North Carolina Must Confront the Racial History of Economic Exploitation
There is a dangerous tendency in American discourse to separate “labor issues” from “civil rights issues,” as though wages, working conditions, and economic survival exist outside the history of race. But for Black workers in North Carolina and across the South, labor has always been racialized terrain.
The struggle for worker justice and the struggle for racial justice were never separate movements. They were forcibly separated because the fusion of the two has always threatened concentrated economic and political power.
From slavery to sharecropping to warehouse labor, the throughline is not difficult to see: race has historically been used as an economic sorting mechanism. Black labor was extracted, controlled, criminalized, and underpaid long after emancipation formally ended slavery. The systems changed names, but the underlying logic remained disturbingly familiar.
After Reconstruction, Southern economies depended heavily on racial hierarchy to maintain cheap labor pools. Black workers were excluded from many skilled trades, pushed into agricultural and domestic labor, and denied access to wealth-building opportunities that white workers could more readily access through unions, land ownership, or industrial employment. Occupational segregation was not accidental. It was policy, culture, and economics operating together.
Even today, many of the most physically demanding, lowest-paid, and least-protected jobs in North Carolina are disproportionately staffed by Black workers, immigrant workers, and other marginalized communities. Warehousing, sanitation, poultry processing, agricultural labor, transportation support, and caregiving industries continue to reflect the long shadow of racialized labor structures.
And when workers attempt to organize, another familiar pattern emerges: policing, surveillance, and discipline intensify.
Historically, labor organizing among Black workers has often been treated not simply as an economic threat, but as a social and political threat. There is a reason civil rights leaders were deeply tied to labor movements. A. Philip Randolph understood this. Fannie Lou Hamer understood this. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this when he stood with striking sanitation workers in Memphis before his assassination.
Economic exploitation and racial hierarchy have long reinforced one another.
This is why conversations about labor cannot stop at wages alone. We must also examine:
- “who is concentrated in dangerous jobs”,
- “who faces retaliation for speaking out”,
- “who lacks healthcare access”,
- “who is over-policed in workplaces”,
- “and who is expected to absorb instability quietly.”
North Carolina’s history makes this especially important. The state’s economic growth has often been marketed through a “business-friendly” framework that prioritizes corporate recruitment and low regulation. But “business friendly” can become worker hostile when protections are weak, organizing power is limited, and enforcement mechanisms fail vulnerable workers.
The reality is this:
A legal right is not the same thing as meaningful access to justice.
A worker may technically have the right to report wage theft, discrimination, retaliation, or unsafe conditions. But what happens when:
- “they fear losing their housing”,
- “they cannot afford an attorney”,
- “they depend on employer-provided healthcare”,
- “they are undocumented”,
- “or they know retaliation can follow them across an entire industry?”
Rights on paper mean little when survival itself is precarious.
This is where labor justice and civil rights fully converge. If workers cannot safely exercise their rights, then the issue is no longer only economic. It becomes democratic.
Worker justice requires more than symbolic protections. It requires redistributing power:
- stronger anti-retaliation enforcement,
- accessible legal advocacy,
- workplace transparency,
- union protections,
- racial equity accountability,
- and public recognition that economic exploitation disproportionately follows racial lines.
The future of labor justice in North Carolina depends on whether we are willing to tell the truth about the past. Not as abstraction, but as living structure.
Because when race determines vulnerability to exploitation, labor justice is civil rights work. And civil rights work must include economic justice—or neither will ever truly be achieved.