To what degree did the emergence of a large union movement in the middle decades of the 20th century advance the civil rights and general economic well-being of African-Americans and Latina/os during those same decades. To what extent did these new unions and the new laws that helped sustain them prove problematic for the civil rights movement; and conversely, to what degree did the emergence of a powerful “rights consciousness” in the 1960s and afterward diminish the appeal of trade unionism and collective bargaining? Consider the nature of the Wagner-era labor law and also that of the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s.
