Boosting labor, bottom first
Janelle Jones’ story about the role of Black women in the US economy has caught on
It takes approximately 30 seconds of conversation with Janelle Jones, the chief economist and policy director of one of the largest U.S. labor unions, to learn where she’s from and why it matters.
“I’m from Ohio! Is that not obvious?” she exclaimed, at a decibel level that reflects how core the state is to her identity. Lorain, Ohio, to be exact, where her mother and her mother’s mother (and aunts, uncles and cousins) worked in the local Ford plant.
Those union jobs, and the upward mobility they provided to millions of Black people who migrated from the South in search of freedom and opportunity, taught Jones what it means to move from the margins to the middle class. She noticed the difference when her mother switched to making Econoline vans after years serving Happy Meals at McDonald’s — a business that her current employer, the Service Employees International Union, is in a long-running battle to unionize.
Now she is fighting to make more jobs as good as the union jobs that supported her family — or better, jobs with new safeguards that protect workers’ physical health.
Last year, Jones left the U.S. Labor Department, where she served as chief economist, for the Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly 2 million security guards, nurses, teachers, airport workers and janitors. About twothirds of the members are women, and more than half are people of color.
For the past several years, Jones has been developing one central philosophy: Because Black women have historically been concentrated in low-paid caregiving jobs, which are often excluded from labor laws and benefits like Social Security, they have accumulated less wealth and experienced worse health outcomes. Furthermore, Jones argues, helping Black women — through measures like raising wages in care professions and canceling more student debt — is the best way to construct an economy that functions better for everyone.
In 2020, she gave her narrative a name, “Black Women Best.” She came up with it while working for a progressive nonprofit called Groundwork Collaborative, which conducted focus groups across the country to find a narrative about how the economy should work for working people.
“They were like, ‘I would like to not be tired,’” Jones recalled of the participants. “‘I want to buy school supplies.’ ‘I want to know that if my car breaks down, because I think it might, I won’t lose my apartment.’ ”
Solving those basic problems for people with the least resources, she thought, would buoy the labor market from the bottom up.
Her premise, articulated in a working paper for the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found an eager audience in President Joe Biden, who owed his victory in large part to Black women. It was embraced by influential figures, including corporate economists and a Federal Reserve president, and formed the basis of a 133page report commissioned by the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls.
While few concrete policy changes are the result of one person’s efforts, it’s possible to see Jones’ message in actions as small as a guaranteed income program for Black mothers in Mississippi (now in its fourth round of funding) and as large as the expanded child tax credit and unemployment insurance provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.