CHAPTER FIVE

The Legacy of Exclusion

From the abolitionists, to the suffragists, to the unionists, to the civil rights and feminist activists, the bravery of a few to challenge the power of the many is part of our national heritage. But power, even when successfully challenged by underdogs, does not go gentle into that good night. So while the civil rights movement in many ways has beaten the racists and the feminists have beaten the sexists, many of the institutions and structures created by once legally sanctioned hierarchies continue to marginalize black people, women, and immigrants.

These racial, gender, and ethnic hierarchies still reach deeply into nearly every aspect of our society, including our labor markets. Although Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial and gender discrimination in the workplace, most of our workplaces remain deeply segregated. And people of color and women still disproportionately work in the lowest-paid jobs. These are the occupations that shape the new working class, a proliferation of underpaid, undervalued jobs in all sorts of service industries, from health care to restaurants. History shows up in the wallets of the new working class.

As the manufacturing footprint in the working class has shrunk, so has the white male archetype that has historically defined the working class. And as the share of private-sector workers in unions shrank along with those jobs, and working-class jobs became more diffuse and spread across numerous sectors, the idea of a coherent working class has lost its force. The racial and gender diversity of today’s working class facilitates its invisibility in two important ways. First, a unifying, single archetype of the new working class remains elusive. Would it be a Latina hotel housekeeper? A black home care worker? A white warehouse worker? An Asian cashier? Definitions want to be neat and tidy, but this working class lacks the defining center of gravity that manufacturing provided the old working class. The second way in which the racial and gender diversity of the new working class undercuts its power is by the very fact that it is so disproportionately black, brown, and female, carrying the lingering residue of second-class citizenship status.

As discussed in Chapter 3, our political system, especially our politicians and the people who fund their campaigns, remains very much a white male establishment. The old working class had political and economic power on its side, aided and abetted by unassailable white male privilege. White men in manufacturing had all the best jobs, despite legal progress that was supposed to make it otherwise. And while white women and people of color, especially black women, have made significant progress into managerial and supervisory positions, these positions remain dominated by white men.

The decades-long destruction of American manufacturing profoundly changed the working class—the neighborhoods, the jobs, the families. What had once been nearly universal guaranteed well-paying jobs for young men fresh from high school graduation were yanked overseas with little regard for the devastation left behind. To add insult to injury, the loss of manufacturing jobs was often heralded as a sign of progress. Black men, who had fought for decades for their right to these well-paying jobs, watched them evaporate just as they were finally admitted to competitive apprenticeships and added to seniority lists. When capital fled for Mexico or China, the shuttered factories in America’s biggest cities left a giant vacuum in their wake, decimating a primary source of jobs for black men that would never be replaced.

The invisibility of today’s working class reflects deeply rooted, often unconscious biases about the worth and value of work done by women and people of color. And for the once privileged white working-class man, the dignity and sense of self-worth that came with a union contract and the trappings of middle-class life are sorely missed and their absence bitterly resented. These are the contours shaping, and sometimes constraining, the economic and political power of the new working class.

The Fight of Our Lives

Until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, neither women nor people of color had a right to equal employment. It was totally legal, as well as common practice, for employers to be explicit about who they wanted to hire—a man or woman, a white person, a black person, or a Latino. If you were a black woman looking for work, your options were clearly spelled out for you in the newspaper classifieds. Anything that didn’t align with your race or gender was out of the question. This legal segregation translated into an earnings hierarchy that mirrored the racial and gender hierarchy in the country. The best jobs were for white men. All managers, supervisors, and professionals were white men and had been since the days of the American Revolution. Black men came next in the earnings hierarchy, but it was a steep drop from the flagship positions reserved for white men, as blacks worked the dirtiest and most dangerous factory jobs or in the fields. White women came next in the pecking order, consigned to low-paid clerical work and a smattering of entry-level factory jobs. Black women were mostly restricted to serving as domestics, cleaning the homes and caring for the children of middle-class and more affluent white families, or working in sweatshops in America’s textile mills or garment factories. In 1960 the vast majority of Latinos lived in the Southwest, where legally they were designated as white but were never truly seen as citizens.¹ Most Latino men at the time worked in manual labor, filling jobs that employed few white men. Unlike black men and women, some Latino men were able to break into higher-skilled factory jobs and some Latinas were able to secure clerical jobs.²

As a result, in 1964 men and women didn’t work the same jobs. Blacks, Latinos, and whites didn’t work the same jobs. And even if the hiring preference wasn’t explicit, pervasive cultural norms made it clear which positions were for whom. In factories, seniority lists and apprenticeship programs were structured in ways to ensure that only white men could advance into higher-paying positions and that a woman would never get a job previously held by a man. In the building and crafts trades, apprenticeships and jobs were controlled through tight kinship or ethnic networks, passed down from fathers to sons and among cousins for generations.³ White women were expected to quit their jobs upon marriage, and were commonly fired upon becoming pregnant. When white women held jobs, they were largely in clerical positions—typing, filing, and answering phones. The same was not true for black women. One hundred years after slavery ended, black women were doing the same work their female ancestors did under bondage: cleaning, cooking, and caring for white people’s homes and children, or working in the fields tending to white people’s crops. In 1960 nearly two-thirds of black women worked in private homes, with earnings only half those of white working women.⁴

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, with its inclusion of both race and sex as categories protected from discrimination in employment, represented a landmark expansion of freedom and opportunity for the majority of American citizens. The muscle behind the bill was a cross-race movement made up of America’s industrial unions and civil rights organizations, along with millions of working-class black people who marched, protested, picketed, and stood up against a brutal racial hierarchy. At the time a Business Week editorial noted, “The summer of 1963 may well go down as a landmark in the history of American industry. With a forcefulness few businessmen ever expected, Negroes nationwide are pressing, individually and in well-organized groups, for more jobs and better jobs. In its drama and impact, the campaign is comparable to the American workers’ drive to unionize at the turn of the century.”⁵ The entrenched racism and bias of whites at the time of the civil rights movement, particularly in regards to hiring, is hard to overstate. One study found that fewer than one in four whites believed that companies should follow the same rules in hiring blacks and whites.⁶ At the same time, with profound illogic, nearly half of both southern and northern whites believed that blacks “had as good of a chance” as whites “to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.”⁷ These two survey responses illuminate two deeply entrenched beliefs: that black people are inferior to white people, and therefore not deserving of equal treatment, and that the playing field is level (even in 1963), belying the structural disadvantage operating in our society.

