexed it to inflation, the Federal Trade Commission's efforts to end noncompete clauses that depress workers’ autonomy and wages, and the Federal Labor Relations Authority's choice to recognize its staff union. These actions are intended to demonstrate the administration's support for workers and the need to create conditions that allow them to thrive.

Since these actions are administrative decisions rather than federal laws, it is entirely possible that subsequent administrations can undo this work. Indeed, several of the Biden administration's decisions were a response to his predecessor's anti-labor initiatives and action. During Donald Trump's tenure, career civil servants were stripped of protections and federal employee unions saw their reach constrained. While future administrations may not go quite so far as to engage in some of the same violent tactics as those that curtailed the Knights of Labor and the Black Panther Party, it is entirely realistic that future presidential administrations may be less supportive of labor organizing and workers’ rights and may mobilize federal agencies to limit their reach and opportunities to make change.

Conclusion

On their own, labor activists and organizers seeking racial equity often draw harsh responses. When these efforts are combined, and organizers attempt to push for better job conditions for Black workers or encourage multiracial groups to join forces to improve working conditions, history shows that the repercussions can be swift, harsh, and even deadly. If today's labor organizers want to see their work have a long-lasting impact, it will be important not just to address persistent racial inequalities that exist in workplaces and labor markets. These activists must also be prepared to withstand opponents’ attempts to stoke racial divisions by inflaming stereotypes and biases, and if their campaigns are successful, they may need to be mindful of the fact that historically, winning concessions has bred enormous resistance.