This statement can be attributed to Cemeré James, interim executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, DC, March 12, 2025—Yesterday, the Trump Administration slashed half of the U.S. Department of Education’s workforce when it laid off approximately 1,300 career staff and 600 probationary employees. A nation’s strength is built on the strength of its public education system, and these actions purposely weaken not only American education but America itself. Mass layoffs also undermine the economy and, if left unchecked, will lead to higher unemployment.
For 46 years, the Department of Education (ED) has helped advance and protect equitable educational opportunities for all students seeking to learn in the United States. The Trump Administration’s “final mission” for the department is to intentionally dismantle it, disregarding both its importance to the nation and the profound unpopularity of shuttering the ED. Allowing Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to operate the federal government like a private equity firm and unilaterally strip federal agencies of valuable people and resources will be ruinous to students, families, communities, and the economy.
Yesterday’s action is particularly concerning because of the impact on marginalized and vulnerable student populations. Public school systems that rely on federal spending will face increased difficulty in continuing to educate students. With a greatly reduced staff, the ED’s Office of Civil Rights cannot fulfill its obligation to vigilantly enforce federal civil rights laws in schools and among other recipients of ED funding. Researchers will struggle to analyze educational outcomes produced by various federal programs after the elimination of the National Center for Education Studies. Postsecondary students will be unable to begin or continue their educational pathways with the loss of staff capacity to manage financial aid awards. The harm of these cuts to students with disabilities, including the effects on early intervention programs for young children, remains unacknowledged by a Secretary of Education who struggles to remember what IDEA (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) stands for.
The administration has no intention of resolving these concerns or communicating how it will replace the ED’s essential services and programs. Since Inauguration Day the administration has wielded authority without regard to the democratic process, ignoring the laws or livelihoods they break.
CLASP stands ready to work with and on behalf of students, families, and communities to advance and protect the educational rights of all students. We call on federal and state policymakers to oppose these reckless actions and take steps to slow down and mitigate the harm while also supporting children, families, and educators at risk. In addition, we call on our partners in the education and children’s advocacy space to join the effort to push back against these harmful attacks, which are an affront to our collective goals to build a more just and equitable country.
By Eddie Martin, Jr.
History has shown us that civil and human rights progress is often met with resistance, and the early days of the second Trump Administration have been no exception. After just six weeks, the nation faces a profound democratic threat, as the administration has put a greater priority on a highly inflammatory agenda than on economic relief for American citizens. Rather than foster unity, this agenda is designed to divide the country—both racially and economically—through direct attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA); civil rights; and equal opportunity. These efforts, enforced through executive orders and policy decisions that lack factual basis, dismantle decades of federal policies that promote equal opportunity. They instill fear, suppress opposition, and sow confusion while masking more insidious efforts to entrench inequality. The consequences are already severe and will continue to worsen, increasing economic injustice and deepening poverty, particularly for people with low incomes and in communities of color.
For those who remember the harsh realities of segregation, the recent executive orders and the Project 2025 playbook aren’t new. Rather, they are a continuation of a long-standing cycle in which racial and economic justice and civil rights progress for marginalized communities are often met with resistance. For others who have not directly faced systemic oppression, these attacks spark anger, anxiety, and uncertainty, leaving many feeling powerless. However, history teaches us that these moments of backlash must be met with action, not despair. Yet if we are to withstand this onslaught, we must cut through misinformation, respond with strategic resolve, and reaffirm our commitment to equity and inclusion. History must serve as our blueprint for resilience, success, and justice.
The fight for civil rights and racial equity in America has always been inseparable from the fight for economic justice. The Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) sought not only to dismantle approximately 100 years of Jim Crow segregation and secure voting rights but also to ensure equitable access to health care, housing, education, and employment. Landmark legislation such as the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (which established Head Start), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Executive Order 11246 (which led to the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 laid the foundation for promoting economic justice and opportunity and fighting systemic racism.