The reason for inclusion of the category “sex” in the final bill is a source of debate among historians. There is some evidence that it was added by segregationists in an attempt to derail the bill. There’s also evidence that the amendment was prompted by racial anxiety from white women, who worried that black women would be given preferential treatment if gender was not included. There’s also some evidence that black women in the civil rights movement argued for its adoption to ensure that racially focused efforts didn’t leave them behind.⁸ Whatever the motivation, the amendment remained in the final bill, much to the dismay of most men, white, black, or Latino. The very idea that women should be able to have the same jobs as men was seen as both ridiculous and contrary to human nature. Executives at the time deemed women fundamentally, biologically, and emotionally so different from men that it was incomprehensible that the sexes could work side by side, let alone do the same job. The head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged with enforcing the law, said at a press conference that “the whole issue of sex discrimination is terribly complicated,” which was not exactly reassuring. After the White House held a conference on equal employment, a New York Times editorial ridiculed the idea by saying that “it would have been better if Congress had just abolished sex itself,” while the paper’s news coverage focused on the hypothetical problem posed by a man applying to be a Playboy bunny. Meanwhile, over at the New Republic, the editors railed against the White House for taking the sex provision seriously, asking, “Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?”⁹

Dealing with married women’s employment really confounded the EEOC. Cultural norms at the time assumed that married women were dependent on their husbands, leading employers to pay women less in both wages and benefits. Working-class women were much more likely to work outside the home than their middle-class counterparts, and black working-class women even more so. These middle-class and white-centric norms ignored the needs of working-class women of color, who were more likely to be co-breadwinners or the sole breadwinner in the family. While the EEOC immediately banned race-explicit categories in help-wanted ads, it dragged its feet for four years before banning ads designating specific jobs for men or women. In fact, upon passage of the Civil Rights Act, the EEOC made it clear to employers that the agency was solely focused on the advancement of black men.¹⁰ It wasn’t until the women’s movement achieved political clout in the 1970s that enforcement of the gender-discrimination provisions were taken seriously by the EEOC, and thus also by employers.

In the decades since the act was passed, black men and working-class women of all races have fought hard to open the doors to better jobs and benefits. They joined forces through the trade union movement, launching the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Working-class union women, particularly in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, led their unions and the AFL-CIO to take up the cause of child care and put it at the top of the agenda.¹¹ Black unionists led by A. Philip Randolph campaigned for a so-called Freedom Budget for All Americans that would provide a government guarantee of full employment, a higher minimum wage, and a basic income for those who couldn’t work, along with major new investments in education and health care. Randolph unveiled the plan at a White House conference in 1966, just three years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the time, arguing for full employment was a strategic way to end the often zero-sum politics between whites and blacks, where a gain for one race was often seen as a loss for the other. As Randolph wrote with great prescience, “The tragedy is that the workings of our economy so often pit the white poor and the black poor against each other at the bottom of society. We shall solve our problems together or together we shall enter a new era of social disorder and disintegration.”¹² Though the Freedom Budget gained champions in the labor movement, the faith community, and even among some business leaders, its aims were never fully embraced by the political establishment. Toward the end of his life, Randolph explained his thinking: “My philosophy was the result of our concept of effective liberation of the Negro through the liberation of the working people. We never separated the liberation of the white working man from the liberation of the black working man.”¹³

Fifty years have passed since labor and civil rights groups joined forces to promote economic freedom and good jobs as critical to the advancement of civil rights for all people. It was the fight of our lives. And it still is.

Work: Still Separate and Unequal

The largest number of jobs that will be added to our economy in the future are going to be working-class jobs, requiring little education, if any, beyond a high school diploma. These jobs are heavily segregated by race and gender, paying wages that still reflect the long-standing hierarchies that the civil and women’s rights movements fought tenaciously to overcome.

The two charts on this page examine the stubborn racial and gender segregation within the ten occupations that will continue to comprise the largest source of new jobs for the foreseeable future, with nine out of ten of these occupations squarely located in the bargain-basement economy. All but one require little to no education beyond a high school diploma. Nine of the ten jobs are rigidly segregated by gender, with women making up overwhelming majorities in all but three occupations. And seven of the ten largest-growing jobs are disproportionately filled by people of color.

In some of America’s biggest cities, undocumented immigrants toil in pockets of the economy where wage theft is rampant, pay below the minimum wage is common, and abusive and degrading work environments are pervasive. In cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, immigrant labor makes possible the many conveniences desired by the affluent, professional elite: cheap manicures and pedicures, drivers for hire, food and grocery delivery, and care of infants and young children. And for Americans across the country of every socioeconomic background, our nation’s crops are still primarily picked and harvested by immigrants.

Chart 2. Top Ten Largest-Growing Jobs by Gender

Source: Author’s analysis of the 2012 U.S. Census and the 2011 American Community Survey of the ten largest-growing occupations as identified by Department of Labor’s U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.​bls.​gov/​emp/​ep_​table_​104.​htm.

Chart 3. Top Ten Largest-Growing Jobs by Race

Source: Author’s analysis of the 2012 U.S. Census and the 2011 American Community Survey of the ten largest-growing occupations as identified by U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://www.​bls.​gov/​emp/​ep_​table_​104.​htm.

