Poor job quality, particularly low wages, remains a persistent concern in the social work profession, contributing to high turnover and recruitment challenges. Although concerns over the quality of social work jobs may not be new, we know little about how the quality of social work jobs has evolved over time and for whom. Using four decades of Current Population Survey data, this article examines trends and variations by gender and race on multiple dimensions of job quality for social workers. The analyses reveal that although some dimensions, such as wages and full-time employment, have improved, other aspects of job quality have worsened, including increased risk of low pay and reduced access to employer-provided benefits. Limited progress has been made in reducing gender gaps in job quality, and racial disparities have worsened over time, with Black social workers facing a higher risk of low job quality than White social workers. The implications for the future of the social work profession are discussed, emphasizing the need to improve quality and equity in social work jobs.

ABSTRACT An area of life that is profoundly impacted by anti‐Black racism is the world of work. Black Americans face persistent barriers from hiring to wage inequality to everyday mistreatment. In response, we conducted a critical qualitative investigation to explore how racism manifests in workplaces, uncover overlooked aspects of Black Americans’ work lives, and examine their responses and resistance to racism and white supremacy within hierarchical work‐based structures. Twelve Black‐identifying participants shared their workplace experiences through in‐depth qualitative interviews. Participants’ narratives revealed racism at work as a pervasive, dehumanizing experience characterized by themes such as experiences of institutional racism, stereotypes, and isolation at work. In the face of racism, participants described drawing on social support, personal strengths, and acts of resistance to navigate their work environments. The findings of this study underscore the need for integrative, culturally responsive counseling approach, such as radical healing alongside sustained structural and policy reforms to address systemic racism to improve the working conditions and well‐being for Black workers.

While extensive research shows that Western publics tend to prefer high-skilled immigrants and those from White-majority nations, the relationship between skill and ethnic penalties in immigration preferences remains poorly understood. This research note seeks to clarify this relationship using a pre-registered survey experiment on a representative sample ( n = 1216) of (White) British respondents asking them to evaluate South-African visa applicants in two occupations (medical doctors and fast-food employees) whose ethnicity was randomized. Results show evidence of ethnic penalties against non-White applicants when it comes to medical doctors, but not when it comes to fast-food workers. White medical doctors (a high-status occupation) are rated more favorably than Black medical doctors, but White fast-food workers (a low-status occupation) are not rated more favorably than Black fast-food workers. This pattern is particularly pronounced among respondents who display more negative attitudes towards immigration in general. The results are consistent with a mechanism whereby ethnic bias is activated at higher skill levels.

Health care workers (HCWs), particularly those identifying as female or Black, face disproportionate mental health strain. Digital mental health platforms have grown in popularity and, for health systems, may offer scalable solutions, but their differential impact across demographic groups remains understudied. This secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial enrolled 1275 HCWs from an urban academic health system between January and May 2022. Participants were randomized to usual care or proactive digital engagement via the Cobalt platform. Female and Black HCWs were oversampled to assess subgroup effects. Monthly digital outreach, including mental health symptom screening and linkage to resources via the Cobalt platform, compared with usual care. Primary outcomes were changes in depression (PHQ-9) and anxiety (GAD-7) scores at 6 and 9months. Secondary outcomes included well-being (WHO-5, WBI-9) and work productivity (LEAPS). Generalized linear models assessed HTE by gender and race. Of 1275 randomized participants (mean age 38.6years; 83.4% female; 25.1% Black), both intervention and control groups showed significant reductions in anxiety and depression scores over time. No significant HTE was observed by gender or race for primary outcomes. Female HCWs receiving the intervention reported significantly greater improvement in work productivity at 6months (LEAPS score difference: 1.70; p = 0.03). Black HCWs in the intervention arm showed a sustained improvement in depression scores at 9months (- 2.21; p < 0.001), though adjusted models did not confirm statistical significance. A proactive digital mental health strategy coupled with a well-being platform improved mental health outcomes across HCWs, with modest differential effects in productivity and depression among female and Black participants. These findings support the scalability of digital interventions and highlight the need for culturally tailored approaches to enhance equity and impact.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of racial trauma on the well-being of Black and Brown individuals and explores the utility of racial healing social work approaches in providing mental health treatment. Grounded in Critical Race Theory (CRT), the study examines the lived experiences of Black and multiracial social workers as they support clients navigating racial trauma. Through interpretive phenomenological analysis, narrative interviews with12 Black and multiracial participants revealed various therapeutic approaches used by social workers, including validation, addresssing stigma, building trust, psychoeducation, narrative therapy, and intersectionality. The findings underscore the importance of these approaches in supporting the healing journey of Black and brown clients. These social workers address racial issues by directly confronting the impact of racism in clinical practice. Using a trauma-informed perspective and storytelling, they identify the effects of racism in their sessions and ways to support racial healing.

