JOB QUALITY AND BLACK WORKERS

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Cover photo by Steve Cagan

The Center for Labor Research and Education, UC Berkeley is an affiliate of the University of California Miguel Contreras Labor Program

This research was funded by grants received from the Akonadi Foundation and the Arca Foundation. The project was completed with the assistance of Hannah Betesh and Ginny Fang.

INTRODUCTION:

Since the end of slavery, visionaries within the Black community, including Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson, have led a freedom movement with the dual objectives of eliminating racial inequality and improving the quality of life for Blacks in the United States. Beginning in the mid-1950s with the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this struggle took the form of the modern civil rights movement. The activities of millions of people in that movement brought about the end ofde jure segregation in the United States and opened up new opportunities for African Americans. The hope was that the end of legal barriers to advancement and the enactment of policies to redress historic racial injustices would result in a qualitative change in life out-comes for Blacks in this country.

Thirty-five years have passed since the victories of the modern civil rights movement, and we have entered into a new era, one marked by a radically different global economic and political context. This report, “Job Quality and Black Workers: An Examination of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York,” looks at one sphere of Black life, the labor market,and takes stock of the realities for Black workers in the context of 21st century globalization. It presents a detailed view of the Black workforce with a focus on the incidence of low-wage work. To the extent African Americans experience a high incidence of low-wage work and many of these jobs will exist in the near-term future, this situation speaks to the need for renewed efforts at transforming the low-wage labor market in order to improve the opportunities available to Black workers.

The research presented in this report lead to three important conclusions. First, the Black community in the United States faces a two-dimensional crisis concerning employment: the crisis of unemployment and the crisis of low-wage jobs. The crisis of unemployment is the typical face of the jobs problem among African Americans. In the popular media, the unemployment crisis is captured by scenes of approximately 11,000 applicants, largely Black and Latino, lining up for 400 vacancies at an Oakland Wal-Mart. However, this scene portrays only one part of the employment dilemma facing African Americans. The other serious problem is the crisis of low-wage jobs held by Blacks who have employment. Too many African Americans work at jobs that do not provide wages (and benefits) to properly raise a family. The purpose of this research project is to gain a deeper understanding of the fate of Blacks who have jobs.

The inattention to the crisis of low-wage jobs reflects the invisibility of the Black working poor. This invisibility is startling given that every day Blacks go to work. They drive buses throughout U.S. cities. They work in schools as teachers, clerical staff, and maintenance workers. They care for small children, disabled adults and the elderly. Some Blacks repair electrical lines or work in hospitals. Blacks unload the ships at our ports and move containers to inland warehouses. Others drive trucks carrying goods from these warehouses to the stores in which we shop. Some Blacks ring up sales in these stores while others provide security at these stores and office buildings. Black people work.

However, many of these jobs are bad jobs that do not allow for a decent quality of life. The jobs don’t pay well. They don’t provide retirement and health benefits. The jobs are “dead-end” jobs inasmuch as they do not link to better jobs either within the firm or at other businesses. Many of the jobs held by Black workers don’t provide on-the-job protection from employers’ arbitrary decisions: a protection that comes from the presence of a union. As a result, many workers are forced to work multiple jobs in order to buy essential goods and services. Others are forced to choose between food and prescription drugs, between gasoline and decent child care, or between decent housing and college for their kids. The living standards for these workers and their families suffer as a result.

A second key conclusion of the research is that the incidence of low-wage Black employment is concentrated in certain key industry sectors. Among all Black workers, 56.5% work for low-wages; however, the four sectors where the percentage of low-wage Black employment exceeds 60%, Retail Trade; Health Care and Social Assistance; Leisure and Hospitality; and Other Services, contain approximately one-third of all Black workers. Thus, any set of strategies which seek to improve job quality for Black workers must address these sectors which hire a significant number of Black workers and pay poorly.

Finally, the research begins to outline how new global economic realities are having an impact on future employment prospects for Black workers. In contrast to popular perception, these realities go beyond job flight from the United States offshoring, to encompass the expansion of industries that are more rooted in this country. Data reveals that Blacks have a significant presence in those industries which are more place-based with less vulnerability to offshoring. Many of these same industries have been projected as growth industries and many employ high numbers of low-wage Black workers. These facts imply that strategies to address the job crisis must look at these industries which will do well in the new global economy and find ways to transform the job quality in these industries. Simply relying on job training programs to address the crisis surrounding employment outcomes will miss a significant portion of the crisis.

