Race & Economics by Walter E. Williams

Author:Walter E. Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: African-Americans, blacks, slavery, family structure, race, whites, welfare, racial discrimination, laws, competition, labor market, minimum wage, skilled labor, unskilled labor, licensing, regulation, deregulation, racial segregation
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Black and White Labor Violence

Labor violence in Chicago was a classic instance of racial competition in the labor market, and in 1919, it culminated in one of the nation’s deadliest race riots.[30] When the riot was over, twenty-three blacks lay dead along with fifteen whites; well over 500 people of both races were injured. The history of Chicago’s racial antagonism goes back to the Pullman strike of 1894, when packing and slaughterhouse workers struck in sympathy with Eugene V. Debs’s American Railway Union. This strike marked the first time in the history of the packing industry that blacks were used as strikebreakers, and the action ended in defeat for the white workers.

In 1904, the packers once again went out on strike. This time the strike was over the skilled butchers’ demand for a minimum wage of 20 cents an hour for their unskilled brethren, complaining that large packinghouses “began a system to crowd out the expert butchers and replace them by cheaper men in every way.” They were displaced by “cheap Polackers and Hungarians. . . .”[31] As our earlier analysis of the economic effects of minimum wages would predict, “The skilled worker realized that this specialization enabled unskilled workers with ‘muscle’ to replace him; it appeared inevitable that unless a minimum wage were obtained for the unskilled, cut-throat job competition would drive all the wages down.”[32]

Once again, the packers’ strike was broken by blacks, who were hired as replacements by the thousands. And once again, they were subjected to extensive violence. Out of desperation as well as miscalculation, union leaders wired Booker T. Washington asking him to come to Chicago to lecture blacks on the subject: “Should Negroes Become Strikebreakers?” Washington turned the invitation down. South Carolina’s Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, a rabid segregationist, came instead to tell the union workers, “It was the niggers that whipped you in line. . . . They were the club with which your brains were beaten out.”[33]

In 1905, during a Chicago teamsters’ strike, trainloads of black workers were brought in to deliver milk, coal, and other merchandise. They were set upon by angry strikers, and riots ensued. Chicago’s city council enacted an order requesting that the city’s corporation counsel file an opinion as to “whether the importation of hundreds of Negro workers is not a menace to the community and should be restricted.” The employers’ association responded by indicating a willingness not to import any more blacks, but refused to fire those already employed. The teamsters’ president replied, “You have the Negroes in here to fight us and we answer that we have the right to attack them wherever found.”

Indicative of white solidarity over strikebreaking was the sympathy strike conducted by hundreds of grade school students. They stoned black drivers delivering coal to their schools. Teachers and principals encouraged the students, in one case saying, “I invite the students to strike, if the dirty niggers deliver coal at this school.”

Despite union and political pressure, employers continued to hire blacks—as more than temporary.

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