The Social Security Act at Ninety and the Workers It First Left Out

The photograph from August 14, 1935, is one of the most reproduced images of the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt sits at a table in the White House, pen in hand, with a semicircle of senators, congressmen and officials crowded in behind him, most of them men in dark suits, one of them Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. The bill on the table promised something Americans had never had from their national government: a pension for old age, earned by working, paid as a right rather than as charity. Now look again at the picture and think about who is not in it, and not just in the sense of who was invited to the ceremony. The cook who made dinner in a Washington home that night was not covered by the law being signed. Neither was the man picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta, nor the woman cleaning a house in Atlanta, nor the sharecropper in Alabama. The words "agricultural labor" and "domestic service" appear in the law as exceptions, and those two exceptions, in the South of 1935, meant that most Black workers in the region were shut out of the new system for close to two decades.

In short: The 1935 Social Security Act excluded farmworkers and domestic workers, which in practice left out most Black workers in the South. Historians still argue about whether that was racial design or administrative caution, but the effect is not in dispute, and amendments in the 1950s largely fixed it. Ninety years on, the pattern of protecting workers by job title, and leaving out the jobs held by the least powerful, has not gone away.

What the law actually covered

The Social Security Act of 1935 was not one program but a bundle. The best known part was old-age insurance, what we now simply call Social Security: workers and employers would pay a tax on wages, and workers would later collect monthly benefits based on what they had earned. Alongside it were a federal-state system of unemployment insurance, federal grants to help states pay means-tested old-age assistance to the elderly poor, aid to dependent children, aid to the blind, and funding for maternal and child health and public health.

The insurance programs were the heart of it, and their coverage was defined by a list of exclusions. The law left out agricultural labor. It left out domestic service in a private home. It also left out casual labor, people working for federal, state and local governments, people working for nonprofit religious, charitable and educational organizations, and the self-employed. Who was left? Mostly people who worked for wages in commerce and industry. The unemployment insurance title carried the same occupational exclusions, so a farmhand or a household worker who lost a job in a bad year got nothing from the new system either. For those workers, the safety net of 1935 was the older one: family, church, mutual aid societies and whatever relief a county would grant.

Payroll taxes began in 1937. Congress amended the law in 1939 to add benefits for survivors and dependents, and the first regular monthly checks went out in January 1940. The very first went to Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary in Ludlow, Vermont, who had paid in for about three years. Her first check was for twenty-two dollars and fifty-four cents. She lived to be one hundred, and she collected far more than she ever paid in, which is not a scandal; it is what insurance against a long life is supposed to do.

How a job title became a colour line

Nothing in the law mentioned race. It did not have to.

In the South of the mid-1930s, the economy still ran largely on agriculture, and Black Southerners, kept out of most industrial and white-collar jobs by law and custom, worked overwhelmingly on farms, as sharecroppers, tenants and day labourers, or in white households as cooks, maids, laundresses, nurses and drivers. Excluding those two categories of work therefore excluded most of the region's Black workforce. Nationwide, large numbers of white workers were left out too, including white farm families across the Midwest and Plains. But the impact fell hardest and most completely on Black workers in the South.

The same pattern repeated across the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which guaranteed the right to organize, excluded agricultural and domestic workers. So did the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the minimum wage law, at its start. The architecture was consistent: the federal government built a floor under industrial workers, and the floor stopped at the edge of the farm and the kitchen door.

The old-age assistance program, the means-tested part of the act, had its own quiet change. The administration's original bill would have required states to provide aid sufficient for a reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health. Congress removed that standard, leaving states to set their own benefit levels. Southern states could then, and did, pay Black elderly recipients less than white ones, with local officials deciding who was deserving.

The argument historians are still having

Why were farm and domestic workers left out? This is a real scholarly debate, and both sides deserve a fair hearing.

One view, associated with historians and political scientists such as Ira Katznelson, who wrote When Affirmative Action Was White, holds that the exclusions reflected the power of southern Democrats in Congress. Those members held key committee chairs, including the Senate Finance Committee, led by Pat Harrison of Mississippi, and the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Robert Doughton of North Carolina. Roosevelt needed their votes for everything. On this reading, the southern delegation made clear that it would not accept a federal program that put cash directly into the hands of Black farm labourers and household workers, because that cash would weaken the region's control over cheap labour. The exclusions were the price of passage.

The other view, argued carefully by the Social Security Administration's own historian, Larry DeWitt, in a 2010 article, points to the record of the hearings. The proposal to drop farm and domestic workers came from Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, who testified that collecting payroll taxes from millions of small farms and private households, most of which kept no payroll records, would be an administrative nightmare in the first years of a brand-new system. Several other countries' early social insurance programs had made similar exclusions for similar reasons. On this reading, the motive was practical, and the racial effect was a consequence rather than a goal.

