Work occupies a special place in the Black-American tradition. Novelist Toni Morrison captures a major element of Black thinking on the value of work in her book, Song of Solomon.
“Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage…Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it…build it, multiply it, and pass it on–can you hear me? Pass it on!” (Morrison 1977).
Work is a way to seize control over one’s life, and share that agency with one’s family and community. For a group that has often been isolated from the levers of power and set upon by forces that sought to bind or brutalize it, the ability to force the world to create a place for them using their blood, sweat, and tears is extremely attractive.
But for work to serve this purpose it must operate differently than it does in the present day. Work is an institution, it is a set of rules that govern the exchange between labor and capital: how much is an hour of labor worth? How much control should workers have when it comes to decisions that affect their livelihoods? In the present day, Black workers face an epidemic of underpayment, where it’s possible to work full-time and still be poor enough to require public assistance. At the same time, a half-century of anti-union policies has contributed to an assault on unionization, because forming a healthy union is one of the best ways to give workers agency, something the Black workforce has made ample use of in the past, with organizations such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the washerwomen’s union in Atlanta (Chapter 8 of Revaluing Workers, Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future). These organizations made use of collective action to pull the institution into shape, they made work work for them.
In order to remedy the twin evils of widespread underpayment and unions under seige, policy needs to put a thumb on the scale. Raising the minimum wage and reforming American labor policy can do just that, and help to make American work into an institution that empowers Black workers instead of exploiting them.
Black workers are overrepresented in work that doesn’t pay. Despite America’s status as a wealthy country, with the highest GDP in the world as of 2022, around 40% of the American workforce is made up of low wage workers. In a report on the group, the United States Government Accountability Office describes them as working people between the ages of 25 and 64 who earned $16 or less per hour. The Brookings Institution created a similar report on the low-wage workforce, with a slightly broader definition, and they found that while Black workers made up about 10% of the medium to high-wage workforce, they made up nearly 15% of the low wage workers. Unsurprisingly, they found that 54% of Black workers earn low wages, compared to 36% of white workers. For many Black workers, low wages make it much harder to use work as a means of empowerment.
Increasing the minimum wage is a common sense remedy to this underpayment epidemic. The federal minimum wage has not increased in a decade and sits at a pitiful $7.25. Though there are a number of cities and states that have raised their minimum wages, these locations do not host the majority of the Black workforce. Though the Great Migration has created significant Black-American populations throughout the United States, 59% of Black folks remain in the southern part of the country, and few southern states have elected to raise their minimum wage above the federal floor.
Securing fairer compensation for all Black people requires a fair minimum wage for the entire nation. This requires a suite of wage-based policy changes. The biggest one is simply increasing the federal minimum wage and tying it to the median wage, in order to ensure that it increases with inflation. This is part of the changes put forward in the Raise the Wage Act. As of 2024, the RTWA will gradually increase the minimum wage to $17/hour by the year 2029. Several years ago in 2021, an Economic Policy Institute testimony for the Senate Budget Committee argued that the RTWA (which at the time would have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025) would increase pay for 21% of the workforce. This would land a substantial blow against the underpayment epidemic, and as the bill would be passed at the federal level, it would apply to workers throughout the United States, supporting Black workers in all regions.
Some researchers have argued that increasing the minimum wage will cause costly job loss, but research on the employment impact of minimum wage increases has found little evidence to support this. For example, in the paper: “The Elusive Employment Effect of the Minimum Wage” economist Alan Mann notes that there are a variety of complex factors at play when analyzing the impact of the minimum wage on employment and that it might be that the minimum wage increases we’ve seen in the last decade or so in the United States are just not big enough to trigger a reduction in the number of jobs in the economy. Raising the federal minimum wage high enough for it to act as a real tool for those who earn it will likely not cause a loss of jobs, but it will create an opportunity for Black workers throughout the United States to make work pay.
Another important step towards empowering Black workers is policy support for collective bargaining. In the United States, Black workers have a long history of using collective action to fight back against the exploitation they faced in the American economy. But currently, union density in the United States is at a low point, due in no small part to a policy environment that has been extraordinarily anti-organized-labor in the last half-century.
The benefits of union membership are significant. One paper that analyzed union density over nearly a century in the United States suggests that unions reduce income inequality—a claim that has been made by a variety of researchers—and that Black workers historically
experienced even greater gains from unionization than white workers, though this effect seems to have decreased in more recent years. They interpret their findings to mean that the gap between the pay for Black workers who are not unionized and those who are is greater than the gap between a non-unionized white person and their unionized counterpart, which appears to align with the view that unions can play a role in helping Black workers make work work for them.
As of 2024, President Joseph Biden has, to a certain extent, broken with the trend of the last 50 years and taken some pro-labor stances. For example, the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) a federal body that is run by presidential appointees, has largely reinstated what is called the Joy Silk Doctrine, which, among other things, makes it much easier to form a union. Related policy changes could include the proposed Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would, among other things, make it illegal for companies to use private meetings to intimidate workers who are considering unionization, and better protect them from employer retaliation.
Creating a policy environment that welcomes collective bargaining also makes room for greater experimentation with worker power. In the present moment, most unions are focused on specific employers, but there are other ways to organize labor. In Revaluing Workers: Toward a Democratic and Sustainable Future, the authors describe a variety of different labor configurations. For example, in chapter 8, the authors call for policies to encourage sectoral bargaining for the common good. The idea of sectoral bargaining is that workers can form sector-wide bargaining entities, and have these bodies be institutionalized by negotiating with business owners to determine the labor conditions for the entire sector. Sectoral bargaining for the common good calls for these bodies to take a holistic approach to organizing, and advocate for workers even outside of the factory floor or the office space. The call to action from Song of Solomon comes to mind when considering the possibilities: what better way to use work to build up your community than to organize alongside them, and create a space together?
The idea of work as a source of empowerment is a powerful one for Black people, and millions of Black workers seize it as a chance to make a place for themselves and pursue self-actualization. Increasing the minimum wage, to ensure that these workers are guaranteed the pay they need to build and sustain themselves, and protecting the right to bargain so that they can make work work for themselves and their communities, are two sound strategies for making work into an institution that can truly act as a source of agency and power.