The Essential Worker: A History from the Progressive Era to COVID-19read.dukeupress.edu On July 30, 1919, the Chicago Tribune reported that nine playgrounds had closed, street sweeping and garbage removal were suspended in the second and third wards, and maintenance and construction on streets, sewers, and other public works throughout the city had ground to a halt. The disruption was due in part to strikes by streetcar drivers and water pipe construction crews, but the primary cause was the terror felt by thousands of African American municipal workers as mobs of white men and boys rampaged through the city attacking Black people. Only a quarter of the workforce at the municipal garbage reduction plant showed up for work, and three of the city's asphalt plants were shuttered due to lack of labor. Fifteen hundred city laborers were laid off, “most of them colored,” and the commissioner of public works ordered five hundred Black laborers in streets, sewers, and construction to remain home until the rioting ended. Five percent of the African American clerks, inspectors, and janitors showed up to work at city hall, and most were told to return home and stay there until further notice. Mayor Bill Thompson's office was impacted when his messenger, Charles Morrison, stayed home and John W. Lewis, the only Black clerk to report at the controller's office asked for a police escort to the train. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, a rumor that city hall elevator operator James W. Judge had been killed on his way to work “caused the few colored employees left to grab their hats and coats and take the advice of the bureau heads to seek cover until the riots are over.”1Particularly striking about the interruption of city government during the race riot of 1919 is the contradiction it revealed between the hostility that white Chicagoans showed toward Black workers and their reliance upon their labor. Chicago was a particularly violent case, but the contradiction was evident in cities across the United States during and shortly after World War I. At the peak of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the superintendent of the Los Angeles County Hospital chastised over a hundred white nurses who threatened to walk off their jobs to protest the admission of four “colored girls” to the nursing training program. Pointing out that hospitals were already overburdened and short-staffed, the superintendent urged the white women to “see the matter in its true light and forget race prejudice.” A month earlier, the mayor of Los Angeles had dispatched a representative to eulogize Cyrus Vena, a ninety-year-old Black man who had cleaned and maintained city hall “for as long as anyone remembers” yet worked until his death without a pension. While the Los Angeles Times applauded Vena's service, the newspaper also referred to him with the condescending term Uncle.2In Washington, DC, the newly formed National Federation of Federal Employees convinced Congress to grant a small wage increase to the mostly African American women and men who cleaned, operated elevators, and guarded federal buildings in the District of Columbia and other cities. Though the raise was far lower than union leaders recommended, Congress was persuaded by union leaders and supervisors that low pay made it difficult to recruit reliable workers “to perform the government work.” Three-quarters of federal “charwomen,” janitors, and watchmen found it necessary to take second jobs washing dishes in restaurants and cleaning private homes and businesses “to keep themselves and their families from starvation.” The Washington Post reported that difficulty recruiting garbage collectors and street sweepers presented “a Real Menace” with the pandemic and the summer heat. Adding the specter of sexual predation by Black men, the superintendent of janitors in DC schools warned that low wages made it “difficult to get men of sound character and responsibility to be janitors in public schools, where the moral safety of thousands of girls would be endangered by the employment of unscrupulous persons at [the] prevailing low wage.”3Although rooted in disruptions caused by pandemic and war in the early twentieth century, the contradiction resonates with the experiences of “essential workers,” who performed similar tasks and were also disproportionately women and men of color, during the COVID-19 pandemic a century later. Before the pandemic began in 2020, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that demand for labor in the next decade would be greatest in occupations where average pay was less than $35,000 a year. Among those jobs were home health aides, medical assistants, warehouse workers, janitors, and others who soon found themselves on the frontlines of fighting and protecting others from the virus. While elected officials and others rushed to praise those workers for risking their lives to provide essential services to others who worked from home, they were slow to raise wages or protect their health and safety. “My experience as an essential worker feels like we've been treated as expendable workers,” African American janitor Troy Bowman told Minnesota legislators who denied his and other essential workers’ requests for hazard pay during the pandemic. Andrea, a hospital housekeeper who was denied protective equipment while cleaning an operating room where COVID patients were treated, recalled, “One minute you are important enough. The next minute it is like, you aren't that important to get the proper equipment, but you are important enough to clean for the next patient.”4How do we explain this persistent tension between the demand for essential services and the devaluing of essential workers? In a market-based economy, we expect high demand to drive prices up. Yet economists explain that an abundance of potential employees, low barriers to entry, and the low “marginal value” conspire to suppress wages in many essential occupations. “There's nothing paradoxical about this