Initial provisions of the 1935 Social Security Act excluded disproportionately minority agricultural and domestic workers, occupational groups not enrolled in Social Security until the early 1950s. This article estimates the economic value of the exclusion of these workers, in addition to...

Historians of African-America have long noted the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the early years of Social Security, which denied benefits to disproportionately Black workers. Archives of the Social Security Administration and period ethnographies attribute this exclusion to...