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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 - 2. Domestic Service
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io82 An American Dilemma
usually in the form of “identical motions,” continuously repeated. The high subjective
undesirability of such work, as compared with even the most monotonous factory produc-
tion-machine job, is universally acknowledged. In addition, there are other “disagree-
ableness factors” attached to the conditions of work in particular Negro jobs which push
them even farther down in the utility scale. In logging it is chiefly risk of accident and
disease )
in sawmills, accident risk and noise; in fertilizer plants, dust and disagreeable
’
odors; in road construction, excessive exposure to the elements, and so on.*
Before we go further in our description of the male “Negro jobs” we should con-
sider the one occupation which is most important of all to the nonfarm female Negro:
domestic service.
2. Domestic Service
The range of job opportunities, as previously stated, is more limited for Negro
women than for Negro men. There is a similar sex differential in the white population,
but the hardship worked on Negro women is much more pronounced. We have already
emphasized the fact that, in 1930, as many as 1,150,000 Negro women earned their
living as workers in domestic service and other service industries. This means that only
one in seven of all Negro female workers gainfully occupied in nonagricultural pursuits
worked in manufacturing, commerce, trade or any other nonservice occupation. The
largest group among the female Negro service workers consisted of those employed by
private households. They numbered 690,000 and thus constituted somewhat more than
half of all Negro female workers in nonagricultural pursuits. Including males, there were
about 750,000 Negroes working as servants of private families, which means that almost
40 per cent of all workers in this field were Negro.’* It was much lower, however, for
certain groups of higher and “intermediate” servants like “housekeepers and stewards”
(8 per cent) and “nurses, not trained” (ii per cent) than for cooks and other house-
hold servants, of which almost half were Negro.
About two-thirds of the Negio servants reside in the South and one-third in the North
and West.® The South had shown an increase of over 40 per cent from 1910 to 1930,
but outside the South there were between two and three times more Negro servants
in 1930 than in 1910. Indeed, more than half the total increase occurred in the North
and the West.^ There were seven Northern states, where one-fourth or more of the
“ Paul H. Norgren and Associates, “Negro Labor and its Problems,” unpublished manu-
script prepared for this study (1940), Part i, pp. 6-7.
**
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States: ip2o-/pj2, pp. 303 and 325-
326. See also Fifteenth Census of the United States: /950, Pofulationy Vol. 5; pp. 412-587.
It is somewhat difiicult to ascertain which service workers can be considered as employees of
private households. The following groups were included in the figure cited in the text:
cooks, other servants, housekeepers, and stewards which were not employed by hotels,
restaurants, etc., and nurses (not trained).
* The census definitions of North, South and West are used throughout this Appendix,
® Fifteenth Census of the United States: Pofulationy Vol. 4, State Table 1 1 ; Negroes
in the United States: ip2o-ipj2, pp. 303-309; and Thirteenth Census of the United States:
tgioy pofulationy Vol. 4, pp, 434-534. The comparison is not quite exact. In the first place
the Census designation “servants*’ includes not only employees in private families but also
cooks, maids, etc. (but not waiters and waitresses), in hotels, restaurants, eating places and
lodging houses; housekeepers and nurses, on the other hand, are not included. Second, data
for 19 JO and 1930 4rc not quite comparable.
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