scenario,” Adam Ozimek told the Washington Post, because with so many workers available to take their place, even the most essential workers tend to command a “pretty low wage.” Others point to the erosion of unions and labor regulations that, as Marshall Steinbaum explained, “once improved workers’ standing and bargaining power vis-à-vis employers.”5While economists emphasize market forces, historians have traced a long history of devaluing specific to essential workers. Jennifer Klein points to the exclusion of “service occupations and sectors that employed predominantly women, African Americans, and Latinos” from labor laws that regulated wages and hours and empowered mostly white and male industrial workers to demand health care and pensions between the 1930s and 1970s. Gabriel Winant emphasizes the interdependence between the industrial and service sectors, and the political possibilities created by “our collective growing social dependence on institutional caregiving” that was “exaggerated by Covid-19 but not unique to it.”6These and others build on a large body of literature tracing economic inequalities of the twenty-first-century United States to the devaluing of service and socially reproductive labor in the twentieth century. Jane Collins, for example, characterized recent conflicts over public sector unionism in Wisconsin and other states as battles over the value of what in the 1970s Daniel Bell called “the public household.” Evelyn Nakano Glenn shows that the commodification and institutionalization of care and service work since World War II has replicated and reinforced patterns of race and gender discrimination that had informed domestic labor for centuries. “The division of labor in public settings mirrors the division of labor in the household,” Nakano Glenn writes of the mid-twentieth century, when Black, brown, and immigrant women were employed primarily in “heavy, dirty, ‘back-room’ ” tasks associated with cooking and serving, cleaning and caring, while white women were concentrated in professional, technical, and administrative jobs such as nursing, social work, and teaching.7The treatment of Black workers during and shortly after World War I suggests a longer, yet more specific, history of the shift from domestic to public service. While the race and gender inequalities of twentieth-century public employment resembled patterns of domestic servitude and enslavement in previous centuries, they were transformed in important ways by the “Municipal Housekeeping” movement of the Progressive Era. Coined to justify the rapid expansion of public services between the 1890s and the 1920s, and the leadership of women in city government, the comparison between domestic and public service also served to rationalize the exploitation of low-wage, and even unpaid, public workers.While the “era of big government” is typically associated with the growth of federal power and employment during and after World War II, its roots lie in the rapid expansion of municipal government during the Progressive Era. “Unquestionably the most impressive phase of the present status of the public service is its increasing immensity,” wrote urban reformer Clinton Rogers Woodruff in 1922. Between 1890 and 1927, annual spending by local governments increased from under $5 million to nearly $6.5 billion, which despite mass migration and rapid urbanization represented a per capita increase from less than $8 per year to over $50. Reporting that the federal workforce had expanded from 384,088 to 640,175 between 1910 and 1920, Woodruff estimated that state and local governments employed over three times that number. Placing the total number of civilian government employees at nearly three million, more than the US military force during World War I, he asserted that their significance was greater, considering “that not only the protection of our lives and property is in their charge, but likewise to a great extent the welfare and happiness of the American people.”8The contrast that Woodruff drew between civilian and military service reflected his roots in the “Municipal Housekeeping” movement, which had promoted the expansion of government in the previous half century. “There are many evidences that we are emerging from a period of industrialism into a period of humanitarianism, and that personal welfare is now being considered a legitimate object of government,” reformer Jane Addams asserted in 1906. Chastising male voters for electing candidates to public office based on their experience in business and the military, she asserted, “They have totally disregarded a candidate's capacity to keep the streets clean, preferring to consider him in relation to the national tariff or to the necessity for increasing the national navy in a pure spirit of reversion to the traditional type of government which had to do only with enemies and outsiders.”9Initially, Addams and other mostly female Progressives drew the comparison between domestic and public housekeeping to legitimate women's leadership in city government. Poorly served by “the predatory instinct learned in competitive business,” she and others contended, cities were harmed by the exclusion of “women, the traditional housekeepers,” from voting and holding office. Addams elaborated her argument in an essay that the National American Suffrage Association published for its massive 1913 parade in Washington, DC. “The very multifariousness and complexity of a city government demand the help of minds accustomed to detail and variety of work, to a sense of obligation for the health and welfare of young children, and to responsibility for the cleanliness and comfort of other people,” she wrote. “Because all these things have traditionally been in the hands of women, if they take no part in them now they are not only missing the education which the natural participation in civic life would bring to them, but they are losing what they have always had.”10“Municipal housekeeping” emphasized the institutionalization of care, cleaning, and