Excluding black occupations from wage law permitted legalized discrimination in pay and benefits

Evidence

By deliberately leaving majority-black occupations out of the Fair Labor Standards Act, Congress ensured that black workers would have to work for whatever wages an employer wanted to provide—and forget about raises or pensions. Employers were permitted to pay black workers less, keep them out of jobs that could be filled by white workers, and exclude them from insurance and benefit plans, all with the legal backing of the federal government. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 358

Categorization

• XREF: The race-neutral profession exclusions in the FLSA echo the union-exclusion mechanism in this same chapter and the general structural-racism-as-mechanism framing of the whole book.