On Organized Labor's AntiBlack Mythology

People's stories about the history of labor in the U.S., before the U.S., are often part of the reason they are unable to see the reality of modern economic conditions. My intention here is to make sure that more often than not, when we talk about organizing around the economy and labor, we are talking about the economy that exists today and not some imagined version based on the past. An appreciation of reality requires a clear viewpoint on the state of Black labor, which has been treated as a natural resource concomitantly extracted alongside the others since the progenitor settler colony began making the American nation-state. In this piece, I urge steps toward a clearer-eyed foundational understanding of the economy from the colonial era through the present. Perhaps thinking transhistorically might illuminate the way anti-Southerness as antiBlackness obscures the economic lens and hinders labor organizing strategy.

We can't seek to forge a resistance that "activates the working masses" if we do not understand the conditions the masses (are forced to) live under, who constitutes "the masses," what labor is required for this economy to function, and ultimately, how to interrupt that functioning.  

All too often, when people reference American Labor, they allude to a "middle America" imaginary, centering white men and factories. This makes a few things clear to me. First, not enough of us in movement spaces that discuss (strategies for) economic transformation are paying attention to the economy on the regional or international scale. This indicates a bias toward either local or national(-ist) storytelling. Second, this bias ensures the American Labor narrative lacks acknowledgment of the importance of organizing the South toward halting the economy. Finally, I assert that there is no valuable attempt to organize labor without an international lens that encompasses what parts of the world are performing the labor required to sustain our lives. 

In other words, if liberation is forged through labor struggle, anti-labor antagonism must be read through a Black, South-to-South lens.

I offer what I've learned about the U.S. economy and the necessity of understanding the U.S. South and Southern Labor beyond border limits, such as the Mason-Dixon and the Mississippi, in relation to the Global South. Clarity around this point might reveal what true labor solidarity requires of us. Below, I share some less commonly discussed economic phenomena that Southern workers are experiencing and what they may mean for us in anti-capitalist liberation movements.

The Approach

Much to my dismay, many of the figures on employment trends are published by capitalist interests attempting to explain the economy without addressing the inherent contradictions that capitalism produces. In some cases, I will use these numbers as they are corroborated by various sources, though I still advocate that a more radical study of economic trends is needed.

Changes in the composition of the U.S. economy

We are litigating the way we discuss labor organizing, so we first look at the industries that make up the most of the total U.S. workforce. The top five industries are: Private Education & Health Services (27.2M), Professional & Business Services (22.6M), Leisure & Hospitality (17.0M), Retail (15.5M), and Manufacturing (12.8M). More detailed labor studies suggest manufacturing isn't in the top 10 of most common industries, depending on how you slice it.

In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of the estimated 159M total non-farm workforce, only 18 percent work in the manufacturing, construction, transportation and warehousing, mining, and logging industries combined. Sources estimate a range between two and five million agricultural workers in the U.S., which is notably less than the number of people working in federal, state & local government jobs (3.0M, 5.5M, and 15.1M, respectively), for example.

Too few of the labor organizing meetings I've been in have begun by outlining this fuller picture—and too many among them have immediately focused on manufacturing jobs.

In 2022,78 percent of the manufacturing workforce was white, and that might be why. The most popular areas of work in the U.S. are, however, incidentally the same areas of work that are now most popular among Black folks. It is not just that  Black labor is treated as an illegitimate site for struggle, but also the sectors they work in, even though Black people are disproportionately low-wage workers in those non-industrial sectors. Further, Black people are unthought of and unimagined as major contributors to agricultural labor because of their literal erasure from the sector via land theft and systemic alienation from land-based work. The land loss faced by Black farmers as agricultural production became increasingly industrialized has drastically decreased the number of Black agricultural workers. The antiBlack racial terror that facilitated and enforced land theft in the Jim Crow South was one of the driving forces of the Great Migration to cities for more industrial labor and domestic service work. All of this occurred as the U.S. forcibly ravaged the economies of Latin American countries throughout the 20th century (and now), forcing displacement and even participating in the trafficking of workers.