other socially reproductive tasks traditionally performed by women, but it also reinforced a long-standing reliance on poorly paid, and often unpaid, workers in traditionally male public jobs. The American City, an influential journal for Progressive city administrators, evoked that history with the cover image of the September 1931 issue, titled “Laying New York's First Water Main in 1800” (fig. 1). Reproducing a mural that painter Ezra Winter had recently installed in the Bank of Manhattan's new headquarters, the magazine depicted three African American men wrestling a wood pipe into a ditch while several white men stood by and watched. Readers may not have known that the Black workers were most likely enslaved, as New York State had passed a gradual emancipation law just a year before the scene took place, but the racial division of labor was unmistakable. The Black men were dressed as laborers, their feet bare, shirts removed or opened at the neck, and sleeves unrolled. They were flanked by two white men dressed in the tall boots and brimmed hats of artisans, who supervised or drove wagons, while the bank's founders, Alexander Hamilton and Oliver Wolcott, stood on the edge of the frame in waistcoats and tricornered hats.11The triptych of Black laborers and white supervisors and authorities would have been familiar to the public officials who read the American City in the 1930s, but the image obscured the degree to which those roles had evolved in the thirteen decades since enslaved workers installed New York's first water main. Hamilton and Wolcott were not public officials, but private investors who financed Manhattan's waterworks as part of a broader scheme to create the Bank of New York. Securing a charter from the state, they contracted the work to artisans who employed the laborers. While Winter accurately placed Black workers at the center of this story, their importance was obscured at the time by the reliance on private funders and the organization of skilled craftsmen who claimed credit for having constructed waterworks, bridges, and other public infrastructure in the early nineteenth century. When New York City celebrated the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, according to historian Peter Way, artisan associations “emphasized independence, commonwealth and craft pride” but said nothing of the immigrant and African American laborers who had done nearly all the digging. That omission, Way writes, reflected a broader public conception of “the canal as a public work that somehow magically appeared.”12Private contracting laid the basis for the patronage system that emerged with more direct government oversight of public works in the mid-nineteenth century. At times, governments relied on forced labor; as when southern states purchased teams of “public slaves” to maintain roads, bridges, and waterways or when the city of Los Angeles employed a superintendent of “Indians on public works,” whose job was to manage mostly Native American prisoners who built and maintained “the streets, alleys and other places, either public or private.” More typically, cities issued stipends to officials who were authorized to hire laborers to build, clean, and maintain public infrastructure. Public officials had long favored their political supporters in awarding public work to contractors and artisans, but the elimination of property requirements extended that practice to male laborers. The change was most beneficial for European immigrants, who qualified for citizenship under a federal law that restricted naturalization to “free white person[s].” African American men gained similar benefits after 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment eliminated racial barriers to voting, particularly in Washington, DC, and southern states, where they were numerous enough to sway elections. By the end of the nineteenth century, public jobs previously performed by unpaid or poorly paid African American, Native American, and immigrant men and women had been transformed into potent symbols of upward mobility for white (and, in the South, Black) men.13“Municipal housekeeping” emerged from Progressive efforts to replace patronage with an efficient and orderly civil service. The backlash was most virulent in the South, where reformers accused urban “bosses” of manipulating “ignorant negro voters” with offers of easy, well-paid government jobs. Historian Kate Masur shows that northern reformers saw conflicts over public employment in the South as harbingers of the danger that overly empowered public employees posed to taxpaying property owners. The New York–based reform magazine The Nation, for example, supported the disfranchisement of African Americans in Washington, DC, as a means of preventing elected officials from trying to “saddle a debt” on taxpayers by enticing “ignorant negro laborers” with promises of “the eight hours and loaferdom of city life.” In North Carolina, according to historian Gregory Downs, reformers complained that patronage allowed African Americans to take jobs away from whites and encouraged “insolence” and “race pride” among Black public employees.14Northern reformers attempted to disfranchise European immigrants but, meeting resistance from unions, settled for civil service regulations aimed at insulating government jobs from the influence of working-class voters. Progressives argued that selecting high-ranked public employees according to their formal education and performance in standardized tests, rather than political alliances, ensured that all communities in a city or state received equal and efficient service. The National Municipal League set the tone for that effort through a series of conferences between 1898 and 1900 where reformers and officials developed a “Municipal Program” for city administration. The proposal reflected a tension between democratic and technocratic ideals that historian Leon Fink identifies at the heart of Progressive thought. While endorsing “self-government,” equal access, and