Description

BLACK AMERICANS AND ORGANIZED LABOR offers a bold reinterpretation of the role of race and racial discrimination in the American labor movement, applying insights of the law-and-economics movement to formulate a powerfully compelling labor-race theorem of elegant simplicity: white unionists found that race was a convenient basis on which to do what unions docontrol the labor supply. Not racism alone but "the economics of discrimination" explains historic black absence and under-representation in unions. This sweeping reexamination traces changing attitudes and practices during the concurrent black migration to the North and the consolidation of organized labor's power, through the confusing and conflicted post-World War II period, during the course of the civil rights movement, and into the era of affirmative action. Moreno impressively weaves together labor, policy, and African American history into a cogent, persuasive revisionist study that cannot be ignored.