ABSTRACT The experiences of roughly 900 Black lumberjacks, serving in the British Honduran Forestry Unit in Scotland, demonstrate that citizenship for Essential Workers was racially constrained in Second World War Britain. These men, who produced timber for pit props, underpinning Britain’s industrial-military effort, are shown to have been undervalued economically, receiving 55 per cent of the basic weekly wage paid to comparable white foresters. The unit’s effort was criticised in racialised terms, without objective foundation, by landowners and Ministry of Supply officials, who also deplored friendships cultivated by Black foresters with white neighbours in Scottish rural communities, including women. These war-time friendships are presented as evidence of interracial conviviality, normally understood as a metropolitan phenomenon of the later twentieth century. Elite-driven racialised aggression forced the unit’s disbandment. The Colonial Office nevertheless enabled the foresters to remain in Britain. An estimated 134 did so. Their stories, relayed in Telling the Truth, a memoir published in 1985, and an engaging documentary film, Tree Fellers, 2004, shape the analysis, informed by oral history theorisation of subjective narrative, along with close reading of Colonial Office files. The men’s experiences in Britain since the 1940s influenced their memories of life as foresters, resisting racialised marginalisation as Black Essential Workers.

ABSTRACT This phenomenological pilot study investigates four Black clinical social workers’ interactions with colleagues and clients, revealing accounts of experienced and witnessed racism. Rooted in Black Feminist Thought, this study emphasizes the need to acknowledge the challenges endured by Black clinicians in an effort to foster a more inclusive understanding of the social work profession. The findings indicate Black social workers endure repeated emotional injuries as a result of race-related discriminatory practices and behaviors. Specifically, study participants share stories of the racially fraught incidents they were subjected to via direct contact with clients and colleagues or through organizational policies. Additionally, participants discuss the phenomenon of vicarious trauma that Black professionals experience when supporting Black clients. These findings are presented through Blackout poetry to integrate the use of erasure to transform existing texts into new works that highlight, critique, or challenge societal issues like power dynamics, censorship, and historical narratives, amplifying often marginalized voices. By centering Black perspectives and recognizing these voices as legitimate sources of knowledge, the researchers aim to amplify the narratives of Black social workers.

ABSTRACT Drawing on intersectionality and the concept of care circuits, this article reframes work–family conflict (WFC) as a collective, political, and structural phenomenon rather than an individual dilemma. It examines the illustrative case of Carla, a Black Brazilian domestic worker and single mother, whose efforts to reconcile care and livelihood are shaped by racism, patriarchy, and labour precarity. Through an intersectional narrative analysis, the article shows how Carla's everyday strategies both resist and reproduce these inequalities, revealing the complex dynamics that sustain them over time. Her life story illustrates how the care circuit – involving care as obligation, profession, and help – is organised relationally and transmitted across generations. In doing so, the article demonstrates that WFC is socially distributed and rooted in unequal structures of care. By situating Carla's trajectory within the frameworks of intersectionality and care circuits, the study foregrounds the experiences of women whose labour sustains the possibility of balance for others, while often undermining their own. Although Carla's story is singular, it symbolises broader work–family challenges experienced by many women in Brazil and beyond. The article thus offers an analytical and ethical contribution to debates on care, work, family, and inequality.

