https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/memphis-sani...
The USA has been pretty racist in discriminatory, and I think it's disingenuous to single out unions for that history. I mean, who instituted Jim Crow and profited from slavery? White voters, government officials, and private enterprise. Unions were definitely not leading that.
I had slavery in mind with the private enterprise comment.
But it's not like businesses are actually run by perfectly rational automatons according to textbook economics. They're run by owners and managers who can be just as racist as the surrounding community, and who can very well prioritize prejudice over a little more profit.
As for Unions, think about it, their major threat is cheap labor from abroad, so the way that they have historically been discriminatory has been in lobbying for anti-immigration and immigration quota (don't know if they still do that as much).
Unclear why you were downvoted. Another example of this was Plessy v. Ferguson where the railroad worked with a civil rights group to bring the case:
>...On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[11] The railroad company, which had opposed the law on the grounds that it would require the purchase of more railcars, had been previously informed of Plessy's racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law.
You're telling much less than half the story, and taking the latter half of the twentieth century in isolation without considering what came before.
U.S. unions with communist and socialist leadership were universally anti-racist in word and very often in deed. Employers often interfered with employee choice of leadership to the benefit of conservative, racist, union leaders as opposed to leftists with anti-racist commitments.
In one of the most flagrant violations of the First Amendment in U.S. history, the Taft-Hartley Act[1] criminalized membership in all manner of left-wing political organization. With the cooperation of union leaders ready to sell out their membership, many of the strongest voices for integration were purged.
Employers and union officials alike had relationships ranging from extortion to open cooperation with organized crime. The relationship between the Hoffa Sr's Teamsters and the mafia was complex, and notorious in part because it was so exceptional.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act#Anti-...
That seems like a very US-lib centric POV where the US is a cartoonish evil-dooer.
In my experience Mexico is pretty much just as bad, even more so in different ways too - classism, racism, anti-indigenous sentiment, Malinchismo, rampant feminicide, etc.
My point is that these countries aren’t cosmic forces. We’re all humans that instantiate the same fundamental prejudices, instincts, biases, etc. wherever you find us.
All sorts of legitimate and useful things get used illegitimately.
Despite this, they too serve a useful function.
https://newspunch.com/american-companies-nazi-germany/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
EDIT: to respond to comments below:
1. Union busting since the New Deal era resulted in one of the most oppressed working classes in the world. Hence, low union enrollment.
2. FDR saved capitalism. I'm not his biggest fan. I'm a socialist.
3. Serious money was offered during the business plot. It didn't come to fruition, but the danger was real. Corporations are the real power in America.
There's nothing working class about that.
If someone is employed in a government organization, like the CDC or a secretary of the white house, and they don't have capital income then they are working class.
I'm not sure this makes much sense. "Racism" (I'm guessing you mean things like slavery or de jure discrimination) were practiced concurrently in the US and elsewhere in North America, not to mention many other countries. The US was one of the first countries to have major movements to end slavery (Britain was the first global power to do so, and they preceded the US). I think it would be most accurate to say that the US has historically been both among the most racist and least racist countries, just depending on how you measure.
> Unions provide countervailing power to corporate power. Racist people are racist. Sometimes these can overlap.
Unions, on the other hand... Unions are a monopoly on labor. Monopolies reduce the amount of a good they supply and drive up prices. This means unions depend on certain people leaving the labor market that a union has captured. When a bunch of unions formed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, which people did the unions choose to exclude? More or less across the board, they excluded women, immigrants and black people. This was extra convenient, as members of those groups would typically work voluntarily for less pay, so the unions had double incentives to get rid of them. Many early Progressives were quite proud of this and other policies like a minimum wage forcing "inferior" groups to have to work harder to catch up to the white man.
The question we should be asking is why unions, minimum wage, hours restrictions, etc. were useful in eliminating "undesirables" from the labor force 100 years ago but help these same groups today.
For the former, I'd recommend chapter three of Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks & White Liberals, about the history of slavery.[1]
For the latter, I'd recommend Illiberal Reformers, about the Progressive Era and its devotees.[2] Later Progressives were responsible for the school-to-prison pipeline and militarized police.[3] The Progressive Era has a wide array of interesting literature, including the writings of many of its early exponents (since they tended to be writers or academics).
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Illiberal-Reformers-Eugenics-Economic...