THE CHALLENGE OF EQUAL ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY
American historians have characterized the decade following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 as one of such dramatic improvement for blacks as to constitute a “Second Reconstruction.” Paradoxically, alongside this remarkable social and political progress came a relative, and in some ways an absolute, decline in the economic status of Afro-Americans. In 1960, 50 to 84 per cent of all black wage-earners fell into menial and unskilled job categories; 23 per cent of Negro families in Los Angeles lived below the government’s “poverty line” of $3,000 annual income, 24 in Newark, 27 in Chicago and New York, 30 in Philadelphia, 32 in Baltimore, and 36 in Pittsburgh. Unemployment figures were also revealing. In Detroit, where blacks were comparatively well off, 16.8 per cent of the black labor force were out of work in 1940 and 17.4 per cent in 1960. Unemployment figures were also revealing. In Detroit, where blacks were comparatively well off, 16.8 per cent of the black labor force were out of work in 1940 and 17.4 per cent in 1960. The rate rose in the inner cities after 1960 as the flight of blacks from the South to the northern ghettoes intensified. These migrants arrived at a time when the spread of automation was robbing blacks already resident in the northern ghettoes of their traditional unskilled places in industry.
Blacks did make important gains in the labor movement. The days were gone when entire industries were “lily-white” and when unions excluded blacks from membership. By 1970 there were more than 2.5 million black unionists in the U.S., and at 15 per cent their membership in unions was higher than their percentage of the total population. Nevertheless, in 1970 the black unemployment rate was still a little over twice that of whites, median annual income for black families was only 61 per cent that for their white counterparts, and blacks remained grossly over represented in lower paying, lower skilled jobs. Part of the explanation lay in the technological revolution as unskilled jobs increasingly were eliminated by automation. Also, there was the continuing drift of jobs to the suburbs as new plants and new jobs were established outside of the cities where blacks did not live. Moreover, serious economic recessions gripped the nation during the seventies, and black unemployment reached a depression level by the end of the decade, making a mockery of affirmative action programs mandated by federal law. A major reason for this was the seniority rule, the determinant for order in lay-offs and prospects for advancement on the job. While seniority is crucial to the economic interests of the factory worker, it does discriminate against blacks who most frequently are the last hired.
The primary issue underlying the contemporary battle against on-the-job discrimination is how to reconcile equal employment opportunity with seniority rights and, in numerous legal suits during the 1970s and early 1980s, black workers have challenged the rule. The general thrust of the court decisions in these cases has been to establish the principle that seniority plans must intentionally discriminate against the workers it covers in order to be illegal. One of the most important of these cases was that of Brian Weber, a white employee of Kaiser Aluminum, and a member of the United Steelworkers of America. A lab technician, Weber had applied for a craft training position, but was rejected because over thirty whites had more seniority. He had more seniority than two of the five blacks selected from a separate minority list, however, and Weber sued charging “reverse discrimination.” The lower courts ruled in his favor, but in June 1979 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress had “left employers and unions in the private sector free to take . . . . race conscious steps to eliminate manifest racial imbalance in traditionally white job categories.” The decision left many questions unanswered, however, and the issue remains in flux.