Iron and Steel: Class, Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920

3 Unskilled Work, Black Workers

C H A P T E R 3 Unskilled Work, Black Workers MAn rhile Birmingham's skilled workers provided the technical knowledge essential to the establishment of the city's early industries, most of the jobs in those industries were low-paying, unskilled positions that required little more than physical strength and endurance. Before 1900 the proportion ofiron and steel workers performing unskilled jobs remained near or above 50 percent.1 Unskilled workers performed the dirtiest, heaviest , hottest, most dangerous tasks in the iron industry, at rates of paybarely above the subsistence level. Birmingham's builders wanted tofillthese jobswith whites. They thought blacks would work hard only if forced to do so. But during the i88os not enough whites responded to appeals for labor to fill demand. So employers reluctantly looked to the blackpopulation ofAlabama and surrounding states for their common laborers. Soon unskilled work became so identified with blacks that local whites began to describe such jobs as "nigger work." Most African Americans who moved to Birmingham thought they could improve their lives, materially and otherwise. Their experience hardly fulfilled all of their hopes. The town's rigid system of industrial segregation severely restricted their opportunities. But the system was not so unyielding that black workers could not achieve some control over their working lives. Whites' commitment to a racial division of work allowed blacks such complete domination of certain jobsthat they gained a degree ofleverage in some sectors of the labor market. Black workers could and did exploit this mo41 nopoly, especially during boom times, to secure better wages and to define for themselves the terms of their employment. They daily challenged the power of white employers individually and informally.Employers frequently complained about black workers' absenteeism and their poor work habits. They expressed frustration at their inabilityto transform black workers into disciplined employees. Employers admitted that they had to adapt to the ways of black workers. At times blacks organized unions and collectively defended the rights they claimed in the workplace. Black unskilled workers clearly were not helpless victims of an oppressive system of segregation. They did not allowwhite employers to impose, without challenge, measures at the workplace that they, like white workers, equated with "wage slavery." Few promoters of the Birmingham district in the 18703 included black laborers in their vision of a "workshop town," even as unskilled workers. Most embraced the myth that in the absence of the close supervision and discipline slavery provided blacks would not work.John Milner advised employers to limit their use of black workers and to distribute the few they did employ among white workers, who would control them.2 Many employers shared Milner's preference for white workers but encountered difficulty finding enough of them to meet their needs. Despite hard times relatively few rural whites in the 18705 were ready to abandon their farms to go to work as common laborers in the mines and furnaces of Birmingham.Whites who did move sought other opportunities in agriculture.3 Milner and promoters of Birmingham thought they might be able to find white unskilled laborers outside of Alabama. They and employers of farm labor in the state eagerly sought white immigrants during the 18705. Birmingham industrialists enlisted the aid ofthe legislaturein their recruitment campaign. Jefferson county's state senators sought an increase in fundingfor Birmingham's educational system in 1872-73 because they thought better schools would attract white immigrants. Though this measure failed, other tactics were apparently more successful; by 1880, 40 percent of unskilled workers were whites, and half of them had been born in other states or countries.4 White immigration did not keep pace with demand for labor during the expansion of the i88os, however. Birmingham's employers, therefore, hired more black laborers. They justified this extension of pre-Civil War employment patterns in the industrywith appeals to prevailingideas about the abilities of the races.John Lapsley, an owner of Shelby Iron, explained to a U.S. 42 : Unskilled Work, Black Workers Senate committee that as a race blacks were more suited for the physical demands of common labor than whites and had demonstrated their capacity for hard labor while previously working for his company as slaves. Naturally, when faced with labor shortages after the war, his company turned to men who had alreadyproven themselves.5 AsJohn Ware, the son of Horace Ware, builder of Shelby Iron, wrote, "when [slaves]became free after the...