ogc163
Superstar
Government jobs helped thousands of Black families move into the middle class. Now, increasing calls for government privatization are pushing them back out.
Yvonne Renee Evans has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and she has spent most of them in the private sector. It was difficult to get ahead. “I put in multiple applications and never got a chance to advance,” she said. “The opportunities might be there, but I was always given a reason.” As a black woman, she wondered if it “could have been a racial issue.” But it was difficult to prove, even when people who had been there for less time or that she had even trained herself were promoted above her. And “they could remove you at any time,” she noted. Once when she managed operating room scheduling at a hospital with a young, white woman, the hospital decided it wanted to downsize the team to one person. Evans was the one removed from the role, demoted to a lower-level position with a pay cut. “I could have fought it, but it wasn’t worth it,” she said. “You pick your battles, and that wasn’t one I chose to pick.”
But then, after retiring from two different private sector jobs, she took a position at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit in 2008. She didn’t need the work — she could have gone into full retirement — but her husband is ex-Army, and she wanted to serve veterans. She quickly found out it was also a rewarding place to work — very different than what she’d encountered in private hospitals. “The advancement here was wonderful,” she said. “You could move up the professional ladder in leaps and bounds as long as you did the work, you had the credentials. You could get to higher levels than you could in the private sector.”
She now runs a podiatry clinic. “Every year I get appreciation awards,” she noted. She’s also been awarded for being an exemplary employee at the VA. “I never would have gotten awarded like that in the private sector. Never.” The money doesn’t make her rich, she said, but it does allow her to save for retirement and help her grown children if they need it. “I am truly the middle class,” she said.
Evans wouldn’t have always found a welcoming workplace in the government. As late as the turn of the 20th century, letting black workers into the federal government was seen as “akin to bringing down the federal service,” explained Frederick W. Gooding, assistant professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and author of American Dream Deferred. Under President Woodrow Wilson entire departments within the federal government were segregated, with literal barricades separating black and white workers in some agencies and extra bathrooms installed so they wouldn’t have to share the same facilities. But then World War II hit. The government needed a lot more employees — both for the war effort and to staff up President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the government. “Because there’s all these new positions, managers can hire people of color without displacing white workers,” said Jennifer Laird, assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College. By the 1960s, that expansion “gave African American workers a foothold in the public sector.” Black people were fleeing “vitriolic racism in the private sector,” Gooding noted. But the racism they once found in public employment was mediated by need. “It’s not because the federal government woke up one day and said, ‘I’m feeling quite altruistic, let’s give blacks opportunities,’” Gooding said. “They needed bodies, it’s simply a supply and demand equation.”
The Great Migration helped take care of the supply. As black families moved en masse from rural Southern areas to urban cities in the North, they found employment with the federal and local governments when they arrived. That movement from the private sector to the public sector built a black middle class across the country, one that to this day is sustained in large part by public sector employment like the job Evans was able to secure at the VA. Those gains, however, are tenuous, and they are particularly threatened as President Trump and his fellow Republicans strive to severely reduce the size of the federal government.
* * *
The pattern of a booming government sector opening up employment to black workers continued after the war ended. After World War II, “there’s an explosion of state and local employment in all of the states … North and South,” noted Nelson Lichtenstein, history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Some of that was driven by a big expansion in public education, leading to a huge demand for teachers. Some of it was driven by a population boom and the need for workers everywhere, from the Department of Motor Vehicles to public parks. “Labor was still very much needed, and African Americans were right there,” Gooding said. “In such a short span of time … the face of the federal government literally became African American.” According to one of Laird’s studies, black people gained 28 percent of the new jobs in the federal government in the 1960s, even though they made up 10 percent of the U.S. population.
Laws passed around the same time opened more doors in the federal government. Civil rights legislation established equal opportunity hiring procedures for the whole workforce, but included particular affirmative action programs in the public sector. Black government workers were still often delegated to lower-level, menial jobs, but there was a clearer path to advance into the white-collar and supervisory echelon. Evans took a slight pay cut to move to the VA, but she now makes more than she ever did in the private sector. “That would have never happened in the private sector,” she said. At the VA, “they reward me for the job that I do.” Pay is based on certain clearly defined credentials and metrics. “If you meet those dimensions and criteria … they reward you for it.” It’s transparent and clear-cut.