ABSTRACT This article develops an intersectional – decolonial critique of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009). While the novel depicts the compounded oppression of Black domestic workers under Jim Crow, its narrative form re-centers whiteness by positioning a white protagonist as the gatekeeper of Black pain. Previous scholarship has highlighted racial stereotypes and white-savior tropes; however, this study departs from that focus by applying intersectionality as both interpretive framework and methodological object of critique. It argues that conventional intersectional readings remain insufficient unless radicalized through decolonial perspectives that confront how cultural texts appropriate and commodify subaltern testimony. Drawing on Black feminist, critical race, and decolonial thought, the article advances three claims: first, the novel shows how race, gender, and class intersect to structure Black women’s subjugation; second, its narrative design renders Black testimony audible only through white mediation; third, this contradiction underscores the need to radicalize intersectionality within postcolonial literary studies.

A burgeoning literature links state policies to health care access/use, yet little research has explored whether state policies relate to the distribution of health care itself. Drawing on census microdata and state policy data from 1960 to 2019, I investigate whether state policy liberalism shapes workforce availability and diversity. First, I find that states in New England and the Middle Atlantic have persistently benefited from larger workforces compared to those in the East South Central and Pacific, with Black and foreign-born workers disproportionately represented in "workforce disadvantaged" states. Second, I show that an increase in policy liberalism is associated with reductions in states' total health care, physician, and nursing workforces; Black and foreign-born physician and nursing workforces; and foreign-born medical assistant/health aide workforces. Taking a political economy approach toward understanding the (mal)distribution of U.S. health care sheds light on a "two-tiered" system that both reflects and reifies existing geographic inequities in population health.

The US agriculture industry has long been reliant on inequalities that intersect race and political economy. Farm policy further accentuates these inequalities as most farmworkers were excluded from New Deal labor and economic statutes due to pressure from Southern Congressmen and agricultural interests. Since then, the agricultural workforce has shifted from being overrepresented by southern Blacks and European immigrants to undocumented residents and migrant workers from Mexico and Central America. As with Black workers before the 1960s, most of these current farmworkers do not have civil or labor or voting rights. Our paper seeks to explain this inequality. We focus on policy development, emphasizing the intersecting roles of race and industrial agricultural interests as embedded within congressional and administrative institutions. We leverage theories of the second face of power and path dependency to highlight the agenda control of agricultural committees in Congress. We also highlight the role of the twentieth-century Bracero Programs and broader developments in the racial political economy to nuance the conventional narrative of the New Deal as a critical juncture for farmworker policy.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett critically examines the lives of Black domestic workers in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, highlighting persistent economic inequalities. Utilizing Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this research employs a qualitative textual analysis approach to examine the novel’s dialogues and narratives, revealing two key forms of economic discrimination faced by Black characters: inequalities in the work and wage system, and barriers to social mobility. These forms of oppression intersect to sustain racial hierarchy and structural inequality. The study concludes that the novel not only portrays historical racial discrimination in the South but also illustrates how hegemonic power normalizes economic subordination through cultural consent, thus highlighting the relevance of the discussion on social justice.

ABSTRACT During the Great Depression, New Deal legislation enshrined what Cheryl Harris termed “whiteness as property” through ostensibly “colorblind” regulations like excluding domestic and agricultural workers from Social Security. While white workers were subject to exploitation, their whiteness protected them from modes of expropriation affecting Black workers. One such mode was the informal economy that arose at New York City street corners, where Black women sought underpaid domestic work in white households, often facing abuse. In her reports on “The Bronx Slave Market,” the activist-journalist Marvel Cooke exposed how the expropriation and violence that structured Black women's care work had deep historical roots, turning to slavery as an analytic, rather than a metaphor. This paper theorizes Cooke's writing as a form of abolitionist critique that illuminates both how the afterlife of slavery structurally affects Black women's labor and the radical care practices countering “stolen care” and the property regime as such.