democratic control, the Municipal Program also recommended that cities be administered “by a class of public servants who by reason of experience and special training are particularly fitted for their official duties.”15As Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Catherine Ceniza Choy, and others have shown, the principles of municipal housekeeping extended beyond mainland cities to facilitate mostly white middle-class women's leadership throughout the American empire in the early twentieth century. In addition to the expansion of municipal services, the comparison between domestic and public housekeeping lent urgency to the cultural assimilation of Latino and Asian immigrants in California and Hawaii, the development of US-led health and education systems in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and the building of housing and recreational facilities for white US citizens in the Panama Canal Zone. “By re-creating the private, domestic realm of the home in the towns of the Zone,” writes Julie Greene, “American women became central to the U.S. construction project.” Even before the Nineteenth Amendment allowed them to vote and run for office in US cities, “supporting the canal construction project through their homemaking labor allowed these women, even while focused on traditional feminine duties and obligations, to participate in a very public episode of American civilization building.”16The comparison between domestic and public service helped legitimate the expansion of municipal public services, and the influence of mostly white middle-class women in their planning and administration. Yet Progressives also utilized it to justify the exploitation and disempowerment of mostly African American, immigrant, and Native American working-class women and men who were employed to provide those same services. This rationale was stated most directly by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who advocated the socialization of household tasks to liberate middle-class housewives from domestic servitude. Arguing that public institutions could provide childcare, food, and other services more efficiently than private households, she suggested that a few skilled professionals could do the work of several housewives and free the others for work for which “they were better fit.” But while Gilman viewed housekeeping as preparation for public administration, she argued that public service would also free women of responsibility for the dirty work of cleaning and removing waste: “As we socialize our functions, this passes from her hands into those of man. The city's cleaning is his work. And even in our houses the professional cleaner is more and more frequently a man.”17Gilman did not specify which men would do that “basest and foulest” work, but later writings indicate that she viewed African Americans as particularly well suited. In a 1908 essay published in the American Journal of Sociology, Gilman proposed to “promote the civilization of the negro” by authorizing state governments to force Black people “who are not self-supporting” into public work. Insisting that her proposal entailed “not enslavement, but enlistment,” she envisioned military-style work camps where Black men would meet “the crying need of the whole South for better roads, harbors, riverbanks, and the general development of the country” while Black women were trained for domestic service. Provided with decent food, rest, and amusement, and freed of “the strain of personal initiative and responsibility to which so many have proved unequal,” Gilman contended, “a great amount of productive labor would be thus brought to the service of the community.”18Gilman's plan was not adopted as general policy, but it was similar to the system of convict labor that southern states developed to build and maintain roads and other public infrastructure in the early twentieth century. Alexander Lichtenstein explains that between the 1890s and 1920, southern states abolished the older system of leasing convicts, nearly all of them African American, to private rail lines and mining and timber companies who housed and fed the prisoners and paid the state for their labor. When Progressive reformers and labor unions convinced legislatures to end convict leasing, states shifted prisoners to public works. Florida was one of the last states to make that shift, and by 1925 it had nearly a thousand convicts working every day in nineteen camps across the state. Toiling a total of five hundred thousand hours at a cost of $1 a day, the prisoners graded 535 miles, surfaced nearly three hundred miles, and built nearly two hundred culverts and bridges in two years. Echoing Gilman's assertion that forced labor would benefit Black workers and society as a whole, Alabama highway engineer C. W. Cooper boasted that his state's use of prisoners on highway construction “demonstrated that with good management work can be accomplished at a good profit, and when the state sets a convict free he is in good physical condition and trained for work.”19Gilman's proposal also resonated with the labor system developed by the federal government in the Panama Canal Zone. As Julie Greene explains, many Progressives saw “no better symbol of the government's new power and the importance of its role as employer than the canal project.” In pushing authorities to provide healthy and comfortable living conditions to white US citizens in the zone, however, reformers often assumed the availability of inexpensive and reliable labor from nonwhite workers. Charlotte Beeks, who had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago, toured the Canal Zone as a representative of the National Civic Federation in 1907. In addition to calling for improved housing, sanitation, education, and health services for white workers, she urged authorities to ease the burden on white housewives by importing Chinese servants, janitors, and cooks to replace West Indians, who, she claimed, refused to take on multiple jobs. Beeks had little