Labor & Employment Law

Assaults on Public Employees Deal a Sharp Blow to Blacks

By James Parks

Steven Pitts

Assaults on public employees? right to bargain for a better life hurt all working people. But blacks are being hit especially hard. Black unemployment was 15.7 percent in January, compared with a national rate of 9 percent. Calls to slash the freedom of public employees could hit black job seekers especially hard because so many blacks are public employees.  

In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, says these attacks are already dealing a sharp blow to the black middle class.

The main reason is that a large number of blacks work in the public sector. In fact, before the recession, 18 percent of black men and 23.3 percent of black women were public employees, making this sector the leading employer of black men and the second leading employer of black women. In urban areas with large black populations, the role of the public sector in providing good jobs and creating a middle class for the black community is undoubtedly greater, Pitts says.

In his column, Pitts calls on the union movement to fight for racial justice and economic justice at the same time.

Without the collective power that unions can exert in the labor markets and at the ballot box, employers will drive wages to the lowest possible levels and subject workers to arbitrary whims. They also will discriminate against people of color and sow divisiveness among workers.

Read the entire column, ?Attacks on Public Employees Deal a Sharp Blow to Blacks,? here.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on February 27, 2011 (boomark / email).