“The Organization as Part of Racial Formation: The Case of Railroad Labor in the Twentieth Century.”

• In Event: 20881 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: The Materiality of Labor

Abstract

While Victor Ray (2020) acknowledged Omi and Winant’s (2015) emphasis on state power in the racial formation, Ray’s emphasis on what remained of the racialization picture focused on the power of the organization. This paper applies Ray’s thesis by focusing on the experiences of Mexicans and African-Americans who labored on the railroads in the twentieth century. Both groups were legally barred from joining most Railroad Brotherhoods until the 1960s and were kept in racialized divisions of labor where the pay was lower and work often more dangerous. As this paper documents, the “racialized organizations” in this study were the Railroad Brotherhoods and the railroad companies. Even when the state utilized some of its power to benefit workers of color, the “racialized organizations” blocked outright or imposed limits on the ability of workers of color to move into what Joseph Jewell (2023) called “White Man’s work.”

Author

• Michael Calderon-Zaks, University of California, San Diego