Black Employment Research Articles

Has Discrimination Disappeared? A Response to William Julius Wilson

William Julius Wilson, in his book, When Work Disappears, notes that 80% of interviewed Black employers (and 74% of Whites) who provided comments on “job skills, basic skills, work ethic, dependability, attitudes and interpersonal skills” expressed negative views of inner-city Blacks. The author suggests that there are problems in Wilson’s research methodology that may too quickly lead to his notion that inner-city joblessness is far more apt to be the result of “unflattering behaviors” of poor Blacks rather than the persistently discriminatory assumptions and hiring practices of employers. Wilson’s findings are compared with those from the author’s own employer interview study. Only 4 of the 44 employers interviewed felt that Black workers had poorer work ethics and attitudes than Whites. Reasons are presented for the differences, and the article concludes with a brief discussion of the policy implications of these findings.

Where the Liberals Lost It: A Case Study

Where the Liberals Lost It: A Case Study Otis L. Graham Jr. (bio) Judith Stein. Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. xiii + 410 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). History had a human face for Judith Stein. She travelled to Birmingham, Alabama to conduct research on a crippled steel industry (she doesn’t tell us when; sometime in the 1990s, evidently). The Birmingham USX facility had employed 27,000 workers during World War II to, and had shriveled to 2,400 when she arrived. Her cab driver was a 19- to 20-year-old black man whose father held a good job at the plant. But the son could not get on at the mill and did piece work at low wages while he hoped for an opening. Her cab ride told her that her young driver was “intelligent and hard-working” and a young man who “possessed the values of his family,” and he “deserves a better future.” A job in steel, presumably. Why does he not have that high-paying job? Who or what fumbled away that young man’s future? Stein sensed, plausibly, that pursuing that question required the fusion of two fields of historical study that had been artificially and regrettably separated—civil rights and economic policy and history. Joining them might produce a “new narrative,” and an answer to the question about her driver. It certainly did produce an impressively researched book which indicts public policy for the sad fate of both steel and blacks like the taxi driver, policy conceived for the most part under Democratic presidents. Running Steel, Running America is built around the belief that governments have great capacity to do good, especially economic good. Since decent job opportunities as ladders of opportunity are within the national government’s power to deliver or maintain in place, lesser outcomes were the government’s fault. The book documents the default on that social responsibility, anchored in the author’s intimate familiarity with the evolution of the steel industry since World War II. Reading such a book in the late 1990s involves not just a trip to Birmingham and Sparrow’s Point and other places that make steel; it also has the feel of a trip back to the sixties. The New Left lives! The Liberals are responsible. [End Page 497] On closer examination, the author’s viewpoint is decidedly nineties. She sees good outcomes snatched from history by governmental policy, crushing the hopes of individuals and communities. And she has an explanation for it. To the New Left, the liberals bungled things because they were not staunch socialists. Here, liberal administrations, dutifully followed by the Republicans when they took a turn, sacrificed both steel and black (and white) workers on the alter of foreign economic policy—the religion of free trade, in the form of head-in-the-sand, foreigner-favoring, import-enhancing foreign economic policy. Pat Buchanan lives! Her topic is post-World War II U.S. industrial policy toward the nation’s crown jewel heavy industry, steel. To this she attaches a sort of parallel story of race relations and civil rights. The book begins in the 1950s, when two adverse developments turned big steel into a beleaguered, declining industry—hostile government policy arising from Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson’s suspicion that oligopolistic steel (the industry) was a main cause of inflation, and import competition deriving from the expansion of steel capacity abroad. (I would have reversed these two causes of steel’s troubles and added managerial mistakes and inflexible labor costs due to the behavior of the unions, but Stein’s causation is external, nine parts federal government and one part foreign competition.) Quickly moving to the sixties, Stein traces the civil rights movement in Alabama with occasional references to the Fairfield plant, the two topics—steel and race—more side by side than intertwined. An intricate discussion of the evolution of civil rights policy affecting black employment, and the emergence of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a prelude to a narrative of job discrimination complaints and politics...