What happened to the promise of Section VII, the provision of the Civil Rights Act that would provide equal opportunity in the workplace?

In a deeply researched and quantitative assessment of the drive to desegregate America’s workplaces, Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey tell the story in Documenting Desegregation of substantial progress despite stubborn and durable privilege. In the years immediately following the Civil Rights Act, from 1966 to 1972, major gains were made among black men, black women, and white women—but, importantly, not at the expense of white men, who actually got a major bump up the advantage ladder.¹⁴ As black men and black women made big gains into working-class jobs, white men got propelled upward into even more managerial positions.¹⁵ Working-class jobs became more integrated, with more black women and white women working together than before, and more black men and white men working together on an equal-status basis. But at the top, white men still had the perch all to themselves, rarely interacting as equals with anyone besides other white men.

The hardened gender segregation began to unravel in the 1970s, as pressure from newly formed feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) forced the EEOC and thus employers to enforce the sex provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Between 1972 and 1980, both black women and white women earned their way into the professions, with black women actually outnumbering black men in professional occupations.¹⁶ White women were the biggest winners during this era, gaining access to both managerial and professional occupations at much higher rates than either black women or black men. Black men made substantial inroads into higher-paying working-class jobs, while women remained largely locked out of those jobs. Overall, white women benefited more from Title VII, securing jobs that once were held by mostly white men in the professions.

By 1980, sixteen years of organized activism and formal federal oversight had resulted in remarkable gains for black women, black men, and white women. But progress ground to a halt in the 1980s, with only white women advancing over the next three decades. At the national level, our political debate became increasingly racialized, particularly around the issue of affirmative action. Conservatives successfully recast affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” and when they secured electoral advantage, they were able to transform this rhetoric into action. Upon winning the presidency, Ronald Reagan quickly knocked the teeth out of federal enforcement, slashing the budget of the EEOC and the office responsible for federal contracting.¹⁷ He appointed Clarence Thomas (now a Supreme Court justice) to head the EEOC and ordered a near stoppage to enforcement of the law. Class-action lawsuits by the EEOC, the easiest way to secure remedies for discrimination, dropped from 1,106 in 1975 to just 51 in 1989.¹⁸

Today progress has stalled on all fronts. The integration of black men into jobs formerly held only by white men advanced rapidly in the 1970s, but this halted in 1980 as factories were being shuttered in favor of cheaper labor overseas. White women made significant gains in the 1980s but stalled out in 2000 as well. Black women made the least progress of the three groups after the Civil Rights Act. In her book Opportunity Denied, Enobong Hannah Branch describes black women as being “between a rock and a hard place,” explaining that “the occupational advancement of black men occurred because of male privilege, and the occupational advancement of white women occurred because of white privilege. However, black women had no point of privilege by which they could advance.”¹⁹ By 2005 it was still the case that black men and women, especially black women, rarely worked in the same job in the same workplace as white men. As a result, in order to achieve completely integrated workplaces in the private sector, more than half of all workers would have to switch jobs.²⁰

According to research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, only four of the twenty most common occupations for men and the twenty most common occupations for women overlap.²¹ Why does gender segregation in the labor market matter, especially for working-class women? Because any job that is performed primarily by women pays less than a similar job performed primarily by men. Home health aides earn less than janitors. Secretaries earn less than construction workers. Elementary-school teachers earn less than computer software engineers.²² What’s more, even women working in the same jobs as men get paid less than the men do. Women’s work is still undervalued, and women of color suffer a disproportionate share of that legacy. The paychecks of women of color are undercut by both the gender and the racial wage gap, resulting in many of the lowest-paid jobs being disproportionately performed by women of color: home health aide, child-care worker, and nursing assistant. Women of color, both native-born and immigrant, are bound together at the bottom of America’s wage hierarchy, despite the fact that many of these jobs carry an enormous responsibility—the development of and caring for people.

Of course, all men are not equal in our labor market either. Research by the Economic Policy Institute finds that black men are represented proportionately in only 13 percent of all occupations.²³ This occupational sorting has significant implications. The average annual wages in occupations in which black men are underrepresented is $50,533; that’s a nice middle-class wage. However, the average in occupations in which black men are overrepresented is $37,005; that’s a working-class wage. This research controls for any differences in education or skill level, leaving one remaining explanation for the lower earnings of black men: discrimination. This discrimination works similarly for black men as it does for women. Essentially, employers steer black men into lower-paying jobs, and the more an occupation becomes associated with black men, the less the boss is willing to pay for the work.

The composition of today’s working class is a direct reflection of decades of gender and racial discrimination, with a pecking order constructed in the past. As immigration from Latin America increased in the past two decades, Latinas found their lot cast with that of black women—they were relegated to our nation’s poorest-paid jobs, disproportionately likely to be engaged in the work of cleaning or caring. Today 88 percent of maids or housekeepers are women, 43 percent of whom are Latina. Among janitors, more than two-thirds are men, 30 percent of whom are Latino.²⁴ Forty-three percent of groundskeepers are Latinos, and in many of the lower-paid construction jobs, Latinos make up the overwhelming majority of workers, many of them day laborers who do the hardest, most backbreaking work at the end of a long subcontracting chain where cost containment can operate in the form of subminimum wages and unsafe working conditions.²⁵ Latinos now occupy the lowest rung in the American economic hierarchy, with wages below those of their white or black counterparts. While the white-black and white-Latino wage gaps have narrowed slightly since 1970, there is still clearly a white wage premium and a male wage premium (see Chart 4). In 2012 white working-class men earned $4.27 more per hour than black working-class men and $5.32 more than Latino working-class men. White working-class women earned $1.79 more than black working-class women and $3.18 more than working-class Latinas.²⁶