Despite facing violence and threats, civil rights leaders—including Dorothy Height, Medgar Evers, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—led organizations like the National Council of Negro Women, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, National Urban League, and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Their grassroots organizing and legal victories secured the very protections that today’s DEIA and anti-discrimination initiatives rely upon.
However, history also warns us that every major civil rights gain has been followed by attempts to roll it back. Just as Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s War on Drugs systematically undermined the civil rights advancements of the 1950s and 1960s, the Trump Administration launched attacks on DEIA progress made in recent decades. As civil rights advocate and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw cautioned, these most recent efforts aim to “come after the entire infrastructure that has been created from the Civil Rights Movement.”
The administration’s preemptive policies (past and present) have resulted in:
These attacks extend beyond the workplace, reaching institutions of higher education and social safety nets. Universities face pressure to end DEIA initiatives under the threat of losing federal funding. Critical programs that provide health care, food, and housing assistance to working-class families and communities of color are at risk of being slashed. Federal troops are being weaponized at the border, while newly appointed civil rights officials are being deployed to target political opponents and to advance reckless economic policies, such as the imposition of tariffs, that threaten to further burden the most vulnerable populations.
The administration has consolidated power across all three branches of government, making resistance more challenging but no less necessary. To counteract this systematic injustice and harm, we must adopt a multilateral approach that secures short-term wins while laying the groundwork for long-term strategic and structural change.
Challenging oppression requires courage, strategy, and often sacrifice. As A. Philip Randolph once said::
Justice is never given; it is exacted … and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships.
To uphold democracy, equity, and justice, we must be creatively maladjusted to injustice, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested: fearless in our pursuit of freedom and unrelenting in our demand for equality. The road ahead is difficult, but history has shown us that when we stand together, we prevail.
By Lulit Shewan
The Southern U.S. has historically had the largest number of Black people in the workforce in the country. This is a region where workplace organizing faces hostile laws and employer power is emboldened. States in the South have some of the lowest rates of union coverage in the country, which means that a sizeable number of Black workers aren’t able to exercise their ability to organize in reprisal of their working conditions.
This issue is both historical and intentional. Low union density in the South is rooted in the ruling class of such states seeking to maintain the longstanding super-exploitation of Black labor following the end of slavery. While chattel slavery bound the enslaved to their masters across all colonies, the South’s agriculture-based economy put a particular premium on free Black labor to build the nation, enforced through extreme violence. This history is inextricably linked to the current state of the South. The same attitudes that harmed both the enslaved and their descendants can be found today in starvation wages, limited economic mobility, poor working conditions, and constrained organizing abilities.
Even as union membership grew in the industrial North, ultimately sparking the Great Migration of Black Southerners in the early- to mid-20th century, Southern powers remained resistant to unionization. Today, only 6 percent of all workers in the region are unionized. That is just one legacy of the region’s resistance; another is legislation that staunchly deters organization and demeans collective bargaining efforts. Such efforts have largely been enforced by the reign of “right-to-work” laws.
All states in the South have right-to-work legislation in effect, meaning that they prohibit union security agreements, which ensure that workers who are not in the union will contribute to the costs of union representation. Proponents of right-to-work laws claim that they protect workers against being forced to join a union, but the largely unspoken and intended effect of such laws are to tilt the balance toward corporations and employers, further rigging the system at the expense of working families.
Arkansas and Florida were the first two states to enact right-to-work laws in the 1940s. Christian Americans, who led the right-to-work campaign in its birthplace of Arkansas, were brazenly racist in their propaganda, warning that if the right to work amendment failed, “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes… whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” It is not coincidental that right-to-work first took root in the Jim Crow South; these laws are just one part of a complex web of calculated efforts to maintain the poverty and exploitation of Black people. The subjugation of the working class and Black communities has always had a place in the region, and those who live at its nexus suffer the most.
While a majority of Americans support unionization, companies continue to push back against organized labor, driving a decline in overall union density and stagnating union growth in the South. The power of these companies is bolstered by anti-worker policymakers aiming to maintain the symbiotic relationship between government and wealth-hoarding corporation entities—a relationship that entirely diminishes the value and self-determination of the Black worker.