These historic dynamics have forced the composition of the economy to change dramatically since the Industrial era that animates the imagined idealized American labor, and by extension, the labor organizing that people in mainstream labor movements insist we "need to return to." Fascism is fueled by nostalgia. Therefore, I believe this to be inextricably connected to the calls of the American Right (white) to put "America First" and restore the Rust Belt's romanticized manufacturing past. The overtly fascist wing of American politics mobilizes this nostalgic longing to manufacture mass support for their KKK-originated "Make America Great Again" political agenda of harmful tariffs, racial cleansing of the labor force through deportation, expansion of the carceral and policing apparatus, and the censorship of antifascist labor struggle. Despite conservatives' hatred of the communists and union organizing, capitalist super-exploitation and imperial extraction provide common ground for Left and Right nostalgia of the American industrial past, centering on workers' empowerment. The Right, however, imagines this future, as it imagines the past—lily white and well-aligned with imperial domination. What led to this current composition of the economy?

Growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I remember hearing endless stories about how manufacturing was being "outsourced." In the age of high neoliberal globalization, headlines often report mass layoffs and major companies moving their workforces overseas, often to the Global South. In 1970, about a quarter of U.S. workers were in the manufacturing industry, and now that portion is less than 10 percent. In the modern economy, many of our manufactured goods are imported from China, Canada, and an assortment of countries South of the U.S. Our increasingly multipolar contemporary world economic arrangement further exacerbates this through dynamics like China setting up manufacturing outposts in the Americas, but not in the United States. The Baker Institute calls this phenomenon, which has manifested as close to us as in Mexico, "nearshoring". 

A vague white-centric analysis of the labor that supplies the U.S. economy might miss this opportunity to organize across borders from South to South.

The U.S.'s attempts to dominate the world through neoliberal globalization efforts actually precipitated the gutting of the U.S. manufacturing sector. What is most often missing from this collectively accepted Rust Belt and coastal urban-centered economic narrative is the role of deindustrialization in unmaking the South. Of the 15 states that lost the most manufacturing jobs since the turn of the century, two are Southern states: North Carolina and Mississippi. 

Casual allusions to American labor are often based upon a Northern, Western, and Midwestern auto industry that no longer exists. Regional shifts in the auto industry have shifted the domestic industry to the U.S. South, which is now responsible for a large share of the production of transportation vehicles. As of 2019, the Southeast now "represents 41.9 percent of total U.S. transportation equipment exports."

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the U.S.'s uneven exchanges with Africa. In all of the discourse about the imbalanced reliance on foreign goods focusing on powerhouses like China, I hadn't yet heard anyone mention the "U.S. goods imports from Africa totaled $43.0 billion in 2025, up 8.7 percent ($3.4 billion) from 2024," carrying a $2.6 billion trade deficit, meaning we are more dependent on manufacturing in Africa than they are on the U.S., where goods are concerned. Even if the dollar amount of that dependence is still low, this set of relations is a South-to-South connection that is emblematic of the shift in American-Western labor dynamics. 

Not only is the composition of the mainstream economy vastly different than what most popular discourse accounts for, but the way it is happening is also arguably more rooted in the Global South than most of the American Left is in practice of acknowledging. Part of that failure of acknowledgment is the depiction of a middle America to the neglect of the Southern and the Black workforce. Mainstream political discourse from the DNC and the GOP both love to focus on this default white figure in the plains, Rust Belt, East, and West coast regions—but are we able to be honest about why those to the left of the DNC choose to do this too?

The State of (Global) Southern Labor?

When discussing the economy, people are more likely to discuss the concentration of poverty in the South, and less likely to say things like low-wage laborers are concentrated in the South, though these are connected. This further throws into a crisis why a region where most low-wage workers reside isn't the area of focus when talking about organizing the working class. This is especially true when the working class is the least economically privileged or the most marginalized.

In the discussion of low-wage labor in the South, I explored this country's distribution of prison labor. To no surprise, the lowest paid incarcerated workers are in the South — this is particularly glaring as prison labor is the lowest wage labor class in the U.S., given the existence of prison labor is a continuation of chattel slavery. In the South, it is most common for incarcerated workers to be paid nothing. This was recently explored in depth in the documentary film The Alabama Solution.

There's also generally a concentration of captive workers that perform labor in the agriculture and broader food industry in the South, particularly in Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. Earlier this year, prison laborers in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison were granted class action status to file suit against the prison system for their exploitation on Angola's Farm Line. Their lawsuit represents the first major prisoner-led collective blow to the robust agri-carceral system. 

Just beyond the U.S. South, another source of America's agricultural labor is the Global South. Specifically, workers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua make up a large portion of migrant workers, especially those who are undocumented and exploited by American industries. The AJC reported that this exploitation mirrors the continued practical enslavement of migrant workers in the South. 