While race- and gender-specific help-wanted ads are no longer legal, numerous studies conclude that employers exercise implicit bias that reveals strong preferences for white people, particularly men. One study found that white men with a criminal record were more likely to be called in for an interview than black men without a criminal record.²⁷ Another study found that résumés with white-sounding names, such as Emily and Brendan, were 50 percent more likely to receive a call than were résumés with black-sounding names like Lakisha and Jamal.²⁸ A study examined bias against mothers and sent résumés that were otherwise identical for both men and women, with one difference: the “test” résumés included information indicating the man or woman was a member of the parent-teacher association. Women whose résumés indicated they were mothers were half as likely to be called as women whose résumés did not indicate they were mothers, while men whose résumés indicated they were fathers were more likely to receive calls than men who weren’t parents.²⁹ Discrimination unquestionably exists; it has just learned to camouflage itself bureaucratically.

Chart 4. Working-Class Median Wages, by Race and Gender, 2012

Source: Author’s analysis, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

Women and people of color have made great strides in the past fifty years, but there’s no turning away from the reality that our society is still organized along relatively rigid gender and racial hierarchies. As the quality of the new jobs being created in America continues to deteriorate, the inequities by race and gender are further exacerbated.

Who Cares?

Nearly twice as many women as men work in jobs paying wages below the poverty line. In fact, five of the most common occupations for women—home health aides, cashiers, maids and household cleaners, waitresses, and personal-care aides—fall into that category, compared to just two of the most common jobs for men.³⁰ With the exception of waitresses, these jobs are either primarily or disproportionately done by women of color. Two are caring jobs and two are serving jobs, which means that they involve high levels of interaction with human beings from a subordinate position.

Jennifer, a forty-three-year-old white woman, describes her job as a preschool teacher as a huge responsibility and one that she loves because she knows how important emotional, social, and cognitive development is at an early age. She told me, “Now is when you can make a big impression on their lives. I’m with them more than their parents are. I’m with them eight hours a day. Their parents are with them for a couple hours and then they go to bed. I feel like I can make a difference in their lives.” And she’s right. The care and learning environments experienced by young children will have ripple effects throughout their lives, as well as throughout society. Getting it right or wrong during this age can have huge benefits or huge costs. Research shows that it’s an investment worth making, returning between $7 and $11 for every $1 invested.³¹

For filling such an important job, Jennifer earns $9 an hour, up from the $7.50 she earned for two years before getting a raise. To become a preschool teacher, she had to earn a CDA (Child Development Associate) credential by taking a thirteen-month course that includes 480 hours of experience working with young children combined with 180 hours of formal training.

Like most women who work in the so-called caring professions, Jennifer derives deep satisfaction from seeing the impact she is making on people’s lives. Her biggest complaint, shared by most women in the caring professions, is that the value she creates is diametrically opposed to how much she earns. “I wish we got more credit for what we do,” she said. “I have a big responsibility. I take care of anywhere from ten to fourteen kids a day. And I get paid nine dollars an hour for it. Their lives are in my hands every day. And I don’t think we get enough credit for what we do. It’s not a small job. It’s a big responsibility, what we have to do. People are trusting me with their kids.” It turns out that choosing a profession focused on developing and maintaining the well-being of people—whether old, young, disabled, or sick—means sentencing oneself to a life of penury.

America’s demand for these kinds of caring jobs will only increase over the next several decades. The aging of the baby boomers means that the population of the very elderly—those over age eighty-five—will more than double by 2035, to 11.5 million.³² Millions of new jobs will be created to help these boomers age with dignity, in their homes, as their bodies begin betraying them, making it difficult for them to feed, bathe, and dress themselves. As a result, home health aides will be the largest and fastest-growing occupation in the country, more than doubling in number over the next decade.

To understand how historical racial and gender hierarchies still echo through our society, one should look no further than the caring professions. Paid care work, whether for the elderly, the disabled, or the young, has always been the job of women, and traditionally of black women.

Home health workers are disproportionately women of color, often immigrants from around the globe. In New York City, home health workers hail from the Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America, leading one New York Times reporter to observe that “home care aides are the garment workers of the modern New York economy.”³³ In their book Caring for America, Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein track the historic devaluation of care work. They tell the story of Evelyn Coke, a seventy-three-year-old Jamaican immigrant who worked as a home health aide for twenty years, often pulling twenty-four-hour shifts without overtime pay. When her own health was failing, Evelyn became the plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking compensation for all those extra hours of unpaid work, challenging the Labor Department regulations which stated that home care attendants were not covered by federal minimum wage or overtime laws, even when, like Evelyn, they were employed by a for-profit agency. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where, in June 2007, Evelyn lost her case and millions of home health workers lost their right to finally be treated as real laborers. During oral arguments, Justice Breyer expressed concern that if home health workers were paid overtime and minimum wage, millions of families would not be able to afford the care.³⁴ The Bloomberg administration and federal government allied against Evelyn, citing the concern that higher wages would greatly increase Medicaid and Medicare costs (which pay for the lion’s share of home care services), squeezing state and federal budgets.³⁵ While the Court’s unanimous opinion focused on procedural and interpretative analyses of congressional intent and regulatory authority, the reality remains that it is entirely acceptable, culturally and morally, to argue that home health workers shouldn’t be paid minimum wage or overtime because it would be too costly for Medicare and Medicaid. Can you imagine the same argument being made about doctors? Can you imagine the same argument being made if the work was done overwhelmingly by white men?

