A01=Paul Frymer
Activism
Affirmative action
African Americans
American Federation of Labor
Anti-discrimination law
Apprenticeship
Author_Paul Frymer
Bayard Rustin
Category=JBSL
Category=JPL
Category=KNXU
Civil Rights Act
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Class action
Closed shop
Coalition of Black Trade Unionists
Collective bargaining
Court order
Criticism
Democracy
Duty of fair representation
Economic inequality
Election
Employment
Employment discrimination
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Equal Protection Clause
Fair Employment Practice Committee
Government agency
Gunnar Myrdal
Herbert Hill (labor director)
Institution
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
Judiciary
Karen Orren
Labor relations
Laborer
Labour law
Labour movement
Lawyer
Legislation
Legislative history
Legislator
Local union
Lochner era
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Labor Relations Act
National Labor Relations Board
Plaintiff
Policy
Political agenda
Politician
Politics
Politics of the United States
Precedent
Provision (contracting)
Racial hierarchy
Racism
Railway Labor Act
Regulatory agency
Seniority
Social inequality
Southern Democrats
Statute
Strikebreaker
Theda Skocpol
Trade union
Union shop
United Automobile Workers
United States Department of Labor
Voting
W. E. B. Du Bois
Workforce
World War II
Product details
- ISBN 9780691134659
- Weight: 312g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Dec 2007
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five. Black and Blue explores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline. The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement. From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction.
Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power, Black and Blue chronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.
Paul Frymer is associate professor of politics and director of the Legal Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of "Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America" (Princeton).