Segregation and Black and Hispanic Group Outcomes

This research uses Black and Hispanic employment on large-city police forces to explore the relative efficacy of two competing hypotheses on the potential effect of residential segregation on minority-group outcomes. The latent-need hypothesis postulates that Blacks and Hispanics would fare better in more segregated communities because Black and Hispanic personnel are needed to police “their” own neighborhoods. Alternatively, the discrimination hypothesis contends that, ceteris paribus, the extent of residential segregation is an indicator of community-level intolerance and expects that more segregated communities would present Blacks and Hispanics with fewer opportunities in policing. The analysis indicates that the discrimination imperative is germane for Blacks. However, residential segregation is of no significant consequence for Hispanics.

Spatial Job Search, Spatial Mismatch, and the Employment and Wages of Racial and Ethnic Groups in Los Angeles

This article examines racial/ethnic differences in geographic job search behavior and the differential effects that this search has on groups' employment and wages in Los Angeles. Using data from the 1994 Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality (LASUI), the results indicate that, controlling for relevant characteristics, blacks, and on certain dimensions Latinos, extensively spatial job search to a greater degree than whites as measured by the number of areas searched. Moreover, this extensive spatial job is found to positively affect the employment of blacks and the wages of Latinos. Simulations show that increasing blacks' and Latinos' access to cars or decreasing their average distance to search areas will lead to greater geographic job search. In turn, this greater extensive spatial job search will lead to greater employment and wages for these groups, respectively. However, the gains in blacks' employment from increased extensive spatial job search are small in magnitude. These results are consistent with spatial mismatch.

Black Male Employment and Tight Labor Markets

Black Male Employment and Tight Labor Markets

“A Piece of the PIE” and More

Further diversification of local police forces is essential in any systematic response to current difficulties in police-minority relations. The authors explore the relevance of out-and intragroup competition on Hispanic employment—one dimension of police diversification. The results indicate that competition is relevant in any dialogue on evolving ethnically diverse police forces or on increasing the role of Hispanic women. Black employment casts a negative influence on Hispanic employment generally, and that negative influence extends to Hispanic males and females separately. Generally, white females compete with Hispanics, particularly in minority Hispanic cities. Within Hispanic groups, the successes of Hispanic males and Hispanic females are zero-sum.

Zone is Where the Heart is? Lessons from Detroit Employers

The author asked case-matched Black and White Detroit employers about their location and how they think customers and other outsiders view the city of Detroit. Nearly all of the city-based employers indicated that land and operating costs in the city of Detroit were lower than in the surrounding suburbs—even without incentives. Both Black and White employers also stated that Detroit was perceived as unsafe and forbidding by customers and outsiders. However, only Black employers felt that the lower costs associated with a Detroit location, sometimes coupled with their community goals, outweighed the perceived costs of this city's negative image. The author discusses the policy implications of these findings in the context of "place"-based incentives, such as enterprise zones and related economic development programs.

Employer Skill Demands and Labor Market Outcomes of Blacks and Women

The author uses data from a 1992–94 survey of employers in four metropolitan areas to investigate the effects of skill demands, as measured by hiring requirements and job tasks, on the wages and employment of newly hired workers. Skill demands were generally associated with lower employment of blacks than whites, and with higher employment of women than men. Most tasks and requirements had statistically significant positive effects on starting hourly wages. Together, these effects help to account for some of the differences between the hourly wages of white and black men, and for some of the trends over time in the relative wages and employment of race and gender groups.

The other Reason Job Suburbanization Hurts Blacks

Data are presented on the racial composition of employment in census tracts for Detroit and Atlanta, showing that employment in the central cities is disproportionately black, and employment in the suburbs is disproportionately white. It is argued that this urban-suburban contrast is explained by the concentration of black employment in predominantly black neighborhoods. Physical proximity to black workers and human capital considerations can account for a small percentage of this relationship. However, even after controlling for these factors, the effect of neighborhood racial composition on the percentage black of employment is quite substantial. These findings suggest that the suburbanization of work may adversely affect black employment, not so much by moving jobs outside of their feasible commuting range but by shifting jobs to areas of the city where black workers are at a higher risk of discrimination.

African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets.