In Evelyn Coke’s case, the justices and her opponents basically removed the workers’ lives from the equation. The costs to the state and to the patients were paramount; the livelihood of the workers was rendered completely invisible and inconsequential. But like their union ancestors in the garment industry and textile mills, these women are standing up for themselves and getting organized. After a decade-long campaign in California involving dozens of protests, some policy jujitsu, and creative organizing, 74,000 home health-care workers voted by a ten-to-one margin to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).³⁶ The organizing win was made possible by legislation that allowed counties to establish public authorities defining themselves as joint employers of the workers and thereby able to negotiate with the union, and created a registry so families could find home care workers.

The SEIU has since taken this strategy to other states, resulting in 27,000 home care workers in Minnesota voting to join the union in 2014—the largest union election in the state’s history.³⁷ The contract negotiations with the state delivered a raise from $9 to $11 by 2016, the first-ever paid sick days, investments in training, and protection from wage theft. At the federal level, President Obama’s proposal to change the rule that exempted elder-care workers from minimum wage and overtime pay made its way through the courts and was ultimately upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in August 2015.³⁸ The proposed changes were favored by some states (Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York), all of which submitted briefs in support of the new rule, while other states (Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin) submitted briefs opposing the new rule.³⁹ The win both delivers material gains for the workers and, as important, finally recognizes their occupations as “real work”—a major victory for a workforce that is expected to grow from 2 million workers to over 3 million by 2022.⁴⁰

SEIU represents about 600,000 home care workers, a scale that lends itself to comparisons with the great industrial union organizing of the last century.⁴¹ This is substantial progress, but unlike the contracts negotiated for the mostly white and mostly male blue-collar manufacturing workers, these jobs don’t remotely provide the wages and benefits that allowed the previous working class to live a middle-class lifestyle. And thanks to another Supreme Court ruling, the ability of unions to organize home care workers took a big hit. In states without right-to-work laws, all workers who benefit from a union contract must pay an agency fee, even if they decline union membership. The agency fee basically represents the worker’s fair share of the costs of the union’s providing collective bargaining and other benefits. This is a smaller fee than the overall union dues, which cover broader costs, such as political funding and lobbying. Without an agency fee, workers in companies that have voted in a union can essentially take a free ride, enjoying the benefits of an enhanced contract without supporting the union’s costs of making the contract happen. That loss of revenue makes organizing in right-to-work states much more financially risky and is a major reason that union density in those states is so much lower.

Now enters the landmark case that dealt a major blow to organizing home health workers, Harris v. Quinn. The SEIU has been successful at organizing home care workers by getting states to adopt joint employer status, making the state as well as the individual client receiving care the official employers of the workers. This makes sense, since a majority of the workers’ pay comes from public funds. But the Court ruled that the home care workers, who were still hired by and could be fired by individual clients, were not wholly public employees. They were “partial public employees” and therefore exempt from being required to pay agency fees like public employees represented by a union.

Now, to be sure, this was a major blow to organized labor. But it was not the fatal setback many thought was coming. This case hinged on an earlier Supreme Court ruling (Abood v. Detroit Board of Education) that found it constitutional to require public employees who choose not to join a union to pay an agency fee to cover the costs of representing them. In writing the majority opinion, Justice Alito created a wholly new category of worker—this “partial public employee”—as a way to undercut the unionization of a workforce that is overwhelmingly composed of women of color. The fatal blow would have been if the Court had overruled its Abood decision and declared that requiring non-union workers to pay agency fees was unconstitutional for all public employees. However, legal experts agree that in the majority decision, the justices all but invited new cases that would directly challenge the Abood precedent, implying that the agency fee requirement of public-sector employees was on very shaky constitutional ground. And indeed, the Court quickly accepted a new case directly challenging the constitutionality of mandated agency fees. Arguments in the case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, will be heard in early 2016.⁴² If Abood is overturned, it will eviscerate public-sector unionism by making all union dues voluntary, essentially allowing far too many workers to free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, or covering their fair share of the costs of collective bargaining. In the private sector, this kind of exclusion is known as right-to-work, and it has essentially made unionization in right-to-work states exceedingly rare.

From Smokestacks to Barbed Wire

When America’s great industrial factories were locked up and denuded of equipment, some of our nation’s biggest cities were left with barren stretches of wasteland. What once symbolized productivity and ingenuity would become an anachronistic remnant of blue-collar America, either destined for decay or converted into expensive lofts for a new, upwardly mobile professional class. The pace of job losses was swift, a hard jerking away of people’s livelihoods and dignity, leaving a reverberating pain that would last for decades. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened up opportunities for black men to work in the reigning industrial sector of the time, but predominantly in the hardest, lowest-paid jobs—the very jobs that were most susceptible to being replaced by machines.⁴³

As a result, black men experienced more than their fair share of dislocation as a result of deindustrialization. Thanks to a generation of discriminatory housing policies, black Americans were also more likely to be living in the central core of urban America. So when major steel factories on the outskirts of major cities—Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Cleveland—shut down, the communities closest to these economic hubs faced severe economic isolation and collapse. The depth of the loss was substantial. Between 1972 and 1982, New York City lost 30 percent of its manufacturing jobs, Detroit 41 percent, and Chicago 57 percent.⁴⁴ White residents in those cities were better positioned to move to the suburbs in search of employment, while black Americans were left behind because of active redlining, designed to keep black people out of the suburbs. In 1970 more than 70 percent of black workers held blue-collar jobs; by 1987 only 27 percent were employed in industrial jobs.⁴⁵ Unemployment among black men soared, while black women did somewhat better in securing jobs in the exploding new service sector. As companies shipped entire industries overseas and the central cities lost white middle-class residents to the job-exploding suburbs, urban black people found little support or sympathy from our political elites. Laissez-faire, trickle-down economics was gaining prominence and power just as globalization tore through American manufacturing. After the widespread shedding of factories in the urban core, Ronald Reagan made it to the White House, in no small part thanks to his astute use of racial anxiety to win over white working-class voters. Help most assuredly would not be on the way.

