DIVISION OF LABOR

AMERICANS HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF WORK AS NOBLE - BUT ASSIGNED IT BY RACE AND SEX

Author: By Eileen Boris

Date: SUNDAY, March 8, 1998

Page: E1

Section: Books

Jacqueline Jones, chair of the Brandeis University history department, has crafted a sobering portrait of more than 300 years of work in America. At its center stands a persistent racial division of labor in which African-Americans have found themselves relegated to tasks disdained by those of European ancestry. A comparison of black with native, English, and other immigrant laborers, hers is a richly illustrative history that asks big questions about race and power, citizenship, and rights. Despite its nearly unrelenting bleakness -- biracial struggles for better working conditions almost always succumb to white fears of losing jobs to blacks -- her story offers room for optimism in the shifting line of the racial divide. Local economies variably shaped who did what, when, and why. Though Jones concentrates on events before 1900, this lopsidedness aids us in understanding how history has shaped current divisions of labor.

Take work with machinery, one of the illuminating threads that Jones so expertly follows throughout the centuries. White workers barred free blacks from tending looms and engines in the North. After the Civil War, industrializing America reserved newly mechanized jobs for whites. For African-Americans still in fields and kitchens, employer-employee relations harked back to slavery rather than forward to modern personnel management. In this century, fewer blacks supervised factory shopfloors than practiced medicine. But antebellum Southern mills had relied on slave rather than poor white labor, belying later practices.

Africans were not the only bond laborers of early America. Slavery developed gradually as an alternative to rebellious English, mostly male, indentured servants (who were in dwindling supply by 1800) and native workers (who were deemed recalcitrant and less valuable than their land). Before the Revolution, Jones shows, unfree laborers also included ``children governed by their elders, . . . sharecroppers and tenants by their landlords, hirelings by their employers, women by their fathers and husbands, . . . criminals and sexual renegades by the state and church.'' The capitalist marketplace of the antebellum North similarly generated groups of dependents, such as unpaid laborers in households ruled by fathers and husbands, and pauper laborers in poorhouses, the first workfare recipients. Wage laborers faced the choice of starvation or exploitation.

With cotton cultivation, Southern racial slavery flourished. Dangerous and unpleasant jobs like harvesting hemp, preparing irrigation ditches, or tapping tar became denigrated because blacks performed them. Imprisoned data enterers, immigrant garment sewers, and migrant fruit pickers represent current forms of less-than-free laborers. Although it reflects today's multicultural work force, their status derives from understandings of black slavery as the most degraded condition, a notion Jones emphasizes to be as powerful in the present as it was when Lynn shoemakers in 1860 marched under the banner ``American ladies will not be slaves.''

White people, Jones controversially contends, ``invented the black `race' -- that is, the idea that blacks were a group irredeemably set apart,'' different and unassimilatable. They also rationalized the work given to African-Americans. For 19th-century white artisans, no less than for contemporary targets of corporate restructuring, blacks who appeared ``lazy'' were simultaneously ``predatory job seekers.'' Despite this recognition that race is a malleable cultural construct, Jones is more comfortable with structural explanations of inequality.

One delight of this book comes from its expansive sense of ``work.'' Jones includes family and reproductive labor, women's work as well as men's. She understands the economic work of gender: how the consumer economy of the 1920s, even as it was learning to promote white beauty, left out black women ``as advertising icons touting new apparel or appliances.'' A surprising theme derives from the history of soldiering, a masculine enterprise that incubated skill and citizenship but only grudgingly included black men, and then mostly assigned them feminized fatigue work. Throughout, Jones carefully emphasizes the social context of work. The backbreaking laundering by the servant became a labor of love for the wife; the patriotic spinning by the Daughters of Liberty was just another burden for the slaves of Washington or Jefferson. Because for African-Americans work was so often linked with subordination, many valued life away from labor, seeking in family and community, processions and performances, the pride and dignity missing from the workplace.

Though dwelling on barriers more than breakthroughs, Jones celebrates the economic nationalism of Marcus Garvey, the self-help of black entrepreneurs, the integration politics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the daily struggles of ordinary people. Just as the black working class refused positions as live-in domestics, left Southern fields for Northern factories, and marched for civil rights, now black workers join with Asian and Latino immigrants to transform the look of trade unionism. They recognize, as ship caulker Isaac Myers of the Colored National Labor Union explained in 1869, that ``if citizenship means anything at all, it means the freedom of labor, as broad and as universal as freedom of the ballot.''

Jones views the state as an active constructor of racial hierarchy, but notes that its compensatory activism often is less efficacious than the availability of abundant, good-paying work itself. The racial division of labor continues to define merit in ways that elevate white applicants over black ones, while deindustrialization and government devolution have threatened the tangible gains of the civil rights movement, including the growth of the black middle class. In response, Jones passionately defends affirmative action and calls for an expanded welfare state. Without a national commitment to economic as well as political rights, to decent housing, quality education, and adequate health care, ``the real distinctions between the rich and poor,'' she argues, can only negate the legal victories of the recent past.