White Workers and the American Civil War

From the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 until the Confederacy surrendered in the spring of 1865, workers—North and South—labored long hours under often trying conditions at wages that rarely kept pace with wartime inflation. Though many workers initially voiced skepticism of plans for sundering the nation, once Southern states seceded most workers rallied round their rival flags and pledged to support their respective war efforts. The growing demand for war material opened employment opportunities for women and men, girls and boys, across the Union and Confederacy. Yet workers were not always satisfied with a job and appeals to back the boys in blue and gray without question. They often resisted changes pressed on them in the workplace—new technology, military discipline, unskilled newcomers—as well as wages that always lagged behind rising prices. Protests and strikes began in 1861 and increased in number and intensity from 1863 to the war’s conclusion. Labor unions, in decline since the depression of 1857, sprung back to life, especially in the war’s later years. Employers sometimes countered their employees’ increasing organization and resistance with industry associations that tried to break strikes and blacklist those who walked off their jobs. While worker discontent and resentment of “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” were common across the sectional divide, Northern workers exercised greater coordination of their resistance through citywide trade assemblies, national trade unions, traveling organizers, and labor newspapers. Southern workers tended to fight their labor battles in isolation from shop to shop and town to town, so they rarely built a broader labor movement that could survive the hardships of the postwar era.

Unfortunate Strangers: Lascars in the British Maritime World c. 1849-1912

<p>In 1903, there were 36,893 lascar sailors out of the 247,448 seamen working on British merchant ships. Lascars were non-white workers mostly recruited from Asia. As a result of changes to the British maritime industry in the second half of the nineteenth century, notably the shift from sail to steam, lascar numbers increased. Lascars became critical to the success of the British shipping fleet. They filled the gap that had formed because of the lack of British sailors to crew ships. Lascars were characterised as cheap, lazy, and dirty, as well as being regarded as poor sailors. Lascars were essentially perceived as everything the British sailor was not. Although lascars were British subjects, they were paid less than British sailors, ate inferior food, and slept in substandard accommodation. Once in British ports, after their voyages had ended lascars enjoyed fewer settlement rights, access to welfare and resources than their counterparts. As a result, lascars struggled to survive in Britain. Strategies that created a racial division of labour and hierarchy entrenched a low social status for lascars compared to that of their British counterparts. This thesis discusses how and why some groups of non-white sailors were given the label lascar. It analyses how the label lascar became a term to represent and enforce difference. Being cheap labour, and non-white was the basis for lascar difference, but the strict regulation and control of their conditions put these men in a much more subordinate position than their British counterparts. The strict conditions and tight regulation that lascars experienced became characteristics of the label they were tagged with. Many lascars were abandoned or chose to stay in Britain where the strategies they employed to survive further enforced their difference. This thesis highlights the period 1849-1912 because of the significant increase in lascar numbers during this period. Chapter one discusses who a lascar was and the interchangeable nature of the term lascar with other labels that describe non-white maritime workers. Chapter two draws on newspaper evidence, plus the works of Gopalan Balachandran and Michael Fisher to examine the effects on lascar recruitment and employment practices that reinforced difference. Chapter 3 focuses on lascars in Britain and what strategies they employed to survive and how they reinforced difference. The majority of the discussion will focus on examples from port cities of London, Glasgow, and Dundee because lascars were a visible part of the social diversity of these cities. Between 1849 and 1912 lascars contributed significantly to the economic success of Britain’s maritime industry.</p>

