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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Appendices - 6. Pre-War Conditions of the Negro Wage Earner in Selected Industries and Occupations - 1. General Characteristics of Negro Jobs

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io8o An American Dilemma
Even those should be considered, for it is just as important to find out why the Negro
has failed to gain a foothold in a particular industry as it is to describe his condition
in occupations where he has been allowed to work.
Table i shows the industries in which significant numbers of Negroes are employed.
A reference to it, as each of the specific industries is taken up, will serve to give basic
facts relevant to the discussion and to place the industry under consideration in per-
spective.
We intend to begin with the “Negro jobs,” in which the bulk of the Negro workers
are concentrated. Those segregated or semi-segregated occupations in which, as far as the
South is concerned, one-half or more of the workers are Negro, include the following
principal groups: domestic service; home laundering; certain other service occupations;
home sewing; lumber milling; turpentine farming and distilling; fertilizer manu-
facturing; unskilled work in building construction; maintenance-of-way work on rail-
roads; longshore work; delivery and messenger work; work as helpers and laborers in
stores; unskilled work in blast furnaces and steel rolling mills; tobacco rehandling and
other unskilled work in tobacco factories.® To this list could be added two traditionally
Negro jobs which have been expanding rapidly since 1910, but in such a way that the
Negroes have gained less than the whites, so that their share in the employment has been
cut to less than one-half. These are unskilled work in building, repairing, and main-
tenance of roads, streets, and sewers; and work as teamsters, truck drivers and so forth.
In the South, the proportion of Negro workers in these occupations, by 1930, was 42
and 32 per cent, respectively.^ It is apparent that motorization was the cause both of the
increase in total numbers thus occupied and of its growing attractiveness to white labor.
As we shall find, there is a similar development under way in some of the other “Negro
job” industries as well. In other such industries, Negroes have been able to maintain
cheir traditional position, at least up until 1930.
Virtually all these “Negro job” industries have the common feature that they are
regarded as undesirable from one or several viewpoints. Many of them carry a social
stigma, particularly in the South, where they tend to be despised not only because they
are located at the bottom of the occupational ladder, but also because of the very fact
that they are traditionally “Negro jobs.” The average wage level is low; in the South
it tends to be even lower in relation to what is paid for skilled work than it is in the
North. Most of the male Negro jobs call for outdoor work. They are usually
. . . characterized by a much greater degree of intermittency in employment than most
white jobs in the South. . . , Thus, all of the outdoor occupations are subject to frequent
“layoffs” in rainy weather. Winter cold curtails employment in turpentine extraction and,
to some extent, also in building work; and seasonal variations in demand seriously affect
work opportunities in lumber and fertilizer production. Business depressions infringe far
more heavily on the lumber and construction industries than on textiles, garment-making,
aiid most of the other southern industry-sectors where whites hold the bulk of the jobs.
Moreover, several of the Negro jobs are characterized
... by a high degree of physical and psychological disutility. Practically all of the
occupations are “day labor” jobs, involving long and strenuous muscular exertion,
* Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Pofulation, Vol. 4; Table 11 of state
tables. See also Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910, Population, Vol. 4; pp, 434-
534-
^liem.

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