Given that the political and legal structures of the South have always been designed to prevent workers from expressing even the most basic forms of power, the collective power built by Black workers within a historically exploited region remains steadfast and inherently undeterred by oppressive administrations and policies. Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee made history in April 2024 when workers voted to unionize with the United Auto Workers (UAW) by a landslide, after tirelessly organizing in one of the states most hostile to unions. Leading up to the vote, anti-worker policymakers such as Governor Bill Lee vehemently spoke out against the UAW’s drive to organize Southern factory workers, in an attempt to dissuade workers from voting. The union won with 73 percent of the vote.
The service sector in the South comprises some of the most challenging workplaces to build labor power, in part due to difficult working conditions and high turnover. This is compounded by employer misinformation about unions and what union organization can offer workers, in support of right-to-work laws.
But the high concentration of Black workers in such industries continues to create a hotbed of collective anger and reprisal, given that this exploitation has history and that racial wage gaps continue to widen as wage inequality grows. In a 2022 study, the Economic Policy Institute found that Black workers have reaped even fewer gains from increased aggregate productivity than white workers. At the forefront of organizing this sector is the newly formed Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), which found that Black workers make up 41 percent of the employees in South Carolina’s food or beverage, general merchandise, food services, and warehouse and storage jobs, but 27 percent of the state’s workforce. The steadfast organizing drive of the USSW is informed by endless stories of various forms of worker degradation and exploitation.
The Trump Administration wasted no time introducing a slew of anti-union sentiment and legislation. Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) reintroduced The National Right to Work Act and Secretary of Labor nominee Lori Chavez-DeRemer walked back support for the PRO Act, which would have overturned Republican-backed right-to-work laws. For many Black workers in the South, these efforts hardly present new threats.
“We are building a union despite the fact that the rules are rigged against us as Southern workers. We are building a union by any means necessary and building it in a way that makes sense for us,” says Eric Winston, service worker and USSW member. Dockworkers, food service employees, and entertainment workers are among the organized groups in the South who have organized strikes in the last year, many reaching tentative agreements. These workers are adapting their organizing to modern workplaces, as with the USSW’s solidarity-centered approach of cross-sector organizing at various locations in different industries.
Organized labor requires investment of time and faces incessant obstacles. Black workers have adopted these undertakings since the Jim Crow South and are at the forefront of the fight against misinformation. For them, it is not a choice, but a necessity. The labor renaissance isn’t over, and the organized U.S. South provides the blueprint for the future.
This statement can be attributed to Cemeré James, interim executive director of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP)
Washington, D.C., February 26, 2025 – The hollowing out of the federal workforce by the Trump Administration through mass layoffs is an underhanded strategy to dismantle countless programs that support children, families, people with low incomes, communities of color, and other underserved populations. These actions will also deepen the immense harm created by the administration’s elimination of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs—and make it more difficult for families to access the supports they need.
The cuts to jobs across federal agencies—from the Administration for Children and Families and the Department of Education to the Department of Justice and Department of Housing and Urban Development—are said to be done in the name of cost savings and efficiency. But these cuts are causing chaos, disruption, and inefficiencies. They are directly and immediately impacting the lives and families of the employees who have been laid off but also harming children and families across the country. We are only seeing the beginning of the layoffs’ consequences. These cuts are ultimately efforts to limit access to important programs like child care and housing that support people on a path to economic security.
CLASP is concerned that these federal layoffs will decimate the many programs that support people with low incomes and communities of color, ultimately causing negative effects on our nation’s overall economy. While we are already seeing some of the damage, it’s clear that the long-term consequences will be even more significant and could affect generations to come. That’s why we urge everyone who cares about the well-being of individuals and their families, as well as the nation’s economic health, to demand that members of Congress use their authority to stop the decimation of the programs they established and funded.
By Alyssa Fortner and Shira Small
This year’s Black History Month theme, “African Americans and Labor,” provides an important opportunity to uplift and reflect on the ways Black women have shaped America’s child care system. This reflection is particularly critical one month into a new administration that has demonstrated disregard for the contributions of diverse workforces today and throughout history. To change the future of child care, it is important to understand the past, both to acknowledge how injustice shapes the sector and ensure a fairer and more equitable future for those who sustain and utilize the child care system.
