William Spriggs, screenshot from CNBC video, Feb. 22, 2023, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/02/22/how-the-fed-can-close-the-racial-wealth-gap-afl-cios-william-spriggs.html
William Spriggs, an outspoken critic of systemic racism in the U.S. economy who spent his career advocating for how to change it, died on June 6. He was 68.
A Howard University professor and former chairman of its Economics Department, Spriggs was the chief economist of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). His death was announced Wednesday in an AFL-CIO tweet. A cause was not mentioned.
In his work, Spriggs focused on workforce discrimination, pay equity, labor and wages, and taxes. He believed all these issues had not worked out favorably for Black Americans because of discrimination, Isheka N. Harrison wrote in an earlier report for The Moguldom Nation.
In 1995, Spriggs led a team that raised the minimum wage from $4.75 to $5.15, according to the American Economic Association.
Condolences poured in for Spriggs, including from attorney and reparatory justice scholar Kamilah Moore, who heads the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
“Devastated to hear the news of Dr. William Spriggs’ passing,” Moore tweeted. “He left a tremendous mark on society, contributing to the first-in-the-nation California Reparation Task Force, including the compensation section of our final report, releasing on June 29. Rest well!”
Before working for the AFL-CIO, Spriggs was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the U.S. Department of Labor. Spriggs is a former president of the National Economics Association, the organization of America’s professional Black economists, and he served on numerous boards.
These included as vice chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Political Education and Leadership Institute; the joint National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Public Administration’s Committee on the Fiscal Future for the U.S.; chairman of the Healthcare Trust for UAW Retirees of the Ford Motor Company and the UAW Retirees of the Dana Corporation Health and Welfare Trust.
“We lost a pillar of our department, @HowardU and the economic profession,” Howard Economics tweeted. “A mentor to countless and an advocate for all. @WSpriggs we are forever indebted to your leadership.”
One of the most prominent Black economists, Spriggs was not afraid to call out his colleagues over the way they handled racial issues, Bloomberg reported.
After George Floyd was murdered by a police officer on May 25, 2020, about four miles south of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Spriggs asked if it was a teachable moment. He wrote an open letter warning that U.S. economists’ methods were “perpetuating the very things they wish to recoil from” and asking them to “reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities.”
“Economists play a key role in shaping policy,” Spriggs wrote. “We are viewed as the objective scientists, with the tools to identify solutions; presumably absent ‘passion.’ But if you start with a model that has race as exogenous, racial differences cannot be objectively approached. The model begins with a fallacy that assumes racial differences as a natural order. It biases the model, because there is a built-in excuse for disparities that cannot be solved. And, invariably, in the overwhelming case of economic analysis, assumes that there is something ‘deficient’ about Black people.”
Taifa Smith Butler, president of Demos, a New York City-based think tank focused on solving economic inequities, tweeted condolences for Spriggs.
“Rest in Power, Bill Spriggs. Mourning his brilliance, kindness, & clarity, that economics isn’t neutral, policy decisions have tangible impacts on our lives, and building power for Black and brown workers is the only way to the world we deserve.”
“Stunned and deeply saddened,” Economist Dr. Sandy Darity wrote in a tweet.” Bill Spriggs was a scholar, long-time friend, and ally. I will miss him greatly.