Unfortunate Strangers: Lascars in the British Maritime World c. 1849-1912

<p>In 1903, there were 36,893 lascar sailors out of the 247,448 seamen working on British merchant ships. Lascars were non-white workers mostly recruited from Asia. As a result of changes to the British maritime industry in the second half of the nineteenth century, notably the shift from sail to steam, lascar numbers increased. Lascars became critical to the success of the British shipping fleet. They filled the gap that had formed because of the lack of British sailors to crew ships. Lascars were characterised as cheap, lazy, and dirty, as well as being regarded as poor sailors. Lascars were essentially perceived as everything the British sailor was not. Although lascars were British subjects, they were paid less than British sailors, ate inferior food, and slept in substandard accommodation. Once in British ports, after their voyages had ended lascars enjoyed fewer settlement rights, access to welfare and resources than their counterparts. As a result, lascars struggled to survive in Britain. Strategies that created a racial division of labour and hierarchy entrenched a low social status for lascars compared to that of their British counterparts. This thesis discusses how and why some groups of non-white sailors were given the label lascar. It analyses how the label lascar became a term to represent and enforce difference. Being cheap labour, and non-white was the basis for lascar difference, but the strict regulation and control of their conditions put these men in a much more subordinate position than their British counterparts. The strict conditions and tight regulation that lascars experienced became characteristics of the label they were tagged with. Many lascars were abandoned or chose to stay in Britain where the strategies they employed to survive further enforced their difference. This thesis highlights the period 1849-1912 because of the significant increase in lascar numbers during this period. Chapter one discusses who a lascar was and the interchangeable nature of the term lascar with other labels that describe non-white maritime workers. Chapter two draws on newspaper evidence, plus the works of Gopalan Balachandran and Michael Fisher to examine the effects on lascar recruitment and employment practices that reinforced difference. Chapter 3 focuses on lascars in Britain and what strategies they employed to survive and how they reinforced difference. The majority of the discussion will focus on examples from port cities of London, Glasgow, and Dundee because lascars were a visible part of the social diversity of these cities. Between 1849 and 1912 lascars contributed significantly to the economic success of Britain’s maritime industry.</p>

Disparities in COVID-19 Fatalities among Working Californians

Background: Information on the occupational distribution of COVID-19 mortality is limited. Objective: To characterize COVID-19 fatalities among working Californians. Design: Retrospective study of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 fatalities with dates of death from January 1 to December 31, 2020. Setting: California. Participants: COVID-19 accounted for 8,050 (9.9%) of 81,468 fatalities among Californians 18-64 years old. Of these decedents, 2,486 (30.9%) were matched to state employment records and classified as confirmed working. The remainder were classified as likely working (n=4,121 [51.2%]) or not working (n=1,443 [17.9%]) using death certificate and case registry data. Measurements: We calculated age-adjusted overall and occupation-specific COVID-19 mortality rates using 2019 American Community Survey denominators. Results: Confirmed and likely working COVID-19 decedents were predominantly male (76.3%), Latino (68.7%), and foreign-born (59.6%), with high school or less education (67.9%); 7.8% were Black. The overall age-adjusted COVID-19 mortality rate was 30.0 per 100,000 workers (95% confidence interval [CI], 29.3-30.8). Workers in nine occupational groups had mortality rates higher than this overall rate, including those in farming (78.0; 95% CI, 68.7-88.2); material moving (77.8; 95% CI, 70.2-85.9); construction (62.4; 95% CI, 57.7-67.4); production (60.2; 95% CI, 55.7-65.0); and transportation (57.2; 95% CI, 52.2-62.5) occupations. While occupational differences in mortality were evident across demographic groups, mortality rates were three-fold higher for male compared with female workers and three- to seven-fold higher for Latino and Black workers compared with Asian and White workers. Limitations: The requirement that fatalities be laboratory-confirmed and the use of 2019 denominator data may underestimate the occupational burden of COVID-19 mortality. Conclusion: Californians in manual labor and in-person service occupations experienced disproportionate COVID-19 mortality, with the highest rates observed among male, Latino, and Black workers.

US employment inequality in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic

This article compares inequality in employment across demographic groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop a measure to capture both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of employment losses. Results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job-loss measure, less-educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less-educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more-educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.

Explosive mixtures: ‘Redbones’ and the racialisation of a white working class

In the 1950s a wave of labour unrest shook a small town in southwestern Louisiana, leading to the racialisation of workers who had previously been considered white, as ‘mixed race’ or, in local terms, ‘Redbone’. This article considers why certain individuals were marked as mixed race in relation to strike violence and their opposition to capitalist expansion. Utilising a variety of methodological approaches, including archival research, historiography and oral testimony, this article seeks to examine how an instance of labour unrest was reinterpreted by local law enforcement, an interstate capitalist class and the national press as calling into question the racial integrity of a group of workers who had been formerly marked as white. This explosive and largely unstudied strike provides an opportunity to better understand how racialisation operates as a technology of control, even over individuals who appear phenotypically white. The strike at Elizabeth allows a glimpse at the tactics of representatives of white supremacy when white workers do not fully embrace the ‘wages of whiteness’.

