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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 18. Pre-War Labor Market Controls and Their Consequences for the Negro - 3. Labor Unions and the Negro
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402 An American Dilemma
they will know how to use. The American union movement, if It wants to
become strong, must be based on a still largely absent, but gradually
developing, labor class solidarity, which must be all-inclusive. The declin-
ing relative significance of the craft union spirit can be regarded as a first
stage of such a development. The other reason is that the labor market
and its organization will in all probability be subject to more government
control, and the national administration will be forced to attempt to defend
a place for the Negro in the labor market against exclusionistic and segre-
gational practices by unions.
When pondering this whole problem, it should be made clear that this
is not the first time it has looked as if organized labor definitely were on
the move away from discriminatory practices. Time and again, in the
history of American trade unions, there have been attempts to build a
labor movement on the basis of workers’ equality and solidarity, but so
far these attempts, except in a few instances, have proved futile.®
The fact that the American Federation of Labor as such is officially
against racial discrimination does not mean much. The Federation has
never done anything to check racial discrimination exercised by its member
organizations.^
There is no doubt that the rise in industrial unionism has increased the
number of unions which do not discriminate against Negroes. The old
unions of this group, like the United Mine Workers’ Union and the Inter-
national Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, have grown stronger, and new
ones, like the United Steel Workers’ Union and the United Automobile,
Aircraft, and Agricultural Implement Workers’ Union, have been added
to the list. When the C.I.O. organized the mass production industries, it
followed the principle that Negroes should be organized together with
whites, wherever Negroes were working before unionization. Some of the
new unions, as previously stated, have recently taken positive measures
to give Negroes opportunities to work in occupations where they have not
been working before and to defend more equality for them in job advance-
ment.
It is understandable, for several reasons, that these attempts so far have
not been significant from a quantitative viewpoint. The rank-and-file
members, the majority of whom have only recently become organized, are
often biased against Negro fellow workers. Many employers have been
rather noncooperative in increasing the range of employment opportunities
for Negroes. The Negro workers themselves often have difficulties in
overcoming their old suspicions. And the leaders have had to put their
main efforts into the work of building up the new unions. The time has
been too short to bring about fundament^ changes in industrial race rela-
tions. The observer finds that the leaders of the new unions are usually
much more broad-minded and less prejudiced than the average run of
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