She’s not the only person of color getting ahead at the VA, either. “There are more people of color with master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, and nurse practitioners than I have seen at any other institution,” says Evans. “I never expected to see it, because I didn’t see that in the private sector. In the private sector, there are very few persons of color in supervision, and advancement is very minute.”
“Bureaucracy will set you free,” Lichtenstein said. The structures and rules imposed on the public sector, which are far less common in the private sector, put a check on racism and favoritism with regulated processes for applying, hiring, and advancement. At the moment, public-sector employees can typically only be fired for cause, and decisions can be appealed. At-will employment, on the other hand — the standard in almost all of the private sector — means you can be fired for any reason, or no reason. The federal government’s General Schedule, which applies to most white-collar employees, transparently governs pay and job classifications. “It’s pretty laid out in terms of steps and promotions,” Gooding noted. “There’s not a whole lot of mystery — it’s public record.” It was all too easy for a private sector employer to fire someone for talking back or rubbing them the wrong way, leaving black employees in a particularly precarious position with respect to their potentially racist bosses. “I was a believer that if you did a good job you got rewarded. And that wasn’t the case,” Evans said. “If you did a good job you got used.” The rules regulating employment in the public sector acted as a buffer against personal discrimination.
‘Bureaucracy will set you free,’ Lichtenstein said.
Evans can also count on having a job so long as she keeps working hard. Public-sector unionization is five times higher than for private-sector workers; thanks to the union she and her coworkers belong to — she was never in a union in the private sector — as well as laws governing how public-sector employees are let go, “they can’t just get rid of you,” she noted. Termination has to be for good cause and follow a formal process. “That’s what unions do: They create structures [and] end managerial capriciousness,” Lichtenstein said.
“Government jobs tend to be permanent jobs,” Lichtenstein said. “In an economy of ups and downs and chaos, these are going to be particularly valued by people who are going to be hurt by that chaos,” i.e., marginalized workers. The government offers a haven from some of those storms; the Irish, excluded from higher-paying private-sector jobs during the period of heavy immigration in the mid-1800s, found public-sector alternatives by the end of the century and flocked to the refuge of government employment, with many men ending up as policemen and firemen.
For African Americans in particular, public-sector jobs were often better than what was on private offer for black workers. “Women [were] secretaries and blacks [were] janitors, and that’s just the end of the story,” Lichtenstein said. In the South especially, black people could only find employment as agricultural workers if they were men, or as domestic help if they were women. And it wasn’t just about pay; the public sector offered stability and good benefits: health care, pensions, and savings. “By aligning themselves with the federal government, for the first time they were able to provide for their families in a different way,” Gooding said. That was “an important entrée for many blacks entering the middle class.”
In Washington, D.C., a slew of black workers got jobs with the federal government starting at end of the 19th century. “It became a model for the creation of a black middle class,” Lichtenstein said. They were good, steady jobs, and subsequent generations also went to work in similar jobs, building and sustaining a “very solid middle class” in the city, he said. But public-sector expansion helped build a black middle class across the country. “The black middle class is disproportionately linked to governmental employment,” Lichtenstein said. White workers who could get high-quality jobs in the private sector had multiple doors open to them; for African Americans, the public sector was a key path toward financial stability.
And when black workers gain a foothold in the government, they help others to enter. The structured advancement opportunities meant that a cohort of black workers was able to move up into managerial roles — and from that perch, they were able to reach out a hand and bring in more behind them. Once she saw the advancement opportunities at the VA in action, Evans started to encourage other people of color to join her for the career opportunities available.
* * *
According to various studies over the past decade, black workers accounted for 10.9 percent of all employment, but made up 12.8 percent of state and local public-sector jobs and nearly 20 percent of the federal workforce. Black public-sector employees enjoy better median pay, and thus financial stability, than their peers in the private sector. The racial wage gap is smaller, for example, in state and local governments, and in some places more educated black workers outearn white ones. On the whole, black men and women earn about a quarter more in the public sector than in the general workforce.
All of these advancements, and the black middle class’s grip on economic security, however, are put at direct risk when politicians attack government and call to shrink it through cuts, moving responsibilities into the private sector, or both — all changes at the top of President Trump’s agenda. He ran on “draining the swamp” and reducing the size of government. His one-time chief strategist Steve Bannon’s project was“deconstruction of the administrative state.” Since taking office, he’s put those goals into action as often and in as many places as he can.