Research on the health impacts of segregation in nonresidential spaces, such as the workplace, is limited. Racial discrimination in the work environment can hinder career advancement (job mobility) and exacerbate socioeconomic risk factors of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Using a cohort of manufacturing workers in Detroit, we assessed the relationship between Black-White workplace racial segregation and CVD mortality risk. We considered job mobility as a potential modifier among Black workers from the United Autoworkers-General Motors cohort. This retrospective cohort study included 5047 Black workers employed for at least 3 years, with follow-up from 1941 to 2015. Annual segregation exposure was cumulated over working life and divided by time since hire. Job mobility was calculated using each worker's time-varying cumulative area under the curve of their movement between lower and higher-wage jobs. Cox models estimated the impact of segregation and job mobility on CVD mortality. We fit penalized splines to examine the shape of the relationship between segregation and CVD mortality. The average exposure to racial segregation was 13%. We observed a strong positive association between greater workplace racial segregation and CVD mortality, with a hazard ratio of 1.61 (95% CI, 1.18-2.19) in the highest exposure category compared with the lowest. Among workers with lower job mobility, those with moderate or high segregation exposure had increased CVD risk compared with those with low segregation exposure (moderate hazard ratio, 2.13 [95% CI, 1.63-2.78]; high hazard ratio, 2.04 [95% CI, 1.27-3.28]). Results among Black workers with higher job mobility were similar. Our findings provide evidence that increasing workplace Black-White segregation may increase CVD mortality among Black workers. We observed that the cardiovascular harm of racial segregation to Black workers operates in the workplace regardless of job mobility to positions with higher wages.

Objective: The environmental justice (EJ) literature has focused on the link between residential pollution and racial and ethnic demographics, as well as socioeconomic status. Yet, many adults spend a significant amount of time at work. EJ effects in workplaces are little, if at all, examined. Here, we add consideration of workplace environmental disparities to EJ research. Methods: We use multivariate regression analysis to investigate work-area ambient pollution and sociodemographics. We analyze the following research questions: What patterns exist between workplace ambient pollution and the proportion of minority workers? May wage mechanisms explain such patterns? For employees’ sociodemographics, we use census tract-level data from the Longitudinal Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) dataset, and we measure pollution burden using data from CalEnviroScreen 4.0. Results: Work-area ambient pollution varies systematically by race and ethnicity in California. Specifically, increases in the percent of Hispanic, Black, and Asian workers are associated with more-polluted tracts. Based on market rational risk response, we expect that workers require more wage compensation to work in more-polluted areas. However, we find that such compensation is lower for Hispanic, Black, Asian, and Native American employees. Conclusions: These results highlight potential inequities concerning workplace EJ. Knowing that minority people are working in disproportionately polluted areas exacerbates health concerns around the already-known residential EJ effects. To improve public health, policies such as the California Clean Air Technology Initiative should jointly consider residential and work-area exposure.

Abstract This study investigated the predictors of decent work for Black workers in Brazil, grounded in the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT). The relationships among marginalization, economic constraints, work volition, and racial microaggressions in the perception of decent work were examined using data from 400 Black workers in a survey study. The results indicate that marginalization, economic constraints, and racial microaggressions negatively affected the perception of decent work, particularly in the dimensions of safety, compensation, and organizational values. Work volition, especially in contexts of structural constraints, emerged as a central factor in the pursuit of decent working conditions. Additionally, the study highlighted the interconnectedness between racial inequalities and the perception of decent work. The findings reinforce the need for public policies and institutional strategies that promote racial equity and improved labor conditions for the Black population.