These conclusions point to the need for a multi-faceted approach to solve the job crisis in the Black community: an approach which addresses the issue of low-wage work, the issue of unemployment, and the need for regional economic development policies while simultaneously seeking economic growth and equity. Fighting the crisis of unemployment requires substantive programs which lower the barriers to job access. These barriers are individual and structural, and both types of barriers must be attacked in order to expand employment opportunities. However, programs designed to increase employment opportunities for African Americans will have limited value on the scale which is needed if a large portion of jobs which are created are low-wage jobs. These low-wage jobs need to be transformed into better quality jobs. Thus, the fight for job access must be intertwined with the fight for job transformation. The neglect of the plight of the Black working poor and the exclusive focus on the plight of the Black jobless frames issues and shifts resources into a search for any job regardless of the quality of that job. Some community advocates, citing the need for jobs and retail shopping opportunities, support economic development plans which target the retail sector in an attempt to either revitalize downtown districts or generate tax revenue. However, the entry of stores such as Wal-Mart results in employment at low wages with little or no benefits. Thus, the presence of Wal-Mart in central city communities reflects a perceived Hobson’s Choice between no jobs or low-wage jobs.

The dilemma of no jobs or low-wage jobs reflects the dominance of “low road” economic development policies. These policies seek to attract businesses to regions and cities regardless of the quality of jobs they offer residents. When jurisdictions travel the “low road,” they follow a path that fosters intense competition between cities for tax bases and a vicious race to the bottom: local governments offer higher and higher subsidies that actually lower the net benefits of the firm’s presence in a region. The proliferation of these policies has created an atmosphere such that any efforts to mitigate the negative impacts of new firms or create labor standards are decried by many local leaders as antithetical to the economic health of the region. The path of “low road” economic development assists in the growth of a low-wage economy. What is needed is to go “beyond Wal-Mart” to identify public policies that raise labor standards and transform bad jobs as well as reduce the high levels of unemployment.

Such new public policies would attempt to block the low-road path toward economic development, while simultaneously building a high road alternative. They would include minimum wage, living wage, and industry wage laws that establish wage floors in regional labor markets. They would include “clawback” policies so that any firms receiving government subsidies would be required to return a portion or all of these benefits if they did not fulfill promises surrounding job creation. They would include community benefits agreements designed to ensure that low-income neighborhoods and their residents benefit from economic developent. They would include linked workforce and economic development programs with incentives to place local residents on pathways to well-paying jobs and that seek to develop those sectors of the local economy which provide a possibility for decent jobs. The net result of these policies would be a regional economy that grows and is equitable.

What is also needed are policies designed to empower poor communities and their residents in economic decision-making. Public policies are a result of political compromise and relative political power; if poor communities do not have substantial power, local economic development policies will generate few gains for poor people. Foremost are policies that will allow workers to organize on their own behalf without the interference of employers. Union representation is an indispensable weapon for low-wage workers who seek to raise the quality of the jobs they hold. However, in the past thirty years, the right to organize has been under attack as deliberate efforts by businesses combined with government regulatory neglect and rapid changes in the structure of the economy have resulted in lowest levels of unionization since the Great Depression. The impact of the loss of effective workplace collective action includes lower living standards and the loss of dignity on the job.

Chapter Two of this report presents the key terms used throughout this report. It then presents a portrait of the Black working age population in 2000. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the prevalence of low-wage jobs among Black workers. Chapter Three looks at the industrial distribution of Black workers and finds industry sectors with significant concentrations of Black workers. In addition, many industry sectors have high proportions of low-wage workers among their Black workforce. The chapter takes a closer look at the retail industry because of recent highly charged racialized debates that have pitted advocates of stronger labor standards against advocates of unfettered retail economic development. Chapter Four places the issue of Black workers and job quality in the context of globalization and finds that large numbers of low-wage Black workers are in industries that do not face an immediate threat of offshoring. Chapter Five summarizes these findings and presents research and policy recommendations.

LOW-WAGE EMPLOYMENT AND BLACK WORKERS

This chapter presents basic data on the incidence of low-wage work in the Black working-age population.v It begins by defining the key terms used throughout this report and proceeds to an overview of the Black working-age population in the United States as a nation and then in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. It then presents data on the persistence of low-wage work among Black workers. The data indicates that low-wage workers are a significant portion of Black population between 18 and 65 years of age. In addition, narrowing the analysis to those members of the Black working age population who work, a high percentage of Black workers receive low wages. Finally, in contrast to many popular pronouncements that present low-wage work as a part-time phenomenon, a large segment of the low-wage Black workforce works full-time.

Some key findings in this chapter are:

This report expands on previous research done on the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan area, by exploring the incidence of low-wage work among Black workers in the Los Angeles, Chicago and New York metropolitan areas. These metropolitan areas were chosen because they represent the three largest concentrations of Blacks in the United States. Chart 2.1 presents the county definitions of the targeted metropolitan areas. In addition to the information on the metropolitan areas, data is presented on the Black workers in the United States as a whole.

While this study focuses on Black workers, for purposes of comparison, data will be presented on other racial/ethnic groupings as well.