This disproportionate economic subjugation is also manifested in who participates in the informal economy, which accounts for a likely undercounted 6 percent of U.S. economic activity. Both rural and Black workers are more likely to use the informal economy to supplement or completely supply their income, with "53 out of every 10,000 Black workers reported working informally on an average day, compared to 42 white workers and 45 Hispanic workers." This mirrors trends showing that those in the Global South are also much more reliant on informal means of attaining income. These populations share experience in being forced out of participation in the formal economy in the imperial core.

What do we do with this?

Solely relying on statistics and charts can obscure the real violence of the economic system we struggle against, as well as the violence practiced in our choices of who we struggle for and whose conditions we neglect in our organizing.

I went into writing this thinking I understood just how much the South was a crucial site for the working-class struggle against capitalism. In researching this piece, I was blown away by the amount of evidence that suggests a willful ignorance of the realities of the Southern worker, the Black worker, and the non-monolithic experience of American labor in general. This ignorance serves the interests of mainstream America's mythologized white, middle, and working-class laborer.

Writing this only strengthens my argument that even those who say words like "strategic" and "analysis" and "pragmatic" and phrases like "no war but class war" may not be taking the time to really sit with today's American economy, which still relies upon the subjugation of the Black laborer and the exploitation of Indigenous people and their ancestral lands, and imperialist dominion over the Global South. Short of this clear-eyed analysis, this race-class order is in no danger of being unseated by a political project that refuses to be specific about exactly which super-exploitation represents the fulcrum for American economics.

In my opinion, one way to conceive of this is to see America's reliance upon the exploited labor force of the Global South, and to, of course, include the Southern U.S. region as a part of that Southern international solidarity alliance that must form to upend this order.

As we hold May Day strike and boycott actions here in Atlanta, I look to the guidance of organizations that can both address the need to organize Southern workers in sectors that represent the majority of the broader U.S. workforce and match calls for international solidarity with a fervor that much of the white organized labor force still refuses. I look forward to engaging deeper with and learning from organizations like the Union of Southern Service Workers, the Southern Workers Assembly, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Southern Vision Alliance, and the Southern Regional Joint Board for Workers United. I am inspired by those in the South who are trying to organize rideshare and gig workers, artists, and others in the informal economy.

There is no real strategizing around labor organizing if we don't intimately know the real economy. Far too many are driven by a fixation on an outdated story of labor organizing, one that each generation of Black radicals has worked tirelessly to dislodge from the whitewashed collective psyche of U.S.-based liberation movements in favor of the truth. The truth is that modern economic challenges are going to require contending with denialism about the inherent antiBlackness of this economic system. It requires diversifying the industries we think about unionizing, especially given that union density is at just 10 percent in 2025. 

But, truthfully, the bigger shift I am haunted by is whether the workplace is still the defining site of mobilization for most of us. With forces of displacement, record-breaking job loss, and younger generations changing careers altogether more often out of desperation—all of which disproportionately impact Black workers—I wonder if there are other segments of our lives that could provide better leverage for organizing in this current economy. In a society where approximately "one-third of the total workforce will now change jobs every 12 months," what does that mean for the likelihood of sustained organizing that is tied to the workplace? We cannot abdicate the responsibility, to be clear, but we should be comprehensive in our analysis and subsequently strategic in new ways that reflect our current political moment. Southern and Black solidarity economics organizing helps bring into focus what this could look like. 

Opportunities like tenants unions and neighborhood associations, consumer organizing through boycotts and consumer cooperatives, and unions of gig workers have all gained popularity as they represent sites of great influence in the lives of most folks living in the U.S. 

Shifts that many describe as "technofeudalism" additionally require us to organize people as users of these devices, as residents of these platforms, building alternative digital villages, digital maroonage (word to Ruha Benjamin and Miliaku Nebuleze), and indie media while we're at it.

Yes, the task at hand is the end of the world as we know it, and I guess I'm saying we have to know it to end it. My interest in where our strategizing as movements falters isn't mostly intellectual, but motivated by those days I'm caught off guard as someone in the street or at an event asks, "Hey man, what do you think is the most pressing thing we need to do now?" Of course, that answer for me is often that we need to figure it out together, but maybe these throughlines that highlight the anti-Southern as antiBlack gaps in predominant views of organizing labor will help us get there faster.