The public sector anchored postwar job-based benefit expansion

Evidence

There were better jobs out there for a skilled plumber, and the best of them were in the public sector, which offered tax-free health insurance and a defined benefit plan. From 1950 to 1970 the proportion of the workforce with some type of health insurance through their jobs went from roughly 50 percent to 80 percent. Almost 50 percent of workers in the private sector had retirement plans, more than twice the percentage in 1950. But my father was not one of those employees. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes that the public sector was the best-benefits employer, which matters because the union gatekeeping in [361] is what Blacks hit when trying to enter it.