Reviewed in this Article:
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. By Nancy MacLean. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation. 2006. Pp. 466. $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 0-674-01909-1.

For most of us, income and social status depend on our job, our occupation – our employment. That’s what makes fair employment practices so important. Elimination of discrimination in employment, occupation, and promotion is an implicit goal in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an explicit goal in the core labor standards adopted by the International Labor Organization.

Equal employment opportunity, however, is often overlooked as a human rights, civil rights and economic justice issue in the United States. Nancy MacLean’s book, Freedom Is Not Enough, is an impressive correction to this oversight. In the past 50 years, attention to discrimination in hiring and promotion – with its income-inequality effects – has too often taken a back seat to examinations of housing and voting-rights discrimination and to the drama of school desegregation, lunch-counter sit-ins, and freedom marches.

MacLean, a professor of history and African-American studies at Northwestern University, has written a landmark report on the impact and results of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This title makes illegal all discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Victims of discrimination acquired a complaint forum at the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and were given the right to sue employers in court. These complaint rights have been weakened in recent years by EEOC budget cuts and Administration opposition or indifference.

Lively, Yet Scholarly
This political history of Title VII is not “dry-as-dust” reading. It is full of lively quotes and anecdotes. But it is also a scholarly document. It has 80 pages of footnotes and it lists 123 personal papers and institutional archives consulted. MacLean enlisted 19 graduate students, six undergraduates, 13 general readers, and 16 chapter readers in the research project. It takes her three pages to give thanks to all the individuals, libraries, and universities that helped her.

In the 1930s and 1940s, unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) often created opportunities for minorities’ progress by means of collective bargaining, seniority and grievance systems, and lobbying for economic justice. Nevertheless, they did not eliminate discrimination by employers or unions. The civil rights awakening in the 1950s produced the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of black and white civil rights and religious groups, CIO unions, and liberals. The 1963 March on Washington for “Jobs and Freedom” and the 1964 Civil Rights Act were landmark achievements of this coalition. Coalition politics was an important result of that era’s civil rights battles. Today, reform activists regularly look for coalition partners to join their campaigns.

Affirmative action was explicit in President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Howard University speech: “Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free.” According to Johnson, justice required the country “to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn, to grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities – physical, mental and spiritual – and to pursue their individual happiness. To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough” (p. 5).

Affirmative Action
The fights for and against affirmative action make up a large, significant, and dramatic part of MacLean’s story. Three Supreme Court decisions helped shape affirmative action policies. In 1971, the Griggs v. Duke Power decision gave the Supreme Court’s blessing to a common feature of settlements in discrimination cases: numerical or quota hiring and promotion goals and timetables. The 1977 Bakke decision discouraged racial and ethnic distinctions, but found “diversity” by considerations of race or ethnicity acceptable as a means of enhancing the quality of higher education. This decision later helped shift the emphasis in affirmative action from correcting past discrimination with a social justice purpose to the private “diversity” benefits reaped by business employers. In a third key decision, in the 1979 Weber case, the Supreme Court upheld an employer- and union-supported race-conscious, affirmative action training program which gave preference to black workers.

The controversial issue of affirmative action through quotas, numerical goals, and timetables became submerged in the 1990s by employers’ emphasis on the benefits of “diversity” in the workplace. In this context, “diversity” meant more black, brown, and female faces in employment settings. In the 1970s, however, many employers, aided by conservatives and reactionaries opposing affirmative action, shifted from “massive [affirmative action] resistance” to “color-blindness,” which had a less offensive connotation. In this context, “color-blindness” meant hiring the best-qualified job candidate regardless of his/her race.

Among the leaders in that fight against affirmative action were William F. Buckley, Jr., Senator Jim Buckley, Joseph Coors, James J. Kilpatrick, Irving Kristol, Robert Nisbet, Norman Podhoretz, Lewis Powell, and Richard Vigurie. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pushed by its lawyer Lewis Powell (who later became a Supreme Court Justice and author of the Bakke decision), was active in the anti-affirmative action campaign and quadrupled its membership in the 1970s.

In 1985, the Reagan Administration set out to rescind an executive order requiring affirmative action by all federal contractors (15,000 businesses employing 25 million workers). An avalanche of protest hit the Reagan Administration, however, not only from a wide range of civil rights groups and the National Black Leadership Roundtable and the National Black Republican Council, but also from members of Congress (many of them Republicans), leaders in education, and previously balky unions. Even business leaders from the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers told officials in the Reagan Administration that mandating goals and timetables and the keeping of relevant statistics were sound public policies that had the support of their members. The chiefs of big business feared a deluge of costly lawsuits would be the consequence of dealing with 50 different (and potentially conflicting) state anti-discrimination programs. Faced with this negative reaction from its own natural constituency, the Reagan Administration gave up its planned direct attack on affirmative action, but continued to undermine equal employment opportunity by cutting budgets for the EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance.

Women’s Rights
During action by the House of Representatives on the 1964 civil-rights legislation, the Rules Committee Chair added an anti-sex discrimination provision as an anti-civil rights joke intended to kill the bill. This provision stayed in the bill and became law, helping women challenge discrimination in the workplace and making women’s organizations sought-after partners in reform campaigns.

MacLean devotes two chapters to gender-based barriers to women’s access to higher-paying jobs. “Women Challenge Jim Crow” describes the fight for fair employment by feminist organizations, black and white working-class women, and white elite and middle-class women. Another chapter, “The Lonesomeness of Pioneering,” tells sad and painful stories of female workers trying to survive on-the-job discrimination, insults, harassment, and even physical violence. As a result of such treatment, many female pioneers in the workplace gave up their struggle to enter higher-paying jobs.

According to MacLean, many Mexican-Americans were ambivalent about joining black Americans’ fight against discrimination prior to 1964. Title VII opened the door to a Chicano campaign for fair employment in good jobs. Still, jobs seemed to take a lower priority than community empowerment, language, and education. Meanwhile, the “machismo” of Mexican-American men pushed many Mexican-American women toward feminism, a pattern found also among some African-American women.

“A Veritable Revolution”
MacLean’s subtitle, “The Opening of the American Workplace,” indicates her key message regarding the drive for fair employment practices in America’s second half of the Twentieth Century. “What has happened is a veritable revolution in thinking about race and gender and work” (p.2). Injustice and inequality have not disappeared from the American scene, but Americans can take some pride in the progress that has been made and documented in Freedom Is Not Enough.

Markley Roberts, a retired AFL-CIO economist and former LERA board member, is Labor Committee chair of the United Nations Association of the Washington, DC area. He can be reached at MROB476825@AOL.COM.

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