Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report
- The saga of Black economic progress has largely been a story of men and women who fought to get into unions and, once in, became organized labor’s most militant members. By the mid 1980s, African Americans were 50 percent more likely than whites to be members of a union. But by 2007, Black workers were only 30 percent more likely than whites to belong to a union. In other words, while union membership has been in general decline for two generations, Black union membership, while still at relatively high levels, has been declining faster than for whites.
The data make clear that the decline in Black union membership is partly related to the overall shrinkage in manufacturing jobs. By the 1960s, Blacks were disproportionately represented in the heavily unionized auto industry, although Blacks were no more likely than whites to work in manufacturing in general. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, shows that Blacks were employed in manufacturing at about the same percentage as whites “from the end of the 1970s through the early 1990s.” But then, Black fortunes in manufacturing took a turn for the worse. According to the study, “By 2007, blacks were about 15 percent less likely than other workers to have a job in manufacturing.”
