Ruminations of a Reflective Mind: Michael Smith's Blog on Life and Society

Chapter 4: Labor Law Evolution: Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era

The trajectory of American labor law from the Reconstruction era through the mid-20th century shows a halting journey toward greater protection for workers – yet always marred by racial exclusions and compromises. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction (1865–1877), the federal government took some steps to safeguard Black workers’ rights. The Freedmen’s Bureau, for example, helped formerly enslaved people negotiate labor contracts and even ran its own courts to adjudicate disputes between Black workers and white employers. However, these efforts were woefully under-resourced and often thwarted by violent white resistance. When Reconstruction ended, so did the brief experiment in federal enforcement of fair labor conditions in the South.

In 1867, Congress passed one notable law that often gets overlooked: the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867, which outlawed the practice of debt peonage (forcing someone to work to pay off a debt). This law was meant to target the Southern states’ new sharecropping contracts and apprenticeship laws that effectively re-enslaved Black people. While it was on the books, local authorities rarely enforced it, and peonage investigations by the Justice Department in the late 19th century had minimal impact. Not until the 20th century would the anti-peonage statute be used to prosecute egregious cases (and even then, only a handful of landowners were ever convicted).

Fast forward to the New Deal of the 1930s: this was a revolution in U.S. labor law, but one tainted by the stain of racial exclusion. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal brought a suite of reforms: the Wagner Act (1935) guaranteed most workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively; the Social Security Act (1935) established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA, 1938) introduced a federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and restrictions on child labor; and various public works programs provided jobs and relief. However, to get these measures through Congress, FDR’s administration made a Faustian bargain with Southern Democrats: the new laws would exclude farmworkers and domestic workers, the two sectors where African Americans (especially in the South) were the majority. This deliberate omission meant that approximately 65% of Black workers nationally were left outside the reach of the Wagner Act and Social Security in the 1930s. As one historian succinctly noted, “the New Deal built a welfare state for white folks.” Southern politicians wanted to preserve the plantation economy’s low-wage, exploitative labor relations, and so New Deal labor law maintained the racial caste in economic terms. For example, a Black maid in 1940 had no federal right to a minimum wage or to join a union; a Black sharecropper had no safety net of unemployment insurance if drought hit or prices fell.

Even within covered sectors, discrimination persisted. The Wagner Act protected union organizing, but many unions were closed to Black workers. The National Labor Relations Board, which enforced the act, sometimes certified segregated unions or ignored complaints from Black workers. The Social Security system initially excluded not just agricultural and domestic workers but also casually employed workers – again affecting Black workers disproportionately. (It wasn’t until the 1950s that these exclusions were slowly reduced; farm and domestic workers became fully covered under minimum wage and Social Security only by the late 1950s and 1960s, and even today farmworkers remain excluded from the National Labor Relations Act’s union protections.)

World War II and the post-war period began to chip away at some of these inequities. We’ve mentioned Executive Order 8802, which was limited but symbolically important. After the war, President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, and there was a growing federal awareness that overt employment discrimination was a national problem. Still, the South clung fiercely to Jim Crow labor practices. Black workers who tried to use the GI Bill to get training or education often faced barriers. In the North, the GI Bill’s benefits (like low-cost home loans) largely bypassed Black veterans, contributing to the racial wealth gap and indirectly affecting employment (since wealth can determine one’s ability to start businesses or endure joblessness).

The real sea change came with the Civil Rights Movement and the legislative victories of the 1960s. Alongside the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, which in Title VII outlawed employment discrimination by large employers, other laws and policies further reshaped labor rights. The CRA established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate workplace discrimination. While enforcement was slow at first, over time Title VII became a powerful tool against racist hiring, firing, and promotion practices. One immediate effect: many employers who had blatantly excluded Black applicants now had to open their doors (at least nominally). In the late 1960s and 1970s, a concept of “affirmative action” in employment took hold – partly through President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 (1965), which required federal contractors to take proactive steps to ensure non-discriminatory hiring. This was the government acknowledging that simply banning discrimination wasn’t enough; you had to actively counteract centuries of exclusion. Affirmative action plans led to minority recruitment and training programs in some industries and more diversity in hiring, though they also sparked backlash that continues in various forms today.

The New Deal’s gaps were also gradually closed in this era. Amendments in 1966 to the Fair Labor Standards Act finally expanded minimum wage and overtime protections to farmworkers and domestics (though farmworkers still lack many protections like the right to unionize or full overtime pay in some states). The minimum wage, first set in 1938, was raised regularly through the 1960s and 1970s, improving pay for the lowest-paid workers (among whom Black and other minority workers are overrepresented). The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) of 1970 created federal safety standards for workplaces – a reform that benefited workers in dangerous jobs, including many Black workers concentrated in high-risk industries like meatpacking, construction, and industrial plants.

Labor gains in this period extended to the public sector as well. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 while supporting a public-sector strike, there was a wave of unionization among government workers. By the mid-1970s, big cities like New York, Detroit, and Washington D.C. had majority-Black municipal workforces who were unionized – providing decent wages and benefits for thousands of African Americans. These public-sector jobs (teaching, transit work, social services, etc.) became a cornerstone of Black middle-class stability. Indeed, in later years, studies would show that Black workers in the public sector faced a smaller wage gap relative to whites than in the private sector. Government employment, thanks to civil service rules and unions, was relatively more meritocratic than many private employers.

Finally, it’s key to note that labor law evolution wasn’t a one-way march of progress. There were backlashes. One major turning point was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, passed over President Truman’s veto, which amended the Wagner Act to restrict unions – banning secondary boycotts, allowing states to pass “right-to-work” laws (which prohibit union security agreements), and requiring union leaders to swear they were not communists (which led to purges of some radical, often racially progressive, union leaders). Southern states eagerly passed right-to-work laws, which weakened union organizing by making it harder to collect dues. These laws had a racial element: they were intended in part to keep the union movement (seen as disruptive and potentially egalitarian) from taking hold in the South, thereby keeping the low-wage, racially stratified economy intact.

In the broader sense, every advance in labor rights for Black workers met resistance. After the civil rights gains, there was white backlash in the form of the 1970s-80s push for “colorblind” policies that often translated into undermining affirmative action. In employment, that meant lawsuits and political campaigns to end racial quotas or goals – some of which were warranted if misused, but many of which aimed to stall the integration of workplaces. By the late 1980s, the Supreme Court began narrowing interpretations of job discrimination (for instance, making it harder to prove systemic disparate impact unless a practice was almost intentionally discriminatory).

Nonetheless, the mid-20th century stands out as the era when American labor law and civil rights law converged. The right to a fair wage, the right to a workplace free from discrimination, and the right to collective bargaining became, for a time, accepted pillars of a just economy. It took immense struggle to reach that point – and as we will see, many of these gains have been eroded in the subsequent neoliberal age.

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