Opinion: A Labor Day Case for Reckoning With Unpaid Black Labor

Around this time each year, we rightly remember the labor movement and the contributions of ordinary men and women who refused to accept the status quo. The workplace protections many of us take for granted exist because somebody once stood on a picket line and demanded them. Working people, alongside their union sisters and brothers, fought for wages, benefits, safer workplaces, reasonable hours, and the ability to care for themselves and their families. At its best, organized labor has also served as an essential check on corporate power, a check weakened by declining union membership and decades of sustained attacks on organized labor.

I know this is the story most of us expect to tell on Labor Day.

This year, I am inviting us to remember an earlier story.

Before the labor movement won protections for American workers, there were workers who had no protections at all. There were people who risked life and limb tending fields they would never own and caring for homes in which they could never claim a room of their own. Their presence was never dignified with wages, much less annual raises, merit pay, retirement benefits,or paid time off.

They were workers, too.

Enslaved Black people helped build this nation while nursing it through its youth. Their labor produced crops, constructed buildings, raised children, prepared food, maintained homes, transported goods and generated enormous wealth from which they were legally prohibited from benefiting.

And the labor was not only physical.

America has benefited from generations of Black intellectual, scientific, creative, cultural, psychological and emotional labor, much of it unrecognized, discredited, appropriated or uncompensated. That history continues to echo in the present. Descendants of enslaved people remain deeply represented in the work of caring for America, in child care centers, long-term care facilities, hospitals, schools, homes and countless other places where human beings tend to one another.

The American care economy did not emerge from nowhere. It has a history. Black labor is central to it.

Before there was a labor movement, Black people suffered and toiled without recognition and often without even the possibility of fair compensation. Under threat of punishment, separation from family, and death, enslaved people put their hands to the plow in service of a nation that had no intention of reciprocating their labor with freedom, wages or security.

The passage of time does not cancel that debt.

In my book, Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation, I argue that repair must take many forms because the damage itself took many forms. Economic injuries require economic repair. Political injuries require political repair. Cultural and historical erasure require acts of restoration, truth telling and remembrance.

One practice I believe deserves greater consideration is the labor acknowledgment.

Most of us know what it feels like to have our work recognized. A word of gratitude does not replace a paycheck. Recognition does not settle a debt. But acknowledgment matters. Even when long overdue, being seen and named can be a balm applied to a wound that has gone unattended for generations.

Think of labor acknowledgments alongside the increasingly familiar practice of land acknowledgments. Land acknowledgments invite us to recognize the Indigenous peoples whose land was taken, occupied, or transformed into the places where we now live, work, worship and learn. Labor acknowledgments could similarly invite us to name the people whose uncompensated labor helped create the institutions, industries, wealth and communities we inherited.

Imagine beginning a university convocation by acknowledging the enslaved people whose labor helped sustain the institution. Imagine a corporation recognizing the Black labor from which its industry or predecessors profited. Imagine a city acknowledging the people who built its roads, homes, monuments, ports or public buildings without receiving the fruits of their work.

Imagine doing this not simply during Black History Month, but as part of how America remembers itself.

A labor acknowledgment can name physical labor, but it should also recognize intellectual, creative, psychological and emotional labor. It can remind us that history is not an abstraction. Everything around us was made possible by somebody.

But acknowledgment alone is not reparations.

We cannot speak seriously about repair while refusing recompense. A labor acknowledgment should open the door to a larger conversation about what is owed. Reparations remain necessary precisely because chattel slavery and the systems that followed it produced material consequences. Wealth was extracted. Wages were withheld. Property was denied or stolen. Opportunities were foreclosed. Those injuries accumulated across generations.

The root word of reparations is repair.

And genuine repair asks more of us than regret. It asks us to identify what was damaged, determine what remains broken and summon the moral imagination to make something whole.

Other nations have undertaken difficult processes of restitution, compensation, truth telling, and reconciliation in response to profound historical wrongs. Their experiences are imperfect and incomplete, but they remind us that democracies can decide to confront rather than conceal the injuries embedded in their histories.

America can make that choice, too.

There may be no more fitting occasion to begin than Labor Day.

Nearly every major expansion of American democracy has depended upon people whose labor exceeded what this nation was initially willing to recognize. Black Americans have been indispensable to that story, not only as workers, but as organizers, thinkers, caregivers, freedom fighters, artists, teachers, builders, and dreamers. Again and again, struggles born from the particular circumstances of Black life have expanded the possibilities of American freedom for others as well.

That is labor worth acknowledging.

A labor acknowledgment will not close the racial wealth gap. It will not return stolen wages or land. It will not substitute for reparations. Its power lies somewhere else.

It interrupts forgetting.

It asks us to recognize that the America we inherited did not simply happen. Human hands built it. Human minds imagined it. Human bodies carried its burdens. And some of those people received neither compensation nor gratitude for what they gave us.

This Labor Day, alongside the union organizers, factory workers, teachers, nurses, tradespeople, farmworkers, domestic workers and countless others whose labor we rightly celebrate, let us make room in our national memory for those workers America never properly thanked.

Say their labor mattered.

Say our prosperity carries traces of their sacrifice.

Then ask the harder question that acknowledgment inevitably raises:

What do we owe the people whose labor made our lives possible?

Acknowledgment cannot be the end of repair. But perhaps it can be one honest place to begin.

Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter is the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA. He is also Chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Howard University and author of Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation.