Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | P | Public Interest

Blacks and labor: the untold story. (Review).(Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal)-

Article Excerpt
THE National Recovery Administration, or "NRA," a linchpin of Franklin Roosevelt's First Hundred Days, did not fare well in the African-American press. "Negro Removal Act," "Negroes Ruined Again," and "Negroes Robbed Again," were only a few of the epithets launched at what many blacks took to be a poisoned spoonful of alphabet soup. The NRA, a component of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), was a giant step toward a European-style welfare state: It created national minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, it guaranteed collective- bargaining rights and industrial production codes, and it poured vast amounts of tax dollars into public-works projects. When, on "Black Monday," the Supreme Court struck down the NIRA as unconstitutional, no one cheered more heartily than American blacks. And when the NIRA's collective-bargaining provisions were later resurrected as part of the Wagner Act, African Americans were dismayed. The National Urban League, the NAACP, and other civil-rights organizations vehemently op posed it.

This history is recounted in Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal, + a recent book by David Bernstein that offers a short and sharp challenge to the prevailing narrative of the emergence of the contemporary American welfare state. Bernstein places labor laws at the center of that development and of the contemporary plight of black Americans. He makes a strong case that many of those ostensibly neutral laws, from Reconstruction through the New Deal-- e.g., emigrant-agent laws, professional-licensing laws, prevailing and minimum-wage laws, and collective-bargaining laws-- were either directly aimed at stymieing black economic and social advancement, or, if not so aimed, were quickly turned to that use. Thc NRA was a classic illustration of this dynamic: It cartelized...