[Recent research indicates little progress since the Truman
administration.] [[link removed]]

THE BLACK-WHITE WAGE GAP IS AS BIG AS IT WAS IN 1950  
[[link removed]]


 

David Leonhardt
June 25, 2020
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Recent research indicates little progress since the Truman
administration. _

, New York Times

 

That’s remarkable. Despite decades of political change — the end
of enforced segregation across the South, the legalization of
interracial marriage, the passage of multiple civil rights laws and
more — the wages of black men trail those of white men by as much as
when Harry Truman was president. That gap indicates that there have
also been powerful forces pushing against racial equality.

Before getting into the causes, though, I want to explain the
difference between the best-known wage statistics and the more
accurate version. The traditional numbers
[[link removed]] are
incomplete in a way that many people do not realize: They cover only
workers. People who don’t work are ignored. This group includes
students, full-time parents, people who have given up on finding work
and people who are incarcerated.

Excluding them wouldn’t present a problem if the percentage of
nonworkers had remained fairly stable over time. But it has not.
“There’s been a tremendous run-up in non-work among prime-age
men,” says Kerwin Kofi Charles, an economist and the dean of the
Yale School of Management.

One reason is that many middle-aged men — of all races, although
disproportionately black — have dropped out of the labor force, and
are neither working nor looking for work. The shrinking number of
decent-paying blue-collar jobs has left many people who didn’t
attend college without good job opportunities, and they have
responded by no longer actively looking for work
[[link removed]].

A second reason that more men aren’t working is that vastly more of
them are incarcerated
[[link removed]].
Incarceration rates are especially high for black men — about twice
as high as those of Hispanic men, six times higher than those of white
men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic
women or white women.

Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Texas, refers to
these incarcerated men as invisible. She has written a book
titled, “Invisible Men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black
progress.” [[link removed]]

Who’s Not Working?

People considered “unemployed” represent a small — and declining
— share of those out of work.

The traditional statistics on the black-white wage gap ignore these
trends, because they examine only people with earnings. As social
scientists put it, the traditional numbers ignore the “zero
values.”

This means that the statistics on the wage gap are looking at a
shrinking share of the population over time. They overlook the roughly
30 percent of black men and 15 percent of white men between the ages
of 25 and 54 who had not been working in a given week during recent
years. (Those shares are even higher now, given the economic
downturn.)

“It’s a weird hole,” Mr. Charles says.

He and another economist — Patrick Bayer of Duke — undertook a
research project to fill that hole
[[link removed]]. They
collected census data dating back to 1940 and constructed wage
statistics that included men who were not working. They are also
conducting a follow-up project about women, Mr. Bayer said. The gap
between black and white women may have narrowed, but only modestly.

The research by Mr. Charles and Mr. Bayer shows that once all men —
working and not working — are included, the picture changes:

The black-white wage gap shrunk substantially from 1950 to 1980, and
especially during the 1960s. Civil-rights laws and a decline in
legally sanctioned racism most likely played some role. But the main
reasons, Mr. Charles said, appear to have been trends that benefited
all blue-collar workers, like strong unions and a rising minimum wage.
Because black workers were disproportionately in blue-collar jobs, the
general rise of incomes for the poor and middle class shrank the
racial wage gap.

One law was especially important: the 1966 amendment
[[link removed]] to the Fair Labor
Standards Act. When Congress passed the original law, during the New
Deal, it deliberately exempted service and other industries with many
black workers from the minimum wage. “Just expanding the minimum
wage to those industries,” Ellora Derenoncourt, a University of
California, Berkeley, economist, said, “boosted the relative wages
of black workers substantially.”

Since 1980, however, the wage gap has increased again, and is now back
roughly to where it was in 1950. The same economic forces are at work,
only in the opposite direction: The minimum wage has stagnated in some
states, unions have shrunk, tax rates on the wealthy have fallen more
than they have for anyone else and incomes for the bottom 90 percent
— and especially the bottom half — have trailed economic growth
[[link removed]].
Black workers, again, are disproportionately in these lower-income
groups.

One nuance is that the racial wage gap has shrunk somewhat among
higher-income men. That’s a sign that more African-Americans have
broken into the upper middle class than was the case in prior decades:

This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing
the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would
policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged
racism
[[link removed]] —
especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a
bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class
families, across races.

“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have
jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most
egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been
almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”

_DAVID LEONHARDT writes The Morning, The Times's main daily
newsletter. Previously at The Times, he was the Washington bureau
chief, the founding editor of The Upshot, an Op-Ed columnist, and the
head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won
the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. @DLeonhardt
[[link removed]] • Facebook
[[link removed]]_

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]