Yvonne Renee Evans has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and she has spent most of them in the private sector. It was difficult to get ahead. “I put in multiple applications and never got a chance to advance,” she said. “The opportunities might be there, but I was always given a reason.” As a black woman, she wondered if it “could have been a racial issue.” But it was difficult to prove, even when people who had been there for less time or that she had even trained herself were promoted above her. And “they could remove you at any time,” she noted. Once when she managed operating room scheduling at a hospital with a young, white woman, the hospital decided it wanted to downsize the team to one person. Evans was the one removed from the role, demoted to a lower-level position with a pay cut. “I could have fought it, but it wasn’t worth it,” she said. “You pick your battles, and that wasn’t one I chose to pick.”
But then, after retiring from two different private sector jobs, she took a position at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit in 2008. She didn’t need the work — she could have gone into full retirement — but her husband is ex-Army, and she wanted to serve veterans. She quickly found out it was also a rewarding place to work — very different than what she’d encountered in private hospitals. “The advancement here was wonderful,” she said. “You could move up the professional ladder in leaps and bounds as long as you did the work, you had the credentials. You could get to higher levels than you could in the private sector.”
She now runs a podiatry clinic. “Every year I get appreciation awards,” she noted. She’s also been awarded for being an exemplary employee at the VA. “I never would have gotten awarded like that in the private sector. Never.” The money doesn’t make her rich, she said, but it does allow her to save for retirement and help her grown children if they need it. “I am truly the middle class,” she said.
Evans wouldn’t have always found a welcoming workplace in the government. As late as the turn of the 20th century, letting black workers into the federal government was seen as “akin to bringing down the federal service,” explained Frederick W. Gooding, assistant professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and author of American Dream Deferred. Under President Woodrow Wilson entire departments within the federal government were segregated, with literal barricades separating black and white workers in some agencies and extra bathrooms installed so they wouldn’t have to share the same facilities. But then World War II hit. The government needed a lot more employees — both for the war effort and to staff up President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the government. “Because there’s all these new positions, managers can hire people of color without displacing white workers,” said Jennifer Laird, assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College. By the 1960s, that expansion “gave African American workers a foothold in the public sector.” Black people were fleeing “vitriolic racism in the private sector,” Gooding noted. But the racism they once found in public employment was mediated by need. “It’s not because the federal government woke up one day and said, ‘I’m feeling quite altruistic, let’s give blacks opportunities,’” Gooding said. “They needed bodies, it’s simply a supply and demand equation.”
The Great Migration helped take care of the supply. As black families moved en masse from rural Southern areas to urban cities in the North, they found employment with the federal and local governments when they arrived. That movement from the private sector to the public sector built a black middle class across the country, one that to this day is sustained in large part by public sector employment like the job Evans was able to secure at the VA. Those gains, however, are tenuous, and they are particularly threatened as President Trump and his fellow Republicans strive to severely reduce the size of the federal government.
* * *
The pattern of a booming government sector opening up employment to black workers continued after the war ended. After World War II, “there’s an explosion of state and local employment in all of the states … North and South,” noted Nelson Lichtenstein, history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Some of that was driven by a big expansion in public education, leading to a huge demand for teachers. Some of it was driven by a population boom and the need for workers everywhere, from the Department of Motor Vehicles to public parks. “Labor was still very much needed, and African Americans were right there,” Gooding said. “In such a short span of time … the face of the federal government literally became African American.” According to one of Laird’s studies, black people gained 28 percent of the new jobs in the federal government in the 1960s, even though they made up 10 percent of the U.S. population.
Laws passed around the same time opened more doors in the federal government. Civil rights legislation established equal opportunity hiring procedures for the whole workforce, but included particular affirmative action programs in the public sector. Black government workers were still often delegated to lower-level, menial jobs, but there was a clearer path to advance into the white-collar and supervisory echelon. Evans took a slight pay cut to move to the VA, but she now makes more than she ever did in the private sector. “That would have never happened in the private sector,” she said. At the VA, “they reward me for the job that I do.” Pay is based on certain clearly defined credentials and metrics. “If you meet those dimensions and criteria … they reward you for it.” It’s transparent and clear-cut.