to say about the low wages, spartan living conditions, and racial discrimination faced by West Indian federal employees on the canal; yet even her modest suggestions for improved conditions were soundly rejected by federal authorities who objected to providing “luxuries for foreigners who are receiving a wage adequate to their service, when so many native American laborers know so well the pangs of hunger.”20Developed in the South and the empire, this racialized version of “municipal housekeeping” migrated to northern cities during and after World War I. Sociologist Richard R. Wright, who grew up in rural Georgia, recalled his surprise at witnessing teams of white men repairing streets, digging sewers, and laying rail when he attended the University of Chicago in the 1890s. When he returned to the city two decades later, however, Wright found that racial employment patterns more closely resembled those that he had known in the South. Employers and unions still shut Black workers out of the crafts and professions, yet “the Negro unskilled laborer has become a welcome guest.” Already, he wrote in 1913, “hundreds of miles of sewerage and of streets in our great cities are largely the labor of Negroes. In nearly every large city, special employment agencies have been opened in order to induce Negro workers from the South to come North, where there is abundant public work to be done, on the streets, sewers, filter plants, subways, railroads, etc.”21It was this demand for labor that compelled public officials to shield their African American employees from racist violence, employment discrimination, and extreme poverty in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington during World War I. The term essential industry was first used in reference to goods and services that were critical to military operations, but its meaning expanded quickly to encompass jobs necessary to ensure social health and safety.22 In May 1918, the War Department issued a list of occupations not deemed “useful” enough to be spared from the draft, including waiters and bartenders, domestic servants, elevator operators, doormen, domestic workers, sales clerks, and ushers and attendants engaged in gaming, sports, and amusements “excepting actual performers in legitimate concerts, operas or theatrical establishments.” The Washington Post pointed out that this seemingly arbitrary list allowed a professional baseball player to avoid conscription by performing vaudeville. Frederic Keough, of the National Association of Manufacturers, objected that even frivolous pastimes contributed to the national economy. “Broadly speaking, there is no such thing as a ‘non-essential’ industry,” Keough told a meeting of the National Metal Trades’ Association in 1918. “It is true that some industrial activities are more necessary than others, yet either an immediate slackening or extensive curtailment of almost any industry would mean an enormous wastage of capital, a loss of organization and ensuing labor unemployment.” P. B. Noyes, director of conservation at the US Fuel Administration, conceded there were “non-essential industries,” but he defined them broadly as those “which do not minister to human safety, comfort or happiness.”23The debate over “essential industries” moved quickly beyond eligibility for the draft to broader issues of labor control. In August 1918, Colorado senator Charles Thomas introduced a “work or fight” amendment to the conscription law that would have allowed the immediate drafting of any worker “in an essential industry” who went on strike. “We want to be fair to our workmen,” Thomas insisted, “but the country's interests come ahead of everything else.” Senator Albert Cummins of Iowa introduced a more moderate proposal that would have forced potential strikers to remain on the job until the War Labor Board reviewed the dispute and issued a resolution that both sides were bound to accept.24Given the reliance of cities on African American service workers, it did not take long for them to be drawn into the debate over essential labor. In October 1918, the city council of Greenville, South Carolina, issued an ordinance based on the “work or fight” rule stating that “able bodied negro women in Greenville who are not regularly employed are to be put to work, put in jail or fined heavily.” Responding to complaints that it had become “exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them,” city officials stated that some Black women had stopped seeking employment after their husbands were drafted and started sending money home. Others gave no reason for refusing work but, “as a matter of fact, they derive a living from illegitimate means.” Facing vigorous protest from Black leaders, and fearing the law would “cause a great exodus from the city,” the mayor denied reports of the proposal. The city council decided that most African American women were properly employed and dropped the issue.25Exacerbated by wartime labor shortages, the tensions between domestic and public labor markets continued after the war came to an end. “Housewives of Washington have been waiting in vain since the signing of the armistice for an approach to normal conditions in the domestic labor market,” the Washington Post reported in May 1919, six months after the war came to an end. Claiming the war had brought “a period of undreamed prosperity to the cooks and housemaids and furnace tenders and butlers of the city,” the newspaper asserted that maids were earning as much in two hours cleaning a government building as they had “laboring at housework all day.” Likewise, a government messenger earned as much in a week as he would have been paid for “a month of private service.” Reporting that maids and cooks earned “fabulous salaries” working in dormitories for “modest and unassuming war workers,” and that “charwomen trip blithely to their mornings employment or arrive there in their own cars,” the paper lamented that “Uncle Sam continues to maintain a monopoly upon the domestic labor of the