The Racially Unequal Impacts of Disasters and Federal Recovery Assistance on Local Self-Employment Rates

This study examines racial inequalities in changing self-employment rates associated with natural hazard impacts and federal recovery assistance in ethnoracially diverse metropolitan counties between 2000 and 2010. It advances the viewpoint that such inequalities can stem from hoarded opportunities tied to white privilege in addition to commonly highlighted social vulnerabilities tied to racial inequities and exclusion. To test that proposition, we conduct change-score analyses using county-level data from the US Census Bureau, the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Results indicate that (a) overall, self-employment rates increase with local property damages from natural hazards, especially among white and Latino workers; (b) those increases are largely explained by the amount of federal public assistance received for disaster recovery, not property damages themselves; and (c) white workers experience the most positive and consistent increases in self-employment from federal recovery assistance. Implications for understanding racial inequities stemming from current and future disasters and government assistance are discussed.

Revisiting White Labourism: New Debates on Working-Class Whiteness in Twentieth-Century Southern Africa

This article is a contribution to and reassessment of the debate about the concept of ‘white labourism’ hosted in this journal in 2010. White labourism is a concept formulated by Jonathan Hyslop to describe an ideology combining an anti-capitalist critique with racial segregation that he argued was dominant in a transnational white working class in the British Empire in the early twentieth century. The debate about this concept has focused on the appeal and extent of this ideology in South Africa during the early twentieth century. In light of recent scholarship on Southern Africa, we take a longer-term perspective to critically examine the concept and the debate. Specifically, we make three interventions into this debate: we consider the role of white workers outside British imperial networks; we examine how radical and revolutionary ideas disappeared from white-working class politics in the mid-twentieth century; and we reassess the connection between transnational flows of people and ideas. Racial divisions in the working class and labour movement in Southern Africa were persistent and enduring. We argue that racial segregation had an enduring appeal to white workers in Southern Africa, and the sources of this appeal were more varied and locally rooted than simply transnational migration to the region.

Examining the Differential Impact of Recessions and Recovery across Race and Gender for Working- versus Professional-Class Workers

We investigate how wages and occupation sorting vary by race, gender, and class during recessions. We performed repeated Kitagawa-Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions of the Black-White wage gap from 1988 to 2020. Black professional-class workers’ wages are more unstable and take a more substantial hit during recessions. Black workers see a lower return to their labor market characteristics during recessions, and this is pronounced for the professional class. Using an occupational crowding methodology, we find that Black women are overrepresented in essential work and roles with high physical proximity to others and receive the lowest wages. White men are crowded out of riskier work but, within these categories, dominate higher-paying roles. Black workers earn less in professional riskier work than in working-class roles, while the reverse is true for White workers. We find that class status does not protect Black workers to the same extent as White workers, especially during recessions.

Quantifying the contribution of occupational segregation to racial disparities in health: A gap-closing perspective

Racism causes racial disparities in health, and structural racism has many components. Focusing on one of those components, this paper addresses occupational segregation. I document high onset of work-limiting disabilities in occupations where many workers identify as non-Hispanic Black or as Hispanic. I then pivot to a causal question. Suppose we took a sample from the population and reassigned their occupations to be a function of education alone. To what degree would health disparities narrow for that sample? Using observational data, I estimate that the disparity between non-Hispanic Black and white workers would narrow by one-third. This estimate is credible because of adjustment for lagged measures of demographics, human capital, and health carried out under transparent causal assumptions. The result contributes to understanding about inequality and health by quantifying the contribution of occupational segregation to a disparity: if we took a sample and reassigned occupations, the disparity would narrow but would not disappear. The paper contributes to methodology by illustrating an approach to macro-level claims (how segregation affects a population disparity) that draws on explicitly causal micro-level analyses (potential outcomes for individuals) for which data are abundant.