She’s not the only person of color getting ahead at the VA, either. “There are more people of color with master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, and nurse practitioners than I have seen at any other institution,” says Evans. “I never expected to see it, because I didn’t see that in the private sector. In the private sector, there are very few persons of color in supervision, and advancement is very minute.”
“Bureaucracy will set you free,” Lichtenstein said. The structures and rules imposed on the public sector, which are far less common in the private sector, put a check on racism and favoritism with regulated processes for applying, hiring, and advancement. At the moment, public-sector employees can typically only be fired for cause, and decisions can be appealed. At-will employment, on the other hand — the standard in almost all of the private sector — means you can be fired for any reason, or no reason. The federal government’s General Schedule, which applies to most white-collar employees, transparently governs pay and job classifications. “It’s pretty laid out in terms of steps and promotions,” Gooding noted. “There’s not a whole lot of mystery — it’s public record.” It was all too easy for a private sector employer to fire someone for talking back or rubbing them the wrong way, leaving black employees in a particularly precarious position with respect to their potentially racist bosses. “I was a believer that if you did a good job you got rewarded. And that wasn’t the case,” Evans said. “If you did a good job you got used.” The rules regulating employment in the public sector acted as a buffer against personal discrimination.
‘Bureaucracy will set you free,’ Lichtenstein said.
Evans can also count on having a job so long as she keeps working hard. Public-sector unionization is five times higher than for private-sector workers; thanks to the union she and her coworkers belong to — she was never in a union in the private sector — as well as laws governing how public-sector employees are let go, “they can’t just get rid of you,” she noted. Termination has to be for good cause and follow a formal process. “That’s what unions do: They create structures [and] end managerial capriciousness,” Lichtenstein said.
“Government jobs tend to be permanent jobs,” Lichtenstein said. “In an economy of ups and downs and chaos, these are going to be particularly valued by people who are going to be hurt by that chaos,” i.e., marginalized workers. The government offers a haven from some of those storms; the Irish, excluded from higher-paying private-sector jobs during the period of heavy immigration in the mid-1800s, found public-sector alternatives by the end of the century and flocked to the refuge of government employment, with many men ending up as policemen and firemen.
For African Americans in particular, public-sector jobs were often better than what was on private offer for black workers. “Women [were] secretaries and blacks [were] janitors, and that’s just the end of the story,” Lichtenstein said. In the South especially, black people could only find employment as agricultural workers if they were men, or as domestic help if they were women. And it wasn’t just about pay; the public sector offered stability and good benefits: health care, pensions, and savings. “By aligning themselves with the federal government, for the first time they were able to provide for their families in a different way,” Gooding said. That was “an important entrée for many blacks entering the middle class.”
In Washington, D.C., a slew of black workers got jobs with the federal government starting at end of the 19th century. “It became a model for the creation of a black middle class,” Lichtenstein said. They were good, steady jobs, and subsequent generations also went to work in similar jobs, building and sustaining a “very solid middle class” in the city, he said. But public-sector expansion helped build a black middle class across the country. “The black middle class is disproportionately linked to governmental employment,” Lichtenstein said. White workers who could get high-quality jobs in the private sector had multiple doors open to them; for African Americans, the public sector was a key path toward financial stability.
And when black workers gain a foothold in the government, they help others to enter. The structured advancement opportunities meant that a cohort of black workers was able to move up into managerial roles — and from that perch, they were able to reach out a hand and bring in more behind them. Once she saw the advancement opportunities at the VA in action, Evans started to encourage other people of color to join her for the career opportunities available.
* * *
According to various studies over the past decade, black workers accounted for 10.9 percent of all employment, but made up 12.8 percent of state and local public-sector jobs and nearly 20 percent of the federal workforce. Black public-sector employees enjoy better median pay, and thus financial stability, than their peers in the private sector. The racial wage gap is smaller, for example, in state and local governments, and in some places more educated black workers outearn white ones. On the whole, black men and women earn about a quarter more in the public sector than in the general workforce.
All of these advancements, and the black middle class’s grip on economic security, however, are put at direct risk when politicians attack government and call to shrink it through cuts, moving responsibilities into the private sector, or both — all changes at the top of President Trump’s agenda. He ran on “draining the swamp” and reducing the size of government. His one-time chief strategist Steve Bannon’s project was“deconstruction of the administrative state.” Since taking office, he’s put those goals into action as often and in as many places as he can.