In the time of chattel slavery, enslaved Black women were forced to take care of white children, while not being allowed to take care of their own. In the post-emancipation period, low-paid domestic work was one of the only industries available to Black women. And throughout the 1900s policy choices and both proposed and enacted laws further marginalized and harmed those in the child care workforce and the families that relied on them. CLASP’s more detailed timeline of this history and impact can be found here.
Though the U.S. child care system has changed over the course of history, the labor of Black women continues to be underpaid and undervalued. While 18 percent of child care workers are Black, Black people only compose 13 percent of the overall U.S. workforce. Despite their overrepresentation in the child care workforce, Black women earn less on average than their white counterparts in a field that is already woefully underpaid, with the average worker earning $30,370 in 2023. For center-based providers, the wage gap between white and Black workers amounts to an average of more than $8,000 per year. Workers in home-based child care programs, which Black providers operate in higher numbers, earn even less.
On top of low wages, the workforce’s limited access to health insurance, retirement savings, and other benefits demonstrate the continued devaluation of Black women’s labor, harming the entire sector. Creating an economically sustainable profession that supports the well-being of all providers is not only a necessary step in creating a stronger child care system, but in working to repair the history of exploiting Black women’s work.
Anti-Black racism, discrimination, and a refusal to chart a new path for child care to disconnect it from its unjust roots keeps child care workers underpaid and keeps care unaffordable. At CLASP, we are committed to helping transform the child care system by outlining its history, changing narratives around the system and workforce, and putting forth policy solutions that support those who have been undervalued or overlooked.
As too many communities in this country face increasing threats to their economic and personal well-being, CLASP remains steadfast in its mission to advance racial and economic equity—especially in moments when progress and justice feel fragile. We are committed to working at the intersection of advancing equity and improving policy, which are inextricably linked. To that end, below are CLASP resources that center racial equity to expand access to child care and support for the child care workforce. These resources seek to understand the impacts of anti-Blackness and racism in the child care sector, because recognizing injustice is the first step in eradicating it.
Centering Black Families: Equitable Discipline through Improved Data Policies in Child Care
This report documents the history of inequitable disciplinary practices that disproportionately impact Black children in child care and early education and how data can be used to create meaningful solutions that address the harms.
This blog discusses ways in which the legacy of white supremacy in the child care sector can be dismantled.
Child Care Assistance Landscape: Inequities in Federal and State Eligibility and Access
This report analyzes variations in eligibility and access to Child Care and Development Block Grant subsidies in 2020, disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
The Racist History Behind Why Black Childcare Workers Are Underpaid
This 2022 op-ed examines the history of black labor in the child care sector and how it underpins the workforce’s severe underpayment.
Expanding Access to Child Care Assistance: Opportunities in the Child Care and Development Fund
This report and its fact sheets explain how the child care workforce can be better supported and diversified to provide more culturally responsive child care options for families and provides strategies for states to expand access to care.
This report examines how community engagement strategies can help create more equitable policies on the road to dismantling systemic racism.
Parent and Provider Experience Should Inform Child Care Policy
CLASP partnered with parent leaders from the United Parent Leaders Action Network in this blog to highlight the importance of community engagement as a tool to advance equity, just as it is a tool for creating effective policy.
By Anna Kutz, Danielle Crenshaw
(EXCERPT)
“I feel that kind of the next large struggle for, especially the Black labor force in the country, is in these ongoing discussions around artificial intelligence and how it’ll impact the American workforce at large,” said Christian Collins, a policy analyst at The Center for Law and Social Policy.
By Anna Kutz, Danielle Crenshaw
(EXCERPT)
Two years ago, a policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, Christian Collins, wrote, “Black labor is the cornerstone of U.S. global hegemony.” This year, he told NewsNation that’s as true as ever.
