Before slavery’s abolition, she said, white workers were threatened — explicitly or implicitly — with being replaced by slaves, stripping them of any leverage with employers. After emancipation, free Black laborers and poor white laborers had to compete in a devastated agricultural economy that struggled to rebuild itself from the war. Eventually, northern industrialists entered Southern markets, joining white Southern land barons to take advantage of cheap labor in industries including textiles, steel and mining.
Workers at an Amazon campus in Alabama decide whether to form a union
