Despite a long history of bitter antagonism between organized labor and black workers, historian Paul Moreno argues at the outset of his new book, African-Americans in recent years are the “demographic group most likely to belong to a labor union” (1). Moreno's concern is less with why black workers would be attracted to organizations that have historically harmed their interests than in how organized labor went about excluding, discriminating against, or, more recently, aiding them. In so doing, he allies himself squarely with those historians who, although “often strident and partisan,” (4) he acknowledges, have advanced a “race-based analysis” (4) of union history. Unlike many of those scholars, however, he is not particularly sympathetic to the goals or operations of unions which, he believes, are “job trusts” (4) that often engage in coercion against workers and employers alike. The resulting study, which explores the “interaction of race, economics, and law from a liberal or neoclassic perspective” (7) is often provocative. If labor historians take his challenges seriously, the book should generate productive debate.
The core of Moreno's book is a detailed survey of the relationship between African-Americans and the labor movement in its various manifestations, from the National Labor Union of the late 1860s to the AFL-CIO in the past half century. Drawing effectively on the considerable scholarship on race and labor published over the past three decades or so, he focuses more on national organizations and union policy than on the grass roots. The book's final section succinctly and ably explores affirmative action and the rise of public sector unionism during and after the 1960s. Throughout the book, Moreno offers abundant examples of white labor activists criticizing black workers for their putative laziness or willingness to undermine labor standards and wage rates, as well as numerous examples of racially motivated workplace violence directed against African-Americans. He makes the persuasive argument that for the century following the Civil War, many, if not all, black leaders cautioned black workers against white unionists. Black critics of unions receive far more attention than black advocates of unionism who, by at least the 1930s, were hardly insignificant in number.
Moreno is also sharply critical of United States labor laws which, he insists, tended to hurt blacks' economic interests. Whereas this was clearly the case with the railway labor legislation that empowered exclusionary white unions, Moreno extends the critique to other labor laws and reform and recovery programs during the New Deal. “Blacks bore a disproportionate brunt of New Deal policies that depressed total employment,” (194–195) he insists; minimum wage laws and even the Wagner Act – which contained no antidiscrimination provisions – come in for criticism, if not sustained examination. The Urban League's Lester Granger may have called the Wagner Act “the worst piece of legislation ever passed by the Congress” (173), but Moreno's embrace of his position is not accompanied by a sustained demonstration of its accuracy. (His skepticism extends to labor legislation often heralded by labor historians. The Wagner Act of 1935, he contends, forbade employers from telling “the truth about union racial policies while unions were free to lie about the employer's position.” [228]).
Moreno's challenges to labor historians are significant ones. He is right to note that scholars have often neglected migration “as an alternative to unionization” (105) which, he believes, “was probably the most important factor in black economic progress” (105). Unlike many in the field, he rejects the notion that working-class solidarity is either natural or logical; hence, to Moreno, its absence is “not to be wondered at” (287). Perhaps most important is his dismissal of labor historians' invocation of the divide-and-conquer thesis, which posits cynical employers pitting white against black workers to thwart unionization and forestall class consciousness. In a fascinating appendix, he dissects various scholars' use of the thesis and finds them wanting.
Given the political orientation of their field – what Moreno calls the “anticapitalist biases of most historians” (298)–it is unlikely that labor historians will accept a number of Moreno's strongly held (and, in these pages, often undeveloped) beliefs–that public employment, public employee unionism, and the expansion of the welfare state are somehow tantamount to “American socialism in the late twentieth century,” (278) that “free markets have liberated and humanized our condition,” (300) or even that employers played little part in fostering workplace racial conflicts. (In contrast to labor historians, whose record in documenting the highly uneven relationship of blacks and organized labor is impressive, business historians have not been especially active in seeking to uncover either corporate America's discriminatory hiring and promotion record or its later efforts at dismantling them). However, it would be unfortunate if labor historians' objections to Moreno's political philosophy prevented them from taking his arguments seriously and engaging in the debate that he seeks to foster.
