Black Labour History: When Workers Resisted Exploitation at Bronx ‘Slave Markets’

Following the Great Depression, Black working class women flocked to street corners in the Bronx, New York, forced to sell domestic labor for far below its value in order to make ends meet. “They come to the Bronx, not because of what it promises,” reads the renowned exposé by two Black radical activists, investigative journalist Marvel Cooke and civil rights leader Ella Baker. These informal domestic workers flocked to the infamous “Bronx Slave Market,” “largely in desperation,” Cooke and Baker wrote in 1935. 

Desperation did indeed characterize the circumstances at the so-called slave markets, in which impoverished women braved the elements for hours, waiting to be exploited by wealthy families for a few cents and hour and risking all manner of dangerous working conditions and potential sexual abuse. 15 years after working on her exposé with Baker, Cooke went undercover as a domestic worker to pen “I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market,” in which she connected the plight of women seeking employment on Bronx street corners to the enduring legacy of slavery. 

“I was the slave traded for two truck horses on a Memphis street corner in 1849. I was the slave trading my brawn for a pittance on a Bronx street corner in 1949,” Cooke wrote. “As I stood there waiting to be bought, I lived through a century of indignity.” On the street corners, predominantly Black women waited to be hired by wealthier white families from around the greater New York area. 

Workers come together against exploitation

But as with all stories of labor exploitation, desperation is half of the story—the other half is a rich history of resistance and the fighting spirit of the working class. In the face of super-exploitation by employers, women workers would band together on the street corners to demand a certain base pay. Others would refuse window washing, one of the most dangerous of tasks domestic workers were asked to do, requiring workers to risk their lives to hang outside of windows in multistory buildings—which reportedly even resulted in injury and even death. Others would resist by coming to work prepared with wristwatches in anticipation of employers setting their clocks back in their homes in order to gain free labor time. 

Labor organizers and radical activists of the time identified unionization efforts as a key way to combat the super-exploitation of the Bronx slave markets. At the first convention of the National Negro Congress in Chicago in 1936, a resolution was adopted which included a commitment to the “organization of women domestic workers into trade unions of the American Federation of Labor.”

“The Bronx ‘slave market’ is a graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section of the American working population – the Negro women,” read an article by Black communist organizer Louise Thompson Patterson. According to Patterson, delegates at the inaugural National Negro Congress “urged the need for organization on all fronts” and “spoke of the severe exploitation of women workers by the rich families of Westchester [north of the Bronx, where many domestic workers found employment].”

In 1936, the Domestic Workers Union Local 149 (DWU) in New York launched a campaign to organize all domestic workers working in private homes. 

An article from June 11, 1936 in the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker read, “The [DWU] pointed yesterday to a recent headline in the New York Times which stated: ‘Depression ends servant problem. Magazine finds that untrained maids can be hired for as low as $4 a month.’ The ‘servant problem,’ the union emphasized, means thousands of men and women working as cooks, butlers, maids, governesses, laundresses and handymen.”

“At the present time, this group is also excluded from most labor legislation such as social security, accident compensation, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, because of their lack of organization,” the article continues. According to the article, the DWU listed the following as “the domestic servants’ program of demands”: “We want wages raised, hours cut, one full day off a week. We want decent food and a decent room on sleep-in jobs. We demand laws to protect us: minimum wage and maximum hour laws, new accident compensation and social security laws which do not leave out domestics. We want projects under the WPA for domestics at trade union wages, so that not one of us will have to go to the Bronx slave market for room and board only in an ‘opportunity’ home.”

The DWU established a free employment center on 2561 White Plains Road in the Bronx, in order to aid in organization efforts and eliminate the need for workers to sell their labor on street corners. However, the DWU encountered significant obstacles to organizing workers who frequented the Bronx “slave markets,” namely that these domestic workers faced uniquely isolating and harsh conditions as they searched for employment on an individual basis on the street corners. 

The difficulties faced by DWU in organizing the most super-exploited workers in their sectors, subject to poverty wages, dangerous conditions, and abuse, are mirrored today in some difficulties faced in organizing workers in sectors such as the sprawling “gig economy,” or organizing workers at giants such as Amazon, subject to high turnover and excessive workplace injuries.