The United States’ current prestige, says Collins, is thanks to the “uncompensated and undercompensated” labor of Black communities throughout the nation’s history.
“It’s pretty easy to grow economic profit, especially for high value crops like cotton, like tobacco, if you’re not paying the workers who are maintaining those crops,” Collins said.
By Kaelin Rapport
Last month, California relied on incarcerated firefighters to prevent and put out fires that ravaged vast swaths of Los Angeles County. The practice of using incarcerated individuals as forced labor has existed for decades and is part of an exploitative prison labor economy that balances state budgets at the cost of Black lives.
Carceral firefighting practices can be traced to slavery, as the use of Black labor was integral to fire management strategy, setting a violent precedent of placing the “inferior” on the frontlines of danger. California began using prisons as a source of enslaved labor for public works in the late 19th century when, as now, disproportionately warehoused Black people. Today, Black people account for 5 percent of the state population and yet comprise 28 percent of the state’s prison population.
That this exploitation persists is due in part to a loophole in the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery “except as a punishment for crime” by removing the constitutional provision allowing jails and prisons to punish those who refuse to work. Last November, California voters failed to pass Proposition 6, which would have closed that loophole. The proposition’s failure was partially due to persistent claims that contemporary work programs like the Conservation (Fire) Camp are voluntary.
Today, approximately 70 percent of incarcerated individuals are assigned to work, and the overwhelming majority reported feeling forced into jobs like fighting fires. Incarcerated Black laborers are more likely to either receive no pay for their labor or work in positions with lower pay than their white counterparts. This placement can be arbitrary or used as a form of punishment. Incarcerated individuals who refuse face the threat of accruing sanctions, being deprived of the few opportunities available to see family and/or reducing their sentences.
Roughly 30 percent of the crews that combat California’s wildfires consist of incarcerated laborers, which amounts to over 1,000 incarcerated firefighters. Some are as young as 18 – the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) launched youth programs at the Growlersburg and Pinegrove Conservation Camps in 2023 and 2024.
Programs like the Conservation Camps have received praise for allowing states to save hundreds of millions of dollars by using prison labor to fight fires and provide training for post-incarceration employment. Incarcerated laborers produce over $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in services in the upkeep of carceral facilities. However, this arrangement obfuscates the social costs of mass incarceration while perpetuating racial inequities and damaging local economies.
State law allows the CDCR to pay half California’s minimum wage of $16/hour. For the highly dangerous and arduous work of clearing areas around wildfires to prevent their spread, incarcerated firefighters receive anywhere between $5.80 and $10.24 a day; an additional $1/hour when responding to emergencies; and two days off their sentence for each day spent fighting fires. These meager wages frequently go toward meeting basic hygienic needs, making phone calls, and buying additional food from the prison commissary.
Because of their criminalized status, incarcerated laborers are excluded from federal protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National Labor Relations, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. They are also unable to unionize. It is also essential to keep in mind that, in addition to lacking adequate compensation, incarcerated laborers are often fighting wildfires without appropriate medical care or protective equipment.
As a result, the harm these laborers face from abysmal conditions inside prisons is mirrored in their life-saving work on the outside. Incarcerated firefighters are four times more likely to be physically injured on the job, eight times more likely to sustain an injury from smoke inhalation than professional firefighters, and largely unable to continue this work after being released. California law bars many with criminal convictions from receiving certification as emergency medical technicians (EMTs), a requirement to become a firefighter in the state.
California is among the 14 states maintaining fire camps that sacrifice incarcerated Black laborers for a public that has historically required their exclusion and exploitation. Being overpoliced, disparately incarcerated, and forced to work for minimal or no pay makes neither Black communities nor anyone else safer.