Black women healthcare workers serve as key drivers of health equity, providing quality care to a population that faces a gamut of concerns regarding (1) patient-provider interactions as well as (2) access to care. As such, it is vital to make sure healthcare is an inclusive field where Black women workers are not overly burdened, or uniquely susceptible to burnout. Here, we present the Heroines of Healthcare Model, which is a conceptual framework developed to better understand the well-being and lived experiences of Black women in healthcare professions. Drawing upon interdisciplinary literature, we combine sociological theory, Historical Womanism with social psychological framework, Superwoman Schema to contextualize Black women's labor, and the overall burden of care work. The Heroines of Healthcare Model not only centers the voices of Black women, but also provides a tool for educators, practitioners, and researchers to develop more inclusive policies, curricula, and wellness strategies. By shifting the narrative from deficit to empowerment, the model affirms the value of Black women's contributions and experiences within healthcare, ultimately promoting equity and systemic transformation.

Background: A racially diverse mental health workforce has been suggested to address persistent racial disparities in mental health among racially minoritized service recipients. However, in a racialized society such as the United States, structural racism is shown to constrain mental health organizations’ efforts to address disparities through workforce diversity. Theoretical Framework and Method: We recruited Black mental health workers (n = 10, Mage = 52.7 [SD = 6.9], 2 males (20%)/8 females; 4 married (40%)/6 single; 2 part time (20%)/8 full time) who have worked in a community mental health organization for at least seven years. We conducted semi-structured Zoom interviews with the participants to understand Black employees’ perceptions about the organization’s diversity efforts. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through the lens of the theory of racialized organizations, using the Sort and Sift, Think and Shift (SSTS) approach to qualitative data. Results: Findings were organized around five themes: (1) workforce diversity matters, (2) whiteness of the leadership as the perceptions of organizational diversity, and (3) the impact of the whiteness of leadership. Two related subthemes were identified from the third theme: (3a) racial task burdens and (3b) racial outsourcing. Discussion/Implications: Workforce diversity among racialized workers without focusing on how structural racism shape organizational processes are more likely to burden and exploit racial minority workers instead of promoting equity. Anti-racist work must move beyond a focus on individuals, as racist or bad actors, to target organizational procedures, operations, and resource allocation, which may have far greater consequences.

Analysis of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data reveals that Black workers are more likely than Whites to receive and provide informal support to family and friends, and most of that support takes the form of offers of rent-free housing. The value of money and in-kind housing received by White workers potentially bumped their total wealth accumulations by 7%, while among Black workers, wealth accumulations were potentially increased by 24%. When monetary support is given to family and friends, it reduces formal wealth balances by one to two percentage points among Whites and Blacks, barely impacting workers’ ability to accumulate wealth. Among retirees, the fraction of Blacks who receive and give informal support to others is almost double that among their White counterparts, and the majority of this support is in the form of rent-free housing. For the 10% of Black retirees and the 5% of White retirees who receive help from family and friends, the value of informal support makes up 38–40% of their total income. Those who do not receive support rely more heavily on Social Security, pensions, and “other” income, and among White retirees, there is also more reliance on earnings and property income.

Abstract While social scientists have devoted significant effort to understanding racial economic inequalities, surprisingly little work has examined inequalities in how Black and White workers recover from job loss. Trends in racial inequalities after job loss have not been systematically examined since the mid-1990s, leaving open questions about how economic restructuring and business cycle fluctuations have shaped racial inequalities in post-displacement outcomes. In addition, extant research on racial inequalities in post-displacement outcomes has focused on inequalities among men. I use data from the 1984–2020 Displaced Workers Supplement to the Current Population Survey to offer the first historical accounting of racial inequalities in earnings changes after job displacement since the mid-1990s. Large racial inequalities in earnings losses are explained by Black workers’ relatively low levels of education, employment in vulnerable segments of the labor market, and disadvantage in finding new jobs, but also mitigated by White workers’ large earnings losses due to lost earnings advantages accumulated at their previous job. Among men, racial inequalities in post-displacement earnings increased substantially during the Great Recession, entirely due to unobserved differences between White and Black men. Using Heckman-corrected models, I demonstrate that standard ordinary least squares (OLS) models substantially underestimate racial inequalities in the effect of job displacement on earnings among men due to racial differences in workers’ likelihood of finding a new job—accounting for racial differences in selection into reemployment reveals significant racial disparities among men in the effect of displacement on earnings between 1981 and 2009.