18
Labor News must have alienated black workers given that the Ragen’s were avowedly
racist.
34
Whites wanted blacks to unionize to bid up black wages and thus preclude their
use as cheap labor, but the white unionists refused to integrate their unions and confront
the realities of the racial history of the United States. The functionalist hypothesis of a
capitalist conspiracy to divide labor along racial lines denies the agency of African
Americans. Some followed Booker T. Washington preferring strikebreaking as a tactic.
In the city of Chicago, however, black newspapers and the Urban League leaned toward
supporting Black Unionization until after the 1919 riots.
35
In a searing critique of a split labor market analysis of the racial division of labor
in the South African gold mines, Michael Burawoy emphasized the creation of a
colonized African mining workforce by the mines in tandem with the state.
36
The mines
required a mass of undifferentiated and cheap African labor to exploit the ore thinly
distributed through a massive expanse. The racial division of labor in the mines was
consistent with Burawoy’s analysis. African labor did most of the backbreaking labor
under the control of white skilled labor which was vastly better remunerated. The white
workers were initially recruited from Europe but increasingly drawn from among the
Afrikaners. The workers were bought off with premium ‘civilized’ wages to enable
continued exploitation of black Africans. Tilly also describes how the categorical
distinction between white and African labor was to facilitate the exploitation of African
34
William M. Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 156.
35
James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 232-239.
36
Michael Burawoy, “The Capitalist State in South Africa: Marxists and Sociological Perspectives,”
Political Power and Social Theory 3 (1981).
Convention