By Steven Pitts

When people ask what the importance of Labor Day is to black people, they should look back at this passage from a speech Dr. Martin Luther King gave at the AFL-CIO Convention in December, 1961:

“Negroes are almost entirely a working people…Our needs are identical with labor’s needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community. That is why Negroes support labor’s demands and fight laws which curb labor. That is why the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”

Dr. King’s words have tremendous relevance today, as the Great Recession devastates millions of working families of all races. Since the beginning of the recession over 6 millions jobs have been lost. This amounts to 4.5 percent of all jobs in the economy, the highest percentage loss during a recession since the 1930s. This recession is continuing a 35-year erosion of the twin pillars of black middle class: stable good-paying unionized jobs in manufacturing and employment in the public sector.

As of August, the official unemployment rate in the black community is 15.1 percent. In addition, the black community has borne a disproportionate share of the job losses since the recession began in December 2007. In that month, blacks comprised 10.9 percent of the workers; however, since then, black employment has fallen by 900,000 and these losses represent 14.4 percent of all job losses.

In the midst of this crisis, President Obama has tried to help those left behind by the conservative drift of the last three decades by stimulating the economy, extending health care coverage, reforming our immigration policies, and enabling workers to freely form unions. And just as Dr. King spoke of “twin-headed creatures”, the opponents of Obama’s initiatives rail against efforts to use government’s powers to aid the less fortunate and simultaneously, use very thinly-veiled racial codes to whip up opposition. (And often, codes are not used at all.)

However, as we fight conservative political forces to enact effective solutions to the immediate economic crisis, we must not forget that the black community faced a severe job crisis prior to December 2007. We commonly speak of this crisis by detailing the high level of joblessness in our communities and decrying the inadequacies of official government statistics. However, I would say that the black community faces a broader problem than is normally discussed. We face a two-dimensional job crisis: the crisis of unemployment and the crisis of low-wage jobs.

In 2007, the official black unemployment rate stood at 8.3 percent. At the same time, 42 percent of all black workers, who were employed full-time throughout 2007, earned less than $30,000 which was the 180 percent of the poverty line for a family of one adult and two children. So while, far too many blacks could not find jobs, far too many black workers who “played by the rules” still ended up losing “the game.” These twin evils of unemployment and low-wage work are the basic context of much of the social ills afflicting our communities.

Recently, there have been more and more stories coming out of Michigan about the impact of the decimation of the auto industry on the black middle class. But these stories are not new, nor are they limited to Detroit. During the 1970s and 1980s, these stories were common through the cities that had been the destination of black migrants: Los Angeles lost factories that produced cars, tires, and aerospace equipment. The San Francisco Bay Area lost jobs as the ports mechanized and military facilities closed down. Steel factories closed down in Baltimore, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Garment factories left New York City. And Houston lost jobs in the oil tool industry.

These closings wreaked havoc upon black communities. Because these jobs were union jobs (or influenced by union wage scales) or government jobs, these workers were able to live better, purchase homes, and put their children through college. These workers were the active in their churches and other civic organizations and they were the backbone of the modern civil rights movement which brought down legal segregation.

What lesson can we draw from this on Labor Day? The key to revitalizing the black community lies in improving the economic fortunes of its workers. One the one hand, this means getting the Black unemployed into good paying jobs—we cannot be satisfied by accepting any job as being good enough—and improving the quality of jobs held by black workers—many blacks are holding low-paying jobs, and these jobs must pay decent wages.

But more fundamentally, this means that, just as the black community had to rely on self-help and political action to defeat legal segregation, the black community cannot focus solely on community uplift to improve the conditions of black workers; we must also engage in political action to raise the living standards of black workers.

Too often, our strategies focuses on the possible deeds of various strata of what W.E.B. DuBois called “the Talented Tenth”. But Dr. King gave his life assisting sanitation workers in improving their lives. The night before his assassination, he declared, “You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor. So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”

Steven C. Pitts, Ph.D. is a labor policy specialist at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.