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Black Workers Cannot Afford Another Lost Decade
Employees watch behind glass doors as US President Joe Biden tours the Carrollton water treatment plant, May 6, 2021, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
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Black workers have been hit hardest by the pandemic. We are more likely to lose income because of Covid-related layoffs and shutdowns, and by last August five months into the pandemic Black unemployment was nearly double that of white unemployment.
But the impact is not just economic. We are three times more likely to be exposed to Covid-19 on the job and twice as likely to die from the virus. To recover from the devastating effects that Covid-19 has had on all communities, we must center the concerns and needs of Black workers in the economic recovery to come. It’s a moral imperative, but it also makes good fiscal and political sense, too.
Helping the Powerless Build Power
Oral histories of five activists whoâve worked in and for worker centers
Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Activists rally outside New York Gov. Andrew Cuomoâs office to call on a $15 minimum wage.
Over the past quarter century, a new form of worker organization â worker centers â have arisen among groups of workers, primarily immigrants and African Americans, for whom unionization isnât usually an option, largely due to the limited scope of the laws governing collective bargaining rights. To tell the stories of these organizations, the Prospect
has conducted oral histories with a range of worker center activists and leaders. Here, edited and condensed for space, are excerpts from five of them.
Black Worker Centers: Building Workplace Power in the Communities
Even in anti-union terrains, the centers have found ways to change public and corporate policies.
As organized labor grapples with the consequences of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Unionâs landslide defeat at the Amazon mega-warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, one potential direction for the labor movement lies in the types of power- and base-building activities of Black worker centers.
That African American workers need to amass the power to better their conditions is beyond dispute. The American working class is in serious trouble, and Black workers most particularly. The median net wealth of Black families is just $24,100 (lower than any other racial group in America today), while that of white families stands at $188,200. Ongoing institutional and systemic racial discrimination against Black workers persists in housing, health care, education, and employment.