Whitewashing the History of Organized Labor
23rd February 2011
As scholars ranging from the liberal political scientist Ira Katznelson to the libertarian legal historian David Bernstein have now documented, organized labor’s rise to power typically came at the expense of black workers. Consider collective bargaining, the legal arrangement whereby a union selected by a majority of employees receives the monopoly bargaining power to exclusively represent all employees. This valuable union tool first became part of federal law under section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Since blacks were barred from the vast majority of unions at that time, collective bargaining served as a de facto ban on all black workers in unionized shops.
‘Progressives’ do many historically odd things, such as the embrace of the Democratic Party, which was the party of slavery from Andy Jackson’s time up through the Civil War, and the party of Jim Crow from the Civil War up through LBJ.