| | Doh! I just realized Bill that wasn't the point you were making. You were making an argument that if productivity among workers being equal, wage gaps because of sexism would go away because of competition in wages. That's funny, John! Yes, that's exactly the point I was making. Glad you saw it, if only a bit belatedly! :-) If there were a wage gap due to invidious discrimination, a free labor market would tend to eliminate it. You don't need civil rights legislation.
History provides a dramatic illustration of this point in the case of African Americans. In 1857, white mechanics petitioned the Atlanta City Council to ban competition from free blacks. The petition stated: "We refer to Negro mechanics [who] . . . can afford to underbid the regular resident mechanics . . . to their great injury. . . . We most respectfully request [that the council] afford such protection to the resident mechanics." (Quoted in Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions, p. 29. Original source: Scott Alan Hodge, "Davis-Bacon: Racist Then, Racist Now," The Wall Street Journal (June 25, 1990)
The petition was necessary, because capitalists preferred the cheaper black labor to the more expensive white labor. The same issue arose after the Civil War, when white supremacists attempted through peer pressure to persuade Southern landowners to limit employment opportunities and restrict wages for blacks. Nevertheless, according to Professor Jennifer Robach of George Mason University, "white employers vigorously competed with one another for black labor." It was thus necessary for the white supremacists to resort to governmental intervention through the Jim Crow laws. Professor Roback describes these laws as "attempts to enforce a labor-market cartel among white employees that could not be enforced in any other way." (Roback, "Southern Labor Law in the Jim Crow Era: Exploitative or Competitive?" University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 51, po. 1161 1984.)
Moreover, it is worth noting that textile manufacturing, the only industry in South Carolina in which segregated employment was prescribed by law, was also the only one in which blacks were underrepresented in 1960, which further suggests that it was not capitalism but governmental intervention that was most responsible for employment discrimination against African Americans. Even during Apartheid, Africaner capitalists routinely hired black labor in violation of their own racist laws -- and were fined for doing so. (Thomas Sowell, "'Affirmative Action:' A Worldwide Disaster," Commentary, December 1989, p. 26)
Although in the present U.S. economy, Jim Crow laws no longer prevent blacks from competing with whites, employers are nevertheless prevented by the actions of labor unions from hiring blacks (women, or other minorities) at lower wages. Consequently, the cure for racist or sexist discrimination that would normally occur in a free labor market tends to be obstructed by unions and by the labor legislation that supports them.
Not only do coercive union monopolies prevent blacks from competing with whites, and women from competing with men, but so do licensing and franchise laws. Instead of outlawing racial and sexual discrimination in the marketplace, the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have decriminalized competition by busting the coercive power of labor unions and dismantling the licensing and franchise laws that prevent people with little money or education from competing with established businesses. At the very least, these coercive monopolies deserve to be contested under the 14th Amendment if only to give unemployed workers and aspiring entrepreneurs the same rights that existing workers and capitalists already possess.
Had the principle of civil rights as embodying freedom of opportunity and equal protection under the law been adhered to from the beginning, black slavery, Jim Crow and separate-but-equal laws never would have existed. Nor, to any significant extent, would racial or sexual discrimination in the marketplace. It was the repudiation of these rights to freedom and political equality that allowed for economic exploitation based on racism and sexism. It is, therefore, essential that these rights be reaffirmed as a guarantee against a similar kind of oppression occurring in the future.
- Bill
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