This collective portrait documents the disproportionate vulnerability of African Americans to the ongoing transformations of the U.S. economy from industrial to service areas as the twenty-first century approaches. chapters have been previously published in Review of Political Economy between 1991 and 1996. This volume represents one of the best sources of up-to-date perspectives on the circumstances facing African Americans in post-industrial labor markets. African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets is divided into seven sections: The Intersection of Race, Power, Culture, and Economic Discrimination, Black-White Wage Differentials, Occupational Crowding, Black Women in the Labor Market, Structural Unemployment and Job Displacement, Sectoral Analyses, and Strategies to Increase Employment. authors discuss such topics as: the impact of the general status of race relations on labor markets; increasing access to higher-paying occupations; the relationship between occupational segregation and local labor market dynamics; and the earnings of black women compared to white women and black and white men. chapters are connected by a common theme: black employment is highly sensitive to changes in both aggregate and local economic conditions. As a result, policy changes designed to promote macro-level economic stabilization could well have the unintended effect of further increasing job instability among blacks. African Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets is a momentous compendium and should be read by economists, African American studies scholars, sociologists, and professionals in the business world.

Interfirm Segregation and the Black/White Wage Gap

This article studies interfirm racial segregation in two newly developed firm‐level databases. We find that the interfirm distribution of black and white workers is close to what would be implied by random assignment. We also find that black workers are clustered in employers where managers, owners, and customers are also black. These findings may be reconciled by the facts that (a) there are not enough black employers to generate much segregation and that (b) other forces may systematically integrate black and white workers. Finally, we find that the black/white wage gap is primarily a within‐firm phenomenon.

The Role of Residential Location in Conditioning the Effect of Metropolitan Economic Structure on Male Youth Employment

Youths have increasingly experienced labor market problems over the last several decades. One fruitful line of explanation focuses on structural changes in the demand for labor stemming from deindustrialization, changing skill requirements for employees, and increasing supply competition from women and recent immigrants. While these explanations merit attention, they have not adequately considered facts that condition their impact. This paper considers the argument that intra-metropolitan residential location conditions the effects of metropolitan labor market structure on black and white male youths' employment probabilities. Using a sample of individual-level data drawn from the 1990 census combined with metropolitan-level indicators of economic structure, it was found that some structural effects varied between central-city and suburban male youths. The conditioning role of residential location, and the subsequent nature of the structural effects, varied considerably between black and white male youths. Interpretations of the conditioning role of residential location include a variety of social and institutional effects on individual residents and the stigmatizing effects of some neighborhoods, especially on black male youths.

Black/Immigrant Competition Re-Assessed: New Evidence from Los Angeles

This paper reports on a survey of employers to assess the impact of immigration and employer practices on black employment chances in Los Angeles. We observe a process of cumulative causation in which a set of mutually reinforcing changes raise barriers to the hiring of blacks. Network hiring seems to have a dual function, bringing immigrant communities into the workplace, while at the same time detaching vacancies from the open market, thus diminishing opportunities for blacks. Employers also perceive immigrants as far more desirable employees than blacks, in part, because they expect that immigrants will be the more productive workers, in part, because they also see immigrants as more tractable labor. Any managerial propensity to favor immigrants is likely to be reinforced by the attitudes of the predominantly Latino workforce, as inserting a black worker in a predominantly Latino crew is not a technique for increasing productivity, given the hostility between the two groups. And African-Americans seem to play their own role in this process, apparently opting out of the low-level labor market in response to rising expectations, on the one hand, and the anticipation of employment difficulties on the other.

Barriers to a Better Break: Employer Discrimination and Spatial Mismatch in Metropolitan Detroit

ABSTRACT:This article discusses key findings from a survey-based employer study designed to evaluate the relative merit of race, space, and skill-based explanations for growing wage and employment gaps between blacks and whites. The author found that black employers hired a greater percentage of black workers for their firms than white employers matched on the basis of firm size, location, and product produced, but black-owned firms paid lower wages, even though there seemed to be no major differences in skills required for the jobs studied. However, suburban black-owned firms, as well as white-owned firms with strongly enforced anti-discrimination programs, hired much higher percentages of black workers than white-owned firms that did not have such programs. The author presents the findings of disparate wages paid to workers in black- and white-owned firms in the context of the spatial mismatch literature.