District.”26Ironically, while governments did pay more than private households, wages remained so low that workers were forced to maintain jobs in both sectors to make ends meet. A survey of “charwomen and cleaners” in college dormitories and other public buildings in Boston, Massachusetts, found that 90 percent relied on second jobs washing dishes in restaurants or cleaning private homes, and that women with five years of experience earned the same amount as those new to the occupation. The Christian Science Monitor attributed the lack of attention to such conditions to the “similarity existing between the work of the ‘charwoman,’ as she is known, and that of the domestic servant.” In Chicago, three-quarters of charwomen, laborers, elevator conductors, and security guards in federal buildings held second jobs washing dishes, cleaning homes, sorting mail, or guarding elevated trains. With soldiers returning to the workforce after the war, some longtime public employees turned to public assistance. “In many instances government workers are compelled to labor under conditions that would constitute a criminal offense in private employ,” the Washington Post reported a year after the armistice. While Congress had granted small bonuses during World War I, wage rates for security guards in federal buildings had not changed since the Civil War.27The debate over essential industries faded after the war, but it would inform competing approaches to labor relations in the public sector for decades. Following Senator Thomas, conservatives viewed public service as an obligation comparable to military service. When police officers went on strike in Boston in September 1919, the Milwaukee Journal compared their action to a work stoppage in the army, which “is known as a mutiny, and carries extreme penalties.” Extending that logic to all public employees, the Indianapolis News stated that a strike was “not a legitimate weapon of any body of public servants, and therefore should never be used by them.” Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge agreed, and with support from the mayor of Boston, mobilized state and local militias to crush the strike. “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime,” Coolidge declared in a statement that would help launch his bid for vice president in 1920 and remain a mantra for opposition to public sector unions over the next century. When teachers formed a union in Seattle nearly ten years later, the Wall Street Journal cited the example of the Boston police strike to assert that unionization would deprive the taxpayer of “his own school district” and allow teachers to “dictate conditions to suit themselves” rather than their students. Reiterating the comparison to domestic labor, the newspaper suggested that public sector unions would leave the public “Governed by Our Servants.”28Liberals also opposed strikes by public employees but sought to avoid them by improving wages and working conditions rather than treating workers like soldiers. Officials in Boston and several other cities responded to the police strike by increasing wages. Soon afterward, Chicago's city council voted to nearly double the pay of skilled and unskilled city employees over the next four years. While Congress rejected several proposals to increase pay for federal employees, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a well-publicized letter to Congress advocating “radical improvements” aimed at increasing efficiency in government. In addition to simplifying and streamlining the bureaucracy, he insisted, “Congress must make up its mind to give adequate pay to Government servants” and allow department heads to increase pay to recruit more talented experts. Campaigning against Coolidge for vice president, FDR proposed to win the loyalty of public employees rather than drill them into compliance like soldiers.29Coolidge won the campaign for vice president and became president after Warren Harding's death in 1923, but Roosevelt's efficiency model had an equally lasting impact on labor relations in the public sector. “Although we hear a great deal in these days about retrenchment and economy, there is seemingly little disposition of the part of citizens generally to do without some of the services now rendered to them by publicly supported agencies,” read a 1922 report from progressive scholars A. H. Place, W. E. Mosher, and William C. Beyer. Despite calls to lower taxes, they explained, “this constant demand for more and better service inevitably results in greater public expenditures and in a larger number of persons in government employ.” Echoing Jane Addams's assertion that demand for public education, health care, transportation, and other services had transformed the very purpose of government, Mosher explained in 1933, “The conception of government as a policing agency, concerned with the protection of personal liberty against any and all encroachments, has given way to the conception of government as a housekeeping agency, seeking in an affirmative way to promote the welfare of its citizens.”30As it had in the Progressive Era, the comparison between government and the household served to legitimate the exploitation of nonwhite workers. In 1930, a sanitation engineer for the city of Philadelphia chose the title “Municipal Housekeeping” for a series of articles explaining how he had reduced the costs of garbage disposal by employing low-wage African American workers. “It is said that fortunes have been made by several laborers who conducted the reclamation of rubbish upon a dump,” John Nuttall wrote in the American City. Boasting that he had diverted those profits into city coffers by hiring laborers to collect and sort waste for metal, rags, and other materials that would be sold or burned to generate heat and power for city buildings, Nuttall explained that he kept labor costs low by paying sanitation workers “on an hourly basis for time actually worked” rather than on salary like other city employees. He did not mention that the