Here is where I come down. The administrative concern was real; the Treasury really did not know how to collect a tax from every household that paid a cook. But two things weaken the purely administrative story. The first is the fate of the decency standard in the assistance program, which had nothing to do with tax collection and everything to do with letting southern officials set lower benefits. The second is what happened when the political will changed: the administrative obstacles turned out to be solvable. Motive is hard to prove. The effect is not.

The amendments that let people in

That change came in the 1950s. The Social Security Amendments of 1950 extended coverage to regularly employed farmworkers and domestic workers, as well as to most self-employed people outside farming. The 1954 amendments went further, bringing in self-employed farmers and more farm labourers. Coverage kept widening in later years, to state and local government workers whose employers chose to join and to employees of nonprofits.

By the end of the 1950s, Social Security had become something close to what its name suggested: nearly universal insurance for people who worked. Within a few decades it had become the most effective anti-poverty program in the country for older Americans, the thing that turned old age from a common route into poverty into something most working families could plan for.

Later Congresses also changed what the program was. Disability insurance was added in 1956, so that a worker who could no longer work because of a serious illness or injury could draw benefits before retirement age. Automatic cost-of-living adjustments, which raise benefits each year with inflation, began in the 1970s. And the benefit formula itself was built to be progressive: it replaces a larger share of past wages for people who earned less over their careers than for people who earned more. A low-wage worker gets a smaller check than a high earner, but one that covers a bigger portion of what they used to make.

That design matters for the story of exclusion in a specific way. Because the formula favours lower earners, and because it pays survivors and dependents, Social Security today does more to reduce poverty among older Black Americans and older women than almost any other public program. The groups the 1935 law did the most to leave out are now among those who depend on it most.

But a delay of fifteen to twenty years is not a footnote. It meant a generation of Black workers in the South reached old age without benefits, or with fewer years of covered earnings than their work deserved. Social Security benefits depend on a lifetime earnings record. Years spent in excluded jobs left gaps that showed up in smaller checks long after the exclusion ended.

The same move, ninety years later

The deepest lesson of 1935 is not about one law. It is about a technique: write protections for workers, then define which workers count, and leave out the jobs held by people with the least political power. The technique is still in use.

Farmworkers remain excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, which means they have no federal protection when they organize a union. They are also excluded from federal overtime pay. Some states have stepped in; California and New York, among others, have passed laws phasing in overtime for farm labour. Domestic workers are also outside the labor relations law. New York passed the first statewide Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in 2010, and a number of other states have followed. Federally, a Labor Department rule that took effect in 2015 extended minimum wage and overtime protections to most home care workers who had previously been treated as companions and excluded.

The modern version of the farm and kitchen exclusion is often a classification. Workers labelled independent contractors, including many people driving for apps or delivering food, are generally outside unemployment insurance and outside the labor relations law. During the 2020 pandemic, Congress created a temporary program to pay unemployment benefits to such workers, an admission that the regular system had a hole in it. When the emergency program ended, the hole came back.

And Social Security itself still has seams. At the end of 2024 Congress passed, and in January 2025 President Biden signed, the Social Security Fairness Act, ending two provisions that had cut benefits for many teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public employees who also had pensions from jobs outside the system. It took decades of organizing by those workers to get there. Meanwhile, the payroll tax that funds the program applies only up to an annual earnings cap, so the highest earners stop paying it partway through the year while most workers pay on every dollar.

The fight for the next ninety years

The program faces a financial question that should be stated plainly. The trustees who oversee Social Security project that, unless Congress acts, the trust funds will be depleted in the mid-2030s, after which incoming payroll taxes would cover only a large share, roughly four-fifths, of scheduled benefits. That is not the same as the program going broke; the taxes keep coming in. But it is a real gap, and Congress will have to close it with some mix of new revenue and benefit changes.

The conservative argument, made in good faith by many, is that the gap should be closed mainly by slowing benefit growth or raising the retirement age, because higher taxes hurt the economy and longer lives mean a longer working life is fair. The answer, I think, starts with who bears the cost. A higher retirement age falls hardest on people who do physical work and on groups with shorter life expectancies, which brings us right back to the people who were left out in 1935. Lifting or removing the earnings cap, so high earners pay on all their wages as most workers do, closes a large part of the gap without cutting what retirees depend on.

Ninety years after that photograph, the question is the same one the picture hides. When the government builds a floor, does it reach everyone who works, or does it stop at the kitchen door?

What you can do

• Check your own record. Create an account with the Social Security Administration and check your earnings history for gaps or errors; it determines your future benefit.
• Follow the solvency debate. Our safety net page tracks proposals in Congress, including bills to lift the payroll tax cap.
• Back excluded workers. Farmworker and domestic worker campaigns for overtime and organizing rights are active in many states. Find them through our labor hub.
• Make the call. Ask your members of Congress, through your representatives, whether they support extending labor protections to farmworkers and how they would close the Social Security gap.
• Keep the history in view. Our racial justice page follows how old exclusions still shape wealth and retirement gaps today.