NATIVITY, ETHNICITY, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE INTRAURBAN DIVISION OF LABOR IN METROPOLITAN LOS ANGELES, 1970-19901

This paper examines how different groups fit into the Los Angeles economy. We systematically analyze change in the employment patterns in 20 different sectors for 1970, 1980, and 1990 for the three largest native-born ethnic groups (Whites, African Americans, and Hispanics) and the two largest foreign-born subpopulations (Hispanics and Asians). Given the size of the foreign-born population in Los Angeles and their concentration in low-wage jobs, we pay particular attention to shifts in the sectoral allocation of working immigrants and native-born Blacks and Hispanics. Our application of shift-share analysis to decompose employment change by sector by ethnic group reveals that in the expanding Los Angeles job market of the 1970s and 1980s, immigrants experienced major job gains-both relatively and absolutely. Native-born Whites gained absolutely in several sectors, but at a rate below that of growth in total employment, and thus became a proportionately smaller fraction of the work force. African Americans experienced complex labor-market outcomes. We show that the African American labor force grew faster than total regional employment in the 1970s, and that they held labor-market comparative advantage in several important sectors. In the 1980s, this position switched to one of comparative disadvantage throughout most of the economy as native Black employment grew more slowly than the region's total labor force. Native-born Hispanics also lost labor-market comparative advantage as their employment growth also dipped below the regional growth rate in the 1980s. The results suggest that both nativity and ethnicity are important elements in the intraurban division of labor in Los Angeles and that the articulation of these elements may be shifting in response to persistent immigration. These outcomes have relevance to the important debates on urban restructuring, the so-called urban underclass, and immigration policy.

BLACKS AND THE CONTINUING QUEST FOR EQUAL EMPLOYMENT IN SIX FLORIDA COMMUNITIES

One of the anticipated results of the civil rights movement in the South was increased economic opportunity for blacks. Yet, little is known about contemporary black employment in the South and the factors related to it. This study is a longitudinal examination of this issue in six carefully selected Florida communities which highlights the relative importance of political and community contextual variables in the hiring of blacks. The results suggest that black resource variables (black population and applicants) are significant in the private sector employment of blacks while political variables are less important today than in the 1970s.

Black and white college women's maternal employment outcome expectations and their desired timing of maternal employment

In an attempt to better understand college women's maternal employment plans, this study compared the ability of different types of maternal employment outcome expectations to predict college women's desired timing of their maternal employment. A mailed questionnaire examined Black (n= 113) and White (n= 189) college women's maternal employment timing preference and their perceptions of the likelihood of 30 possible outcomes of maternal employment. Regressions showed that White women's expectations about the benefits for themselves and the costs for their children predicted their desired maternal employment timing. No variables predicted the timing preference of Black women. Additionally, the Black compared to White respondents expected maternal employment would bring fewer personal costs and more benefits for their children and they desired employment earlier in their child's life. Discussion focuses on Black and White women's conceptions of the integration of the employment and domestic roles.

THE SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF BLACK EMPLOYMENT BETWEEN THE CENTRAL CITY AND THE SUBURBS

The share of fast food restaurant jobs held by blacks is smaller in the suburbs than in the central city. This is of interest because expected wages are higher in the suburbs. Estimating a model of the racial composition of the restaurant's workforce, we find that 36 percent of the difference in black employment share between central city and suburban firms is attributable to the fact that suburban firms are less frequently served by public transit. City/suburban differences in the race of managers and customers also play an important role, accounting for 29 percent of the difference.

The Sunshine Factor: Freedom of Information Act Reveals Black Faculty and Administrative Employment Statistics at Major U.S. Universities

The Sunshine Factor: Freedom of Information Act Reveals Black Faculty and Administrative Employment Statistics at Major U.S. Universities

Black/White Differences in Schooling and Employment

This paper investigates the extent to which academic preparation, the structure of labor market opportunities, and exposure to nonmarket income alternatives explain race and gender differences in schooling and employment. Despite lower overall high school continuation and college attendance rates, Black men and women in the High School and Beyond Longitudinal Survey were actually more likely to continue high school and attend college than Whites with similar mathematics and verbal test scores. In contrast, Black school leavers had far lower employment rates than Whites with similar test scores. Multinomial logit estimates show that fewer job opportunities for Blacks offer a partial explanation for the observed patterns of schooling and employment. There is little or no evidence, however, that community crime and welfare recipiency rates affected the probability of employment for Blacks or Whites.