Patrisse Cullors, one of the three founders of Black Lives Matter, directly experienced the simultaneous havoc created by closing factories and the “war on drugs.” Her father worked for General Motors in Van Nuys, California, a job that made her dad exclaim with pride, “I could build a car from scratch.” Open since 1947 and employing 2,600 workers at its peak, the plant closed in 1992, when Patrisse was about eight years old. Growing up, Patrisse and her brothers were supported by her mom, who “worked three part-time jobs to keep a roof over our head.” Her dad’s job had provided the family with excellent health insurance and additional resources to supplement her mom’s earnings. Patrisse recalls exactly how the factory closing affected her life, explaining that it “was such a major blow to him, and to our family. And really, to the community at large. My grandfather worked at General Motors, then my dad worked at General Motors. So many children, parents, and families literally inherited the job in the factory.” And the loss of her dad’s job quickly plummeted the family from “being working class to being super-poor,” Patrisse remembers. Instead of having access to private doctors and world-class care at Kaiser Permanente, she and her brothers now had to go to the public county hospital. Her dad was never able to rebound to his previous salary, instead relying on a series of low-paying jobs at auto-repair franchises like Midas.

Cullors describes the connection between deindustrialization and mass incarceration as happening “fast, fast, fast.” Her neighborhood, Van Nuys, was poor in the 1990s, and right next door to the affluent community of Sherman Oaks, which made Van Nuys susceptible to gentrification and its black residents undesirable. “The neighborhood became super-surveilled and super-policed. I witnessed my brothers and their friends being harassed on a daily basis, stopped and frisked. They were eleven, twelve, and thirteen. There was no community center or community organization for the neighborhood kids to go to, leaving them with nothing to do but sit and hang out all day.” In his teen years, her older brother was brutally beaten by a sheriff while in the L.A. County jail, an experience that fundamentally shaped Cullors’s life. Years later, after graduating from UCLA in religion and philosophy, she made a decision to make her life’s work tackling the state-sanctioned violence she witnessed in her neighborhood. So when the ACLU filed an eighty-six-page complaint in a class action suit against the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for abuses in its jail system in 2011, Patrisse answered the call. She read the report in one evening and decided she was going to do an art piece with the complaint. She created a forty-five-minute performance piece which included recordings of the notes her mom kept while her brother was incarcerated, news clippings from the sheriff and undersheriff denying the allegations, and the eighty-six-page report, which was pasted onto giant boards sectioned off with police caution tape. “It was a beautiful and very intense piece,” she recalls. She toured the piece for six months, and the repeated requests from viewers for information on how they could get involved and fight back prompted Cullors to start Dignity and Power Now. That group’s major demand was permanent civilian oversight of the Sheriff’s Department, which they won in September 2014; they are currently negotiating with the county supervisors about implementation. For Cullors’s family and millions of others living in former industrial belts, the loss of manufacturing jobs and the rise of extensive incarceration were inextricably linked.

Let’s take a short look back at Chapter 4 and recall the hyper-racialized politics of the 1970s and 1980s. By the mid-1970s the Republican Party was determined to peel away white working-class voters by playing to their increasing racial anxiety after the civil rights reforms opened up competition to jobs, mandated busing to integrate schools, and developed affirmative-action policies to redress the long-standing exclusion of African Americans from opportunity. As several scholars have observed, it was the white working class who bore the brunt of integration efforts. As Thomas and Mary Edsall explain in their book Chain Reaction, white working-class men felt they had worked hard to buy a home near good schools, only to find that now their kids would have to be bused way across town. It didn’t sit well, and it bred resentment. On the other hand, most affluent whites lived in communities so far from either black or white working-class people that their children were rarely affected by busing orders.⁴⁶ The Republican Party used the detachment of white elites from the implementation of integration to charge the Democratic Party with liberal elitism: championing the rights of minorities from a lofty perch on which they remain unaffected. In addition, the Republican Party cleverly began describing affirmative action as “reverse discrimination,” arguing that better-qualified whites were losing jobs to less-qualified minorities. It was a cynical and ugly ploy, but it worked.

And it’s still working. Charges of reverse discrimination have resulted in Supreme Court rulings that have all but ended affirmative action. The Republicans pursued a narrative of “color blindness,” arguing that the way to overcome past and current discrimination was to bar government from considering a person’s race at all, often co-opting and distorting Martin Luther King’s famous statement that “we should judge people on the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” In addition, ever since Nixon’s campaign focused on law and order, the Republican Party has found electoral success in framing urban problems as ones of lawlessness, disorder, and dysfunction. The problem—rising drug-related crimes—was addressed not as the symptom of economic blight and marginalization but instead as a moral and character defect of black people—one that required a war to fix. That war, which is still officially under way, was the “war on drugs.” As Michelle Alexander observes in her stunning and critically acclaimed book The New Jim Crow, “Conservatives found they could finally justify an all-out war on an ‘enemy’ that had been racially defined years before.”⁴⁷

By the time Reagan took office, two things were crystal-clear about the ideology of the Republican Party: 1) it would use race to divide the working class to win elections; and 2) it would use race to fuel antigovernment sentiment to shrink the role of government. So just when urban America was reeling from the economic upheaval of deindustrialization and black working-class men and women found themselves either jobless or underemployed, the narrative about what was happening in these neighborhoods depicted black people as morally and culturally defective, mired in a web of self-destruction that included drugs, out-of-wedlock births, and crime.

Ronald Reagan masterfully spun dog-whistle narratives, turning racially coded language into electoral gold. He was an equal opportunity offender, demeaning black men and black women alike. In addition to the mythical “welfare queen” with “eighty names” and “twelve Social Security cards,” whose tax-free income alone was “over $150,000,” Reagan described the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”⁴⁸ He promised to crack down on crime by bringing more federal resources to bear on the problem—law and order being the one exception to a rigid intolerance for government spending.

