America's New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age by Kathleen R. Arnold

Author:Kathleen R. Arnold [Arnold, Kathleen R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, General, Economics
ISBN: 9780271032764
Google: hslcrcuEr7sC
Goodreads: 1872559
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2007-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Racialization of Labor and the Re-emergence of Biological Racism

The greater integration of African Americans into the workforce was facilitated by civil rights legislation and by the fact that several Supreme Court decisions in the early 1970s went beyond the Civil Rights Act to play a “more energetic role in rectifying the effects of historic patterns of discrimination.”92 Changes in the demographics of the manufacturing labor force were most evident in the South at first, as African Americans gradually replaced white workers. This change was largely the result of civil rights legislation; but another factor was the increasing internationalization of competition, in the sense that “black workers served to keep the shaky low-wage industry competitive in the world marketplace.”93 As well, more and more black workers were hired by hotels and the service industries. Job creation and political activism further encouraged the hiring of African American workers; however, because of job slotting, racism, and economic recessions, these employees were often the first to lose their jobs in times of economic instability.94 To summarize, African Americans began to occupy positions from which they had long been barred, but they often faced discriminatory practices in relation to hiring, job allocation, and so on.95

Moreover, for the poorest African Americans, civil rights legislation allowed for greater integration into manufacturing and other low-skilled jobs at a time (the 1970s and 1980s) when these jobs were beginning to disappear. The splits between skilled, unionized work and unskilled, nonunion work became more significant in the 1980s, with the result that wages were no higher for African Americans who finally were able to work in integrated workplaces. These divisions were due to the changing nature of work (a result of economic globalization), but they were also a consequence of racial exclusion by unions, “slotting” in the sense that whites were often hired over African Americans for skilled labor and other discriminatory practices that undermined colorblind employment policies.96 Discriminatory practices could continue partly because employers resorted to tactics that subverted antidiscrimination laws and partly because affirmative action programs were never on stable ground: charges of reverse discrimination began soon after these programs were in place in the 1970s.97 This is not to deny that real progress was now possible for certain African Americans; rather, it is to point out that the poorest, those perceived as the least skilled—those who were blue-collar workers—did not benefit to the same degree as others. This was true of African American women as well as men: as more and more African American women entered the workforce, most of the women who worked blue-collar jobs were placed in the “least desirable positions.”98

By the 1980s and early 1990s, the internationalization of industry that had allowed greater entry of African Americans into all types of employment was leading to their exclusion, especially at the blue-collar level. At the same time, the discourse arose that African Americans were “lazy, irresponsible, and sexually promiscuous”; the subtext was that their unemployment or underemployment was by choice and individual pathology, not a result of broader circumstances.

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