The Essential Worker: A History from the Progressive Era to COVID-19

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Abstract

Due to the importance of municipal employment for African American workers and their communities, the contradiction between society’s reliance on Black labor and its opposition to Black advancement remained a critical pivot point in the politics of race and class in American cities. Starting in the 1930s, municipal workers built a small but vibrant union movement to challenge those restrictions by improving wages and working conditions in public jobs, demanding collective bargaining rights and other legal protections, and increasing opportunities for promotion into better-paid skilled and managerial positions. Due to the success of that movement, by the late twentieth century, municipal work became “the principal source of black mobility, especially for women, and one of the most important mechanisms reducing black poverty.” Yet those efforts faced immense opposition from elected officials and others, both liberal and conservative, who viewed the empowerment of public employees as a threat to the public’s access to inexpensive and reliable public services.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)6-23
Number of pages18
JournalLabor: Studies in Working-Class History
Volume20
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 1 2023

Bibliographical note

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© 2023 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.

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