Читать книгу Corporations Compassion Culture - Keesa C. Schreane - Страница 28

Given the importance of labor unions to employee-employer relationships—including expectations about productivity, protection, and pay—unions have long been a part of the Black employees' path to higher levels of inclusion, equality, and decent pay. But the path to equality has been a rocky one. To consider just one example, White employees of the Georgia Railroad went on strike in 1909, demanding that Black employees, who were paid less, be replaced with White workers who would, solely based on race, be paid more. When the strike eventually ended up in federal arbitration, the White union lost. Why? Because it was decided that paying Blacks equal to Whites would undermine the entire purpose of hiring Black workers in the first place. It's worth noting that the union in this case, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, was not only a White-only union but also acted consciously to the detriment of Black workers.

This is far from the only time that “diversity” in the workplace has been used to set one group of workers against another. Caitlin Rosenthal, assistant professor at University of California at Berkeley and author of Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, put it in stark terms:

Railroad managers and owners made [the case] for diversity [in hiring], but the business case they made was that having a diverse workforce would allow them to divide workers against each other and have more control over them. They said, “oh, we need to hire people with different racial backgrounds, but we're going to use that as a strategic advantage to prevent them from unionizing.” So there are people who've made business cases for diversity before, and they aren't always ones that we would feel good about now.⁶

Time and again, workers of color have discovered that diversity efforts are not always what they seem on the surface. History offers countless examples of this phenomenon. A 1907 report indicated that Black workers faced prejudice in trade unions and were permitted to work only where Blacks were highly concentrated so not to threaten White workers.⁷ The point is, the unions that helped protect the mental, physical, and financial well-being of workers didn't cover Blacks.