The following measures would make necessary strides in de-escalating the systemic violence of coercion Black incarcerated laborers suffer via California’s carceral system and serve as a model for other states to follow:
By Lulit Shewan
In the United States, the legacy of alternative and temporary work has served to create increasingly unstable jobs that make up a highly visible but often overlooked share of the American workforce. Temporary and staffing agencies are a high-traffic, high-profit industry meant to serve individuals seeking job training for further employment opportunities. These programs largely serve communities of color, low-income Black communities, individuals without postsecondary education, and those who face barriers to “traditional” work. But the temporary staffing industry reveals yet another blatant system of discrimination reminiscent of pre-Civil Rights policies. Temporary staffing agencies create a system of precarious employment that fails to support the work needs of vulnerable groups, while systematically creating vulnerability through poor job conditions, subpar wages, labor exploitation, and racist practices. These agencies are yet another example of how employers and corporations operate at the intersection of profit accumulation and discrimination.
Temp workers are more than twice as likely to be paid poverty wages compared to workers in all industries. These workers are often paid less than their direct-hire counterparts doing the same work. Staffing and temp agencies receive a cut of the hourly fee they charge host employers, which can range from 30 percent to more than 150 percent of the wages the worker receives. Namely, Black women are also overrepresented in occupations that have a disproportionate share of temporary agency workers and are less likely to work in occupations that have a high share of independent contractors or contract workers, as compared to their white counterparts.
An estimated 13 million to 16 million U.S. workers are hired through staffing agencies annually, according to industry estimates. Despite the volume of this industry, U.S. policy poorly enforces the regulation of temp work, and this lack of regulation leaves a wide gap for the largest employers in sectors like warehousing, manufacturing, and increasingly in retail, to use temporary agencies to squeeze more labor from workers. Such poorly regulated programs create new systems of discrimination in poor Black and brown communities, where efficacy and accessibility are deficient.
Among communities of need, employment agencies are also often known to exacerbate the precarity of job programs through misleading information, manipulation, and outright discrimination. The industry is rife with stories of agencies deceiving and often lying about the terms of employment surrounding hours, pay, safety, and the process of temp-to-permanent job trajectory. Many of these agencies operate without a license, send people to jobs that don’t exist, or place them in jobs that don’t pay minimum wage. Oftentimes, these agencies charge a fee to connect individuals to companies with little or poor return. A 2022 NELP study underscoring the systematic manipulation of agencies found that 24 percent of workers reported experiencing wage theft through a staffing agency, in which they were paid less than minimum wage, not paid overtime, or not paid the proper amount for hours they worked. Exaggerating the benefits, salary, or job security of a position is also commonplace across various agencies in several states. Such agencies have also normalized the farcical presentation of temp-to-perm positions, convincing people to work under substandard conditions under the pretense that something better is on the horizon. As of 2022, NELP found that 72 percent of surveyed workers have never been hired into a permanent position from a temp job.
The underbelly of this issue, as is true for all forms of systematic oppression, is racist discrimination. Across various localities and states, a rampant trend of bigotry in hiring serves to further disparage employment opportunities for Black people in need. Many agencies often rely on this discrimination at several points in the recruiting and enlistment process. Stories of this anti-Black discrimination have seen spikes since the inception of the pandemic staffing-agency boom; employers using coded language to request non-Black people for hire, eligibility requirements being illegally skewed, assigning Black applicants to ‘less desirable’ work, or the unmitigated presence of interpersonal racism on the job.
The significant rise of discrimination is a grave concern to the growing temporary workforce that often operates as a lifeline to a very vulnerable workforce, whose threshold for workplace conditions and self-advocacy are greatly skewed due to the precarious nature of this work. Oftentimes, Black workers who attempt to fight back against these discriminatory practices not only fail to see retribution but lose accessibility to this vital work as a whole. It is also important to note that formerly incarcerated individuals are overrepresented in this labor market. These agencies, operating in tandem with employer tax credits, impel workers with criminal records to accept such jobs with low wages and poor working conditions, creating a class of disproportionately Black workers whose desperation employers can exploit.
The poor management and regulation of temporary staffing agencies is yet another facet of a racist workforce system, one that often serves to replicate the poor material conditions that Black laborers, the backbone of this country, have faced since its inception. The truth is clear: these agencies work to serve companies, not workers.
While eliminating barriers in recruitment and hiring and combatting illegal job discrimination are two of six national priorities identified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, it is glaringly evident that these values are seldom upheld and enforced in the temporary staffing industry.
