Still Fighting: The Relationship Between Contemporary Preemption in the South and the Continued Struggle for Black Worker Rights

Post-Reconstruction Black Codes implemented throughout the South stunted the economic mobility of Black workers and replicated the free labor system of slavery (Nittle, 2021). While these laws were abandoned or outlawed over time (Nittle, 2021; PBS, 2017), the use of contemporary preemption in Southern states acts as a de facto continuation of Black Codes by barring legislation, often from progressive cities and municipalities, that seeks to strengthen rights and protections for Black workers throughout the region. In order to properly understand the unique racial, political, and economic entanglement between twenty-first century preemption and the oppression of Black workers, one must first explore the origins of preemption and the history of Black worker oppression in the South. This examination provides the backdrop for modern attempts to suppress Black workers in states like Alabama and Tennessee. A closer look at the deep political divisions between Southern legislatures and urban municipalities in their states offer arguments, though unfounded and insufficient, in favor of preemption, and outline the challenges worker advocates face when addressing the problem. Despite its challenges, it is critical for organizers to continue fighting preemption using creative strategies and to reaffirm the rights and advancement of Black workers.

Maintaining the Status Quo through Repressed Silences: The Case of Paid Domestic Labour in Post-Apartheid South Africa

As competent social actors, we individually and collectively leave things unsaid that might threaten to disrupt the status quo. In this article, we outline an understanding of the unsaid and extend its implications to include what we call ‘repressed silences’ or silences about which we do not speak. Drawing on a diary-interview study involving five domestic labour dyads comprised of a white employer and a black worker, we examine silences topicalised by participants, how the unsaid stands in contrast to what could/should have been said and finally how these silences constitute a form of repressed silences. We demonstrate how the topic of paid domestic labour and its labour-related roles, rights and responsibilities are silenced – and the silence itself is not spoken of – among participants, thereby (re)producing the status quo of South Africa’s (racialised) inequalities and hierarchies.

The Crisis of the Black Worker, the U.S. Labor Movement, and Democracy for All

This paper contextualizes the socioeconomic condition of the African-American working class in the American Labor Movement. As the union movement continues its steady decline, African-American social conditions are deteriorating at an alarming pace. Racial oppression disrupted historically powerful labor movements as African-Americans served in predominantly subproletariat labor positions. As a result, Black workers endured the racially oppressive U.S. structure on the periphery of the U.S. Labor Movement. I argue that Black working-class social conditions are dialectically related to their subjugated position in the modern-day union movement. Therefore, for Black social conditions and working-class conditions to improve overall, the union movement must centralize the conditions of the Black workers.