Back in the day, if you had an extra or non-traditional job, it might have been called your “side hustle.” Whether you did hair at the house or fixed cars in the alley, it was money aside from your regular income stream. The upside was that it usually paid cash and was money that often went unreported to the Internal Revenue Service. To be clear, I’m not condoning that! The downside, it was work that came with no 401(k), health insurance, or benefits at all.
The sad reality is that for many African-Americans, in the workforce, your side hustle wasn’t much different from your full-time job. I was reminded of this in a recent article written by Gabrielle Rejouis for The Forge. As Rejouis astutely walked readers down the historical legacy of discrimination and racism in the American labor market, she recapped how the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was designed to exclude Black workers.
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