Slavery depressed all workers’ wages while unions excluded Black workers

Evidence

Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could instead choose to buy people, rent them, contract indentured servants, take on apprentices, or hire children or prisoners. Within this environment, white workers formed labor unions and advocated for better pay, improved conditions, and shorter work days. Yet nearly all those unions withheld membership from free Black workers. White workers viewed Black people not only as rate busters but also as political adversaries, since Black constituencies were generally aligned with the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln and emancipation, but also the party of big business—while white union members sided with the Democratic Party, seen as more sympathetic to labor and immigrants. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 587

Categorization

• XREF: This is a specific contested empirical claim the reader must separate from the reframing thesis — the wage-depression mechanism and the partisan split (Republican/big business vs Democratic/labor) is exactly the kind of falsifiable detail the historians’ objections would target.