As neighborhoods in our greatest cities cried out for help in dealing with the spasms of joblessness and a rising drug trade, there was no New Deal. Or new War on Poverty. There was a war on drugs. And it was, and still is, being waged with near impunity in black and brown communities.⁴⁹ Today 2.2 million people are incarcerated in prisons or jails, up from just 350,000 in 1980.⁵⁰ A full 60 percent of incarcerated individuals are people of color, and two-thirds of all people in prison for drug offenses are people of color. Today one out of three black men and one out of six Latino men is likely to be imprisoned at some point in his life, compared to one out of seventeen white men. And it’s working-class men of color who have been cast as the enemy in this sprawling dragnet. The new working class is missing millions of black men who instead of punching the clock are now serving time as a result of the economic wasteland wrought by deindustrialization. The United States spends $80 billion annually on incarceration, and the economic and social toll expands the amount. A criminal record casts a long shadow, with an often lifelong sentence of social and economic exclusion. Even the most entry-level of jobs require a criminal background check, and most states restrict an ex-offender’s right to vote. In 2010, 5.8 million people weren’t allowed to vote because of a criminal conviction, with black Americans more likely to be disenfranchised. In three states—Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky—more than 20 percent of black Americans were disenfranchised.⁵¹ Imagine if the cumulative resources spent on the war on drugs had instead been allocated to rebuilding the communities left barren by closing factories and isolated by white flight.

Today almost one in twelve black men is behind bars, a staggering loss to families, neighborhoods, and society.⁵² And for the partners and wives left behind, most of whom are working-class, the challenges of making enough money to get ahead have only intensified with the rise of the bargain-basement economy. Nearly half of all child-care and home care workers have to supplement the incomes they earn from their jobs with public assistance.⁵³ These are the “welfare queens” that Reagan was so fond of demonizing and that President Bill Clinton called to mind in his successful effort to “end welfare as we know it.”

Today young activists like Patrisse Cullors and thousands of others are fueling a new civil rights movement that brings together economic, social, and racial justice, which I cover in more detail in Chapter 7. In working-class black neighborhoods, as in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Cleveland, this new generation is connecting the issues of joblessness, police brutality, and the prison industrial complex. It’s by and large a movement of, by, and for working-class people of color, and like the earlier civil rights movement it has generated significant white allies, particularly among college-educated whites.

History Repeats Itself: The Immigrant Story

Since the beginning of wage labor at the dawn of industrialization, immigrants have been central to building working-class power (in addition to establishing and building the country). Today, with people of Latino descent making up the largest percentage of the nation’s immigrant population, it’s easy to forget that their white ethnic predecessors—Polish, Irish, and Italian—were once considered nonwhite and marginalized in both society at large and in the economy. These white ethnics led major strikes in the early 1900s, sometimes by joining forces with blacks, as was the case in the great shutdown of U.S. Steel in 1919.⁵⁴ At the turn of the twentieth century, these immigrants lived in tenements and ghettos and were considered to be of a lower class and status than their native-born, “genuinely” white-skinned counterparts. That changed with the “all hands on deck” ethos needed to fight World War II. With near-universal participation by American men, albeit still segregated by race, returning white ethnic veterans were granted full economic and political citizenship, their ethnic identities subordinated as the privileges of whiteness expanded through free college, federal housing loans, and better wages through the labor movement.⁵⁵ It’s unimaginable that the labor movement in the postwar years would have achieved the scale and power it did without the substantial population of European ethnics becoming “white” and therefore being granted the highest legitimacy and status as workers and citizens. But their inclusion as whites further marginalized black people and Mexican Americans, who now formed a smaller group of “others” who could be consistently compared to or, more important, contrasted with the archetypal white working-class male.

Our nation has a long history, one that continues to this day, of viewing Latino immigrants as cheap and often disposable labor. We want them here when we need them but quickly turn our backs when the going gets tough. We want their labor but refuse to acknowledge the cultural contributions or full humanity of our brothers and sisters from Latin and Central America. In the early days of America’s industrial expansion, many of the railroads were built and our crops harvested by Mexicans, who were recruited for these jobs. It’s estimated that between 1920 and 1930 more than 1 million Mexicans crossed the border to answer the call of America’s farmers and industrialists. But when the Depression hit and jobs became scarce for all Americans, the Mexican workers were swiftly and forcibly deported.⁵⁶ During World War II, when immigration from Europe and Asia was curtailed, and then after the war, when the great engine of American productivity seemed destined to deliver endless prosperity, American companies actively recruited Mexican workers to perform some of the most backbreaking, menial, and lowest-paid jobs. Migrant Mexican workers helped fill labor vacuums in the fast-growing Southwest, much of it fueled by major agribusinesses, which provided a bountiful supply of crops to be harvested. In 1950, 450,000 Mexicans were recruited to the United States as part of what was called the bracero program. But as before, when another recession gripped the United States in 1954, white Americans again expressed their economic anxiety by lashing out against Mexican workers. In an operation officially titled (this is no joke) Operation Wetback, the federal government rounded up something between 1 and 2 million Mexicans and quickly deported them.⁵⁷ And as always happens in the well-established boom-and-bust cycle, all was forgiven and the bracero program was reinstated once the economy bounced back.

The program continued until 1964, but the practice of drawing migrant Mexican workers for cheap labor in the Southwest continued unabated, just under a different name. By 1960 fully one-quarter of the southwestern workforce was made up of immigrants from Mexico. Eventually these farmworkers, along with their Filipino counterparts, would band together in one of the longest, most tumultuous, and most sophisticated labor-organizing triumphs in our nation’s history under a motto that still resonates with oppressed workers and can be heard chanted in the new labor battles today: ¡Si Se Puede!

