The French philosopher Albert reportedly said, “Without work all life is rotten but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. Now, historians are suggesting he may have not uttered or written those exact words but been paraphrased by one of his biographers. No matter. The sentiment is a pertinent one, especially as we lift up Labor Day, its history, and the role that Black women have played in the labor history of our nation.
There is meaningful work and there is soul-crushing work, and the challenge Camus poses is how to find meaning in routine, how to embrace joy in everyday tasks. Why do we work? Partly to make a living, to earn money, to live, to provide the means to pursue our joy. Why do we work? Because our work makes a difference when we are organizers, cultural workers, paid activists. We all struggle to find meaning in our work, but this is mostly a late 20th century/21st century phenomenon. Historically, many worked because they had no choice, and meaning was a footnote, not central.
Consider the Black woman “domestic”. More than half of all Black women held such jobs into the 1940s. We didn’t love this work. It was all we could get. We nurtured white children without having the luxury to nurture our wone. We were the backbone of white household, cooking, cleaning, and more. And in the process of our work we were demeaned, often given used clothing instead of wages, often sexually assaulted by depraved white men who headed household. But we worked because we had to. We worked because we wanted our babies to live.
Our nation has been celebrating Labor Day since 1994, after New York’s Central Labor Union drew public attention to the ways that many worked. Then, many workers, children included, worked from sunup to sundown (and beyond) six or seven days a week. There were strikes, labor actions, and eventually Labor Day, a recognition of workers. Sadly, a focus on Black workers was absent in these initial celebrations.
Most workers were exploited. In 19o4, the National Child Labor Committee (which I once chaired) was founded to visually document the way that children, and I mean little children, were treated as workers, in the mines, in the fields, and elsewhere. Children lost their lives and also lost their childhoods when they did back breaking, bone chilling work.
Louis Hine did an exceptional job in documenting children at work. A challenge, though, was the fact that those who were passionate about labor and about the rights of laborers too often excluded the contributions of Black workers. If we want to recognize Black workers, we must start with enslavement and the unpaid work of Black people that provided a foundation for this nation. At every juncture in our nation’s history, we find the work of Black people, including Black women, pivotal.
The flawed leadership of our nation would currently erase this history and celebrate American exceptionalism, but the reality is an inconvenient truth. Not only would there be no America without the labor of enslaved people, but there would also be no wartime victories without the work of Black women. I am thinking of the invisible warriors, the Black women who were “Rosies”, women who worked in wartime industries as welders, machine assemblers, riveters, and other assembly line workers. They faced discrimination on all sides, especially from their white “sisters”, who even protested the fact that they had to use the same bathrooms as Black women (our nation’s obsession with toilets is another story). The stories of the Black Rosies have mostly been swallowed, and there are those who would lift it up because it is important. As many as 600,000 Black women were part of the war effort.
Gregory Cook has amplified the work of the Black Rosies in his film, The Invisible Warriors. His mom was one of the Rosies and he was moved enough by her story to document it. In his work, he has lifted up the Black women whose silent contribution to the war effort has been overlooked, sometimes maliciously. There are those who would erase this contribution to our nation, which is why we must life it up.
For some Labor Day means the end of summer, for others, time to get back to school. For me, it is a remind of the foundational contribution that Black people have made to our nation, and especially the hidden work that Black women have provided, against all odds. The Black Rosies are among the other warriors, the nurses, the Black women enlisted troops, the Black women, like Dr. Olivia Hooker, the first Black woman in the Coast Guard who fought for the right to fight. It is galling that there are efforts to ignore or erase this extreme patriotism. It is our duty to lift up the Black Rosies and others Black working heroines this Labor Day. They may have sometimes worked without joy, but they always worked with purpose, and we are the richer for it.
