Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History.

Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History. By Paul D. Moreno. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2006. Pp. xiv, 334. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-3094-X.)

Despite its subtitle, Paul D. Moreno's study of African Americans and organized white workers offers little that is new. Instead, Moreno surveys familiar historical ground and "explores the interaction of race, economics, and law from a liberal or neoclassical perspective" that antedates the antebellum starting point of his study (p. 7). His main thesis holds that labor unions are inimical to the interests and ideals of America and African Americans and that unions bear much of the responsibility for perpetuating discrimination in the workplace.

The author contends that for thirty years historians have obscured this responsibility. He argues that "liberal" historians committed to studying labor "from the bottom up" tried to explain away the racism of rank-and-file unionists by concocting a "folklore of socialism" that blamed discrimination on capitalists' "divide-and-conquer" strategy for keeping wages low (p. 289). Other historians, seeking to explain why white workers often forced employers to discriminate, invented a split-labor market theory that because of its resemblance to classical economics was rejected by "radical" historians for a cultural studies approach that included whiteness studies. Moreno argues that classical economics, particularly the "economics of discrimination" theory, explains job and wage discrimination. Unions are monopolies created to limit the labor pool in order to create an artificial scarcity that increases the bargaining power of workers. Since the purpose of unions is to discriminate against nonmembers, it is unsurprising that unions discriminated against African Americans. Previous historians refused to admit that the coercive essence of unions held no appeal for black workers, who valued above all the free-labor idea of self-ownership in a free market. Beyond noting that Moreno oversimplifies subtle and complex scholarship, one can argue that the point of the labor history Moreno scorns has been to investigate this very question. Why did white unions undermine their efforts to control the labor market by excluding black men and women (Moreno almost completely ignores women and gender), thereby creating a reservoir of desperate competitors?

The book begins with the emergence of free-labor ideology and the antislavery movement, climaxes with New Deal legal protections for labor, which Moreno contends forced unions and hesitant African Americans to ally, and culminates in the civil rights era. Students of southern labor and African American scholarship will be familiar with the major conflicts, unions, and organizing efforts among longshoremen, miners, steel and railroad workers, and others that Moreno deftly recapitulates. Dismissing incidents of racial solidarity as rare exceptions, Moreno focuses almost exclusively on well-documented efforts of white workers to eliminate black competitors. To fulfill his promise to "integrate black and labor history with business and economic history, and to 'bring back in' both employers and the state," Moreno portrays businessmen and employers mostly as victims of racist employees (p. 6). Indeed, the author argues that white unionists profited from discrimination while African Americans and employers paid the price. Consequently, African Americans rejected the collectivism of unionism, sympathized with employers, and embraced the ideology of free labor and the free market. Although it seems to challenge his assertions of black devotion to economic liberalism, Moreno fails to address scholarship documenting the black collectivism that developed in response to oppression by merchant capitalist slaveholders, landlords, and employers as well as white unionists.

Furthermore, other than scattered quotes from critics of unions, Moreno offers little evidence that controlling the labor supply was the primary reason why locals excluded black workers. Readers may also wonder how such fair-minded employers and a fine-working free market could create conditions that compelled workers to organize in the first place. Moreno's lucid, neo-liberal interpretation, while not exactly new, will certainly elicit lively responses.

ROBERT S. SHELTON

Cleveland State University