Unions Can Help White Workers Become More Racially Tolerant

Labor unions are important organizations in shaping worker attitudes about their political world. In this chapter, we build and contextualize with recent work by Frymer and Grumbach (2020) that finds that being a union member leads workers to be more tolerant towards racial diversity and more supportive of civil rights policy. Here, we argue that for this dynamic to occur, unions need to be active in promoting greater racial diversity to its members. After examining the historical variation with regards to union advocacy, we focus on the recent era in which unions have increasingly promoted and prioritized civil rights causes, in part because of new leadership and in part because of an increasingly diverse workplace. Unions are critical organizations in the promotion of civil rights and greater racial tolerance in America.