Content Note: This page contains references to themes that some individuals may find distressing, including suicide and harassment.
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” – W. E. B. Du Bois
By Christian Collins
Black History Month’s national theme for 2025, “African Americans and Labor,” honors the symmetry between the history of Black Americans and the history of American labor. Whether paid or unpaid, voluntary or compulsory, essential or nonessential, Black labor has always been the cornerstone of the United States. The indispensable nature of Black labor has always been requisite to the development and wealth of the United States, to the point that it is valued more than the lives of the Black people performing the work. Chattel slavery of Black people was used to construct the racial capitalism that took the U.S. from British colony to global economic superpower and built the very halls that host our government. Yet within those walls resides a democracy that still views the lost lives of Black laborers as an insignificant inconvenience instead of the echoes of our founding genocidal tragedy.
Much like the current societal inequities that originate from Black people never being equally viewed as “people” by our government and society at large, the current socioeconomic inequities faced by Black workers originate in the fact that Black labor has never been viewed as “labor” but as an entitlement for American society.
Throughout American history, the word “labor” has had multiple definitions depending on the type of work performed and who is doing it. Nowhere is that more evident than in the history of labor performed by Black Americans. The slave trading network was a means in which enslaved Black people were developed into a profitable commodity. Even after chattel slavery was limited by Constitutional amendment from being applicable to all Black people to only those incarcerated by the government, Black lives were never valued as much as their labor. Black labor fueled child care, infrastructure construction, agricultural labor, artistry, and ironwork, among other essential forms of economic gain. The occupational segregation of Black workers to certain professions indicated what professions were undeserving of “fair” compensation or access to benefits, even as their work became more critical to the continued survival and growth of the United States.
Misalignment between the value placed on Black labor versus on Black workers themselves, and the associated consequences, are still evident in the contemporary U.S.. Roughly half of all Black workers in the Southeast were agricultural wage laborers or domestic workers in the 1930s, leading to their specific exclusion from the labor rights protections administered through President Roosevelt and continued economic discrimination they experience. Black women in the United States were forced into careers as child care providers during slavery and into reconstruction. The occupational segregation of Black women continues to suppress wages of care providers even as the nation experiences a critical shortage of sector workers. Black men are overrepresented in the occupations most likely to be replaced via artificial intelligence (A.I.), such as factory labor and retail, while underrepresented in the occupations least likely to be replaced by A.I., like health and legal professionals. This trend continues a tradition of pursuing economic innovation from technological automation without regard to the human destruction it often causes.
Black history is defined not just by the leaders who relentlessly pursued racial justice on behalf of Black communities but also by the collective loss of lives in that pursuit, and that is especially prevalent regarding Black labor. The following graphic honors the stories of Black workers who have lost their lives because of how their labor was undervalued. Their lives will live on not just in their families and communities, but also within CLASP as we continue to work toward the elimination of anti-Blackness within the labor force and broader American society.
Click the names below to interact and learn more:
The W. E. B. Du Bois quote that opened this blog came from his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America. In this work, Du Bois argued that the Reconstruction period showcased how the autonomy and contributions of freed Black slaves were essential proof that a multiracial and working class-led democracy was possible in the United States after existing so long as a nation governed by racial hierarchies enforced through the economy and the law. The end of Reconstruction and subsequent violent terror of Jim Crow were in Du Bois’ eyes not a sign that widespread racial justice was impossible, but of the desperation of white supremacy to disrupt “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”
The most effective weapon against racism, and therefore a governing system that embraces racial capitalism, is solidarity and collective action. Though the individuals highlighted above lost their lives due to the continued undervaluing of Black labor and the lives of Black workers, there are millions of people and communities across the country who hold similar stories of workers lost because society felt entitled only to their “labor,” not a recognition of their humanity. Black History Month is a time to celebrate the historical and current contributions of Black leaders in every aspect of American history, and to use the lessons of our past and present to build solidarity toward a true racially just democracy and economy.
“So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.