6 - “The Right to Work Is the Right to Live!”: Fair Employment and the Quest for Social Citizenship

Summary

The late political philosopher Judith N. Shklar called “earning” a social right of American citizenship. “The opportunity to work and to be paid an earned reward for one's labor,” she theorized, has not only brought “public respect” or the standing crucial for citizenship but separated the “American” from both the nonwork of the European aristocrat and the forced labor of the slave. Liberal inheritors of the New Deal exemplified Shklar's understanding of the “right to work” as “the comprehensive commitment to providing opportunities for work to earn a living wage for all who need and demand it.” Those who sought to transform the wartime President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) into a permanent agency to fight job discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and nationality argued in 1945 that “The Right to Work is the Right to Live!”

But the FEPC met intransigent opposition from staunch segregationists who transformed the demand for economic rights into a discourse on social equality. As Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo claimed, the FEPC existed to “force the white employees in the departments in Washington to eat with [blacks] and use the same toilet facilities.” As his colleague James O. Eastland put it, this “Communist program for racial amalgamation” would “discriminate against the white war veteran and give the Negro preference over him.”