Black jobs matter, labor leaders say

Black lives matter, no doubt.

But what will often make a crucial difference in those black lives are good jobs.

"Anytime there is economic insecurity, you see racial tensions like we have now," Derrick Johnson, president for the Mississippi State Conference for the NAACP, told about 75 workers, labor leaders and activists gathered at City Hall on Monday.

Monday's conference, sponsored by two of the nation's largest labor unions, follows six days of local protests over fatal shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana. Dozens rallied briefly outside City Hall on Monday morning.

"The condition of black labor is the measure of all labor," said Anthony Monteiro, a former longtime instructor in African American studies at Temple University.

"If black labor is doing badly, eventually all workers will do badly."

Monteiro said the modern situation for African American workers degenerated in the Reagan era, while many white workers thought they could escape the problems in an "alliance with white capital."

"Now they face poverty, unemployment, suicide and distress and now they understand what it's like to be black," he said.

Much of what is happening now, Johnson said, has to do with structural racism, particularly discriminatory government policies. "It isn't about individual hate or love."

Opening the event, Henry Nicholas, who leads the District 1199C of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, a division of AFSCME, noted that his union also represents police officers, a reference to the shooting of five police officers by a sniper in Dallas.

He said African Americans had to do more to stop killing each other.

Valarie Long, executive vice president of SEIU, said that her union, working with AFSCME, had organized 20,000 home care workers, including 6,000 in Philadelphia.

"They know how to unionize and that's the best antipoverty program there is," she said.

The panelists discussed had their theories, but it took a young security guard, Larhonda Whitmore, 24, to explain, in practical ways, the difference a good job can make.

For a brief moment, she said, she was living her dream - man, woman and child together in their own apartment, both working and in love.

But the economy tore apart her family, Whitmore said. Her job was steadier than her boyfriend's and that caused tensions.

And her job wasn't even all that steady.

Whitmore works as a security guard assigned to a local university. During the summer, she loses her job and at $10.45 an hour, she couldn't save enough to carry the rent through summer.

Soon the fledgling family was evicted. "It broke us apart," she said. Now she and her daughter, 3, live with her parents.

Too often, she said, there aren't enough opportunities for good jobs, especially for black men.

They wind up trying to support themselves and their families by, for example, selling CDs on the street. That constant interaction with street life puts them in harm's way, perhaps from police, perhaps as victims of crime.

"It isn't about black and white," she said, although many of the faces in the situation are black.

It's about a good job, and a union, she said.

jvonbergen@phillynews.com

215-854-2769 @JaneVonBergen

www.philly.com/jobbing

4.9%

National unemployment rate, for June.

4.4%

For whites.

5.8%

For Latinos.

3.5%

For Asians.

8.6%

For African Americans, over age 20

8.2%

For African American men, over 20.

31.2%

For African American youth, 16-19.

SOURCE: U.S. Labor DepartmentEndText