While Mexicans make up the largest group of Latino immigrants in the United States today, about 50 percent, great waves of migration from Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic fill out the broad Latino working class that is a huge part of our Sleeping Giant. Some people from these countries came fleeing brutal dictatorships, civil wars, and sinking economies—a good share of which were the result of U.S. foreign policy and trade policy—hoping that el Norte would provide a better life for themselves and their families.

The first large wave of Puerto Ricans, who, though officially citizens, are more often treated as visitors or outsiders, came to the United States in the postwar period; many clustered in barrios in New York City. But not insignificant numbers were also bound for factories in the great blue-collar cities of the Midwest. Generations of Puerto Rican families were able to move their families out of the barrios and into public housing being built for the working class, a story made more familiar to Americans by the ascension of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. But like their black counterparts, Puerto Ricans experienced severe dislocation in America’s cities when factories packed up in search of ever-cheaper labor.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as Central American countries erupted in violent civil wars, often with our country providing the weapons to one side, millions of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans sought refuge in the United States. While Nicaraguans were granted refugee status, Guatemalans and Salvadorans were not, so they became a large workforce for Americans’ growing demand for largely off-the-books jobs as nannies and landscapers and in the underregulated shadows of our labor market in janitorial and housekeeping services.⁵⁸ Coming from countries marked by coups and liberation movements, Central American immigrants were far more politically sophisticated and schooled in protest movements than Americans had been for a generation. And they brought some much-needed fuel to a labor movement that had at the time been focusing on stemming losses rather than organizing new workers. Beginning in the early 1980s in Los Angeles, the largely Central American janitorial labor force began organizing for better wages. The Justice for Janitors campaign gained national attention when Los Angeles police violently attacked immigrant workers who were striking for their right to organize their workplaces in Century City, Los Angeles. The campaign, which eventually spread to over thirty cities and was led by the SEIU, won huge victories that not only improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of janitorial workers but provided the labor movement with a new vitality and courage it desperately needed. It also inspired a major Hollywood movie, Bread and Roses, penetrating pop culture in a way the union movement hadn’t in decades. The Justice for Janitors campaign in many ways set the stage for the Fight for $15 movement, which has set its sights on disrupting the major multinational corporations that employ significant numbers of the new working class.

Between 1960 and 2008, over 40 million immigrants made the United States their home, more than half of them from countries in Latin America, with the largest group of newcomers coming from our neighbor to the south, Mexico.⁵⁹ The large influx of Latino immigrants has engendered vehement backlash and awakened racial insecurity, particularly among English-speaking whites. Today’s Latino population, both documented and undocumented, is the new scapegoat used to apportion blame for all manner of social and economic problems. “They” are stealing our jobs, pushing down our wages, straining our schools, and bringing crime to our neighborhoods. In 2015, Donald Trump became the Republican front-runner during the primary season by developing an incendiary anti-immigrant platform, with widespread deportation as his central plank. Even President Obama, who has been a vocal and ardent supporter of comprehensive immigration reform, has succumbed to the political pressure to increase deportations. In fact, more immigrants have been deported under his administration than during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, migration of Mexican workers to the United States picked up dramatically. Between 1990 and 2000, the population of Mexican-born people living in the United States doubled, from 4.5 million to 9 million, then grew a bit slower in the new century, to 12.7 million in 2008. About half of these immigrants are undocumented. What’s unacknowledged is the profound role the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has played in spurring this migration. If there was ever an issue that could form common cause between the white and Latino working class, it should be the destruction wrought by American trade policy. As Juan Gonzalez richly details in his book Harvest of Empire, NAFTA eviscerated the ability of small farmers in Mexico to make a living in the wake of U.S. agribusinesses exporting heavily subsidized and industrially raised cheap grains to the country. Of the Mexican immigrants moving to the United States in the years since NAFTA, 44 percent have been from rural areas, despite only 25 percent of Mexico’s people residing in such areas.⁶⁰ The rise of American-built factories in maquiladoras, sprawling free-trade zones where manufacturing is centered, depressed demand for goods from Mexican-owned factories, contributing to the loss of 159,000 jobs. Today foreign-owned companies employ the same number of manufacturing workers as Mexican-owned factories. When you combine the job gains from the new factories with the losses from the old, only about 500,000 new jobs were created in Mexico during the fourteen years after NAFTA was implemented—not even close to the 1 million jobs Mexico needs to create each year to keep up with its growing workforce. Most important, the development of booming maquiladoras didn’t produce any real improvement in the quality of life for the Mexican people. Only 10 percent of Mexican households have seen any increase in their incomes in the years since NAFTA.

American trade policy, which wrecked the livelihoods of so many working-class families in this country, is also a major driver of Mexican immigration to the United States. The United States lost over 1 million factory jobs, evenly split between Canada and Mexico in the first ten years after NAFTA was implemented.⁶¹ Millions more would follow. South of the border, millions of Mexicans also found their livelihoods destroyed by this neoliberal economic regime and were pulled north in search of work. This enormous migration of people is the new beating heart of today’s working class, and the key to its revival as a political and cultural force in America. Which is why the Republican Party has returned to its playbook of division, exploiting the economic anxiety of the white working class by making Latino immigrants the villains. The fact that Donald Trump, who profits immensely from an empire created by cheap labor and unrestricted global capital, is running for president by stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment is both a farce and a tragedy—and yet another reminder that the latent power of the new working class is threatening to America’s elites and will remain politically contested. As this new working-class generation comes of age, it remains to be seen whether the racial, ethnic, and gender divides that have impeded solidarity can finally be dismantled.

This new working class faces a triple-headed challenge: overcoming entrenched corporate power, defeating the economic hegemony of neoliberalism, and tackling pervasive and stubborn racial, ethnic, and gender oppression. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, rising inequality and the social distance created in its wake means that the first challenge to toppling such powerful and historical injustices is making visible the cause and the claim.