collectors were almost entirely African American men who had recently migrated from the rural South, but he did include a photograph of Black women sorting garbage at a similar operation in Washington, DC. “Colored women are used for this work,” explained a caption, “and many typical mammies are found there” (fig. 2).31That an influential public official would utilize a derogatory term for Black domestic workers to describe city employees in a professional journal demonstrated how seamlessly racist and sexist assumptions about the value and dignity of household labor were imported into the public sector. Evelyn Nakano Glenn points out that this association between domestic and municipal housekeeping reflected a broader transfer of responsibility for socially reproductive tasks, such as health and childcare, food preparation cleaning and sanitation, from private households to the market and the state. Initially, this shift occurred within relatively affluent households that employed African American, Native American, Asian, Latino, and European immigrant domestic workers. With the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, middle- and working-class families relied more heavily on services provided by businesses and, increasingly, state and local governments.32Just a few months after the Supreme Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which granted workers in private industry the right to join unions and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions, President Roosevelt explained why the law could not apply to workers employed by the government. Declining an invitation to address the twentieth annual convention of the National Federation of Federal Employees, the president acknowledged that public employees’ desire for decent wages and working conditions was “basically no different from that of employers in private industry.” He also affirmed that “organizations of government employees have a logical place in government affairs.” Roosevelt cautioned, however, that such concerns were overshadowed by “the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government. All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” In addition to the NLRA, the Roosevelt administration also exempted public employees from the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and other New Deal regulations aimed at providing economic security to American workers.33The consequences of Roosevelt's position did not become fully apparent until the following decade, when the rapid expansion of health, education, sanitation, and other services transformed government into the largest employer in the United States, but its implications were clear to workers employed by local, state, and federal governments during the Great Depression. Until the 1930s, government payrolls remained small and relatively inconsequential to the broader economy. Public payrolls also included significant numbers of skilled craftsmen and white-collar professionals, whose wages and working conditions were protected by civil service protections and prevailing wage agreements that craft unions and professional associations had imposed in the absence of collective bargaining agreements. As public workforces expanded and their ranks began to include increasing numbers of unskilled, nonprofessional workers, however, those workers began pushing for the collective bargaining rights and labor standards that the president and Congress were extending to workers in the private sector. While initially the Roosevelt administration endorsed demands for parity between workers in the private and public sectors, it backed off that commitment in the late 1930s, creating a new class of “public servants” who provided health, education, and other services to workers in the private sector yet were denied those services for themselves and their families.With the continued expansion of public services and with the Great Migration of African Americans between the 1920s and the 1970s, municipal employment remained the most reliable alternative for Black migrants seeking to escape even lower-paid agricultural work and domestic service. Yet despite the seemingly endless demand for their labor, Black men and women were still restricted to low-wage jobs that offered little opportunity for advancement. In addition to cleaning and maintaining public buildings, streets, and sewers, these included garbage collection and processing, and laundry, food service, and childcare and patient care in hospitals, schools, and nursing homes.Due to the importance of municipal employment for African American workers and their communities, the contradiction between society's reliance on Black labor and its opposition to Black advancement remained a critical pivot point in the politics of race and class in American cities. Starting in the 1930s, municipal workers built a small but vibrant union movement to challenge those restrictions by improving wages and working conditions in public jobs, demanding collective bargaining rights and other legal protections, and increasing opportunities for promotion into better-paid skilled and managerial positions. Due to the success of that movement, by the late twentieth century, municipal work became “the principal source of black mobility, especially for women, and one of the most important mechanisms reducing black poverty.” Yet those efforts faced immense opposition from elected officials and others, both liberal and conservative, who viewed the empowerment of public employees as a threat to the public's access to inexpensive and reliable public services.I am grateful for feedback on this article from Kevin Boyle, John Miles Brach, and other participants in the Newberry Library Labor History Seminar, and from Emma Amador, Keona Ervin, Jennifer Klein, and Gabriel Winant. Research for this article was supported by the Richard and Beverly Fink Fund at the University of Minnesota and the Jerry Wurf Memorial Fund at the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.
