Since time immemorial, equality has been at the helm of every African- American national’s dream. With hundreds of protests and revolts ravaging through their hearts and efforts, even in today’s 21st century, this dream remains far from realised. Built on the exploitation and occupational segregation of people of colour, the U.S. economy has witnessed stark inequality when it comes to the wages and incomes of the white and black people.
Discrimination can be of many kinds. For example, discrimination on grounds of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc. In this article, we focus on discrimination in labour markets where workers with similar skill levels receive different wages owing to the varying skin colour, i.e. white or black.
Blacks in the United States, have experienced harsh labour market discrimination during much of twentieth century and it still continues today. Until the commencement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was legal to not hire a black worker irrespective of the skills, i.e., experience, educational qualifications, etc. A few studies have shown that 1964 was responsible for the narrowing of this wage gap in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. For example, the ratio of the earnings of black male employees to that of their white counterparts had increased from 62% in 1964 to 75.3% in 2013 (Source: Bureau of Labour Statistics). Over the years, although the wage differential between the black and white workers have not changed, the latter group continues to earn much more than the former.
Figure 1 shows the median income that the different categories of workers earn in a weak. It is evident from the graph that it is the black women who are the worst affected by the discriminatory practices. While both men and women of the white category earn more than the blacks, white men earn substantially higher than any other category, giving them an unprecedented economic advantage over the others. Figure 2, therefore, compares the wages of black men and women with that their white male counterparts. It can be inferred from the same that even though the wage differential has not changed much over the past 20 years, it remains at a significantly high level. As of the first quarter of 2020, white men continue to earn 29% higher than black men, 39% higher than black females and 35% higher than the entire black population. These numbers stand higher than the end of 2003 where the wage differential stood at 26%, 37% and 33% for the aforementioned groups, respectively.
Figure 1: Median Usual Weakly Earnings (in USD)
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics
Figure 2: Wage Differential (in %)
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics
So why does this kind of discrimination occur? Is there an external factor contributing to it? Like intentional government policies or economic behaviour. Research shows that there are four primary reasons behind the racial discrimination in the labour market:
The Competitive Markets and Societal Norms
Gary Becker (1930), a Nobel Laureate was amongst the first to analyse the economics behind discrimination. According to him, discrimination by a firm situated in a locality with a large minority population can lead to reduction in its own profits. For example, if a bigoted owner of a firm refuses to pay the blacks as per their productivity, then these workers would leave and other profit seeking employers would hire them. Therefore, in a competitive market, employers who are more affectionate towards the colour of money than that of the skin will have an incentive to take decisions pertaining to buying, selling and hiring, solely on the basis of the economic factors.
However, Figure 3 shows us that this is not the truth. In America, none of the workers are paid incomes equivalent to their productivity. However, the black men and women are paid significantly lesser than their white counterparts. In 2015, when the overall labour productivity increased by 62.7% in America, black men witnessed a 7.2% decline in their median hourly wage and black women experienced a mere 12.8% rise in the same. The rising gap between the growth rate of wages and productivity of the workers is a testimony of this fact and represents a flaw in the above given logic.
Figure 3: Wage Growth vs Productivity Growth
Source: EPI analysis of unpublished Total Economy Productivity data from Bureau of Labour Statistics
Gary, B. (1930) rationalizes the above fact by arguing that market forces are not powerful enough to bring forth a change in the societal norms. These discriminatory practises can emerge at various levels, i.e., among managers, workers or even the customers. For example, if a manager, who believes in the equal opportunities and is personally not prejudiced but has workers or customers who consider the blacks as “inferior”, then his fair practises might lead to either a refusal to buy the firm’s products from the customers or a unionization and/ or resignations from his workers. These would eventually lead to losses for the firm, thereby, compelling the manager to practise discriminatory laws against the black workers. Therefore, even the competitive market forces urge the firms to follow non-discriminatory practices, the societal norms act as a barrier to it.
Level of Education
Existing research also focuses on the differences in the level of education between the Black and White population as a reason for this existing wage differences. Table 1 shows the proportion of the respective category that has completed High School or a Bachelor’s degree. As is evident, the data shows that in 2019, while 89.5% of white men completed high school, only 85.3% of black men graduated from the same. Similarly, 3.3% fewer black women completed their high school as compared to their white counterpart. Furthermore, the numbers fall by a greater amount when we look at completion rates for “Bachelor’s degree or higher”, where as compared to 33.5% of white men, only 19.5% of black males completed the given level of education. Therefore, lower levels education of the black workers, in part, explains the concurrent wage differential.
Table 1: Proportion of Students Completing the Level of Education
White | Black | |||
| Male | Female | Male | Female |
High School Graduate | 89.50% | 90.80% | 85.30% | 87.50% |
Bachelor's degree or Higher | 33.50% | 34.30% | 19.10% | 24.50% |
Source: United States Census Bureau
Government Policies
The black people in the U.S. were forced to work as slaves for a very long period of time. During this, they were given no choice but to work in brutal conditions as workers in the agricultural fields, domestic servants and petty daily bread earners. As per studies, some slaveholders made the blacks do work worth $14 trillion (in today’s dollar). These enslaved people cooked and served food, ploughed and sowed fields, cleaned houses, harvested and packaged crops. They also raised, milked and butchered livestock, carried luggage, cut hair and provided child care services. When these slaves tried to run away, the U.S. federal laws such as the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 helped ensured that they were recaptured by imprisoning anyone who aided in their escape or fining police officials who failed to arrest alleged runaways.
Although slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863, all occupations were not made open to the Black workers. On the other hand, officials of the Freedman’s Bureau encouraged Black workers to remain in the same occupation that they were carrying out as slaves. Ironically, this is the same organisation that was vested with the power to help the formerly enslaved black workers attain freedom.
Moreover, these efforts to occupationally marginalise the Black workers was enhanced via the enactment of the Jim Crow laws that led to the codification of the role of Black people in the Southern economy and society. For example, if the Black people worked in any occupation other than domestic servitude or farming, they were strictly penalized in states like Southern Carolina. Furthermore, if the black people abandoned the signed labour contract or broke any rules, there were arrested and due to a loophole in the 13th Amendment, sent back to unpaid labour on plantations owned by the whites. Even certain emigrant-agent laws were implemented to prevent the inter state movement of the black workers and prohibited recruiters from posting advertisements in communities dominated by the Black population.
These were aggravated by the technological advancements in the mid- twentieth century which led to reduced demand for farm labour and domestic work in the southern U.S. This caused a rapid reduction of Black workers in U.S. farms and domestic environment and a simultaneous concentration of the same group in low- wage service jobs such as sewing machine operators, barbers, taxi drivers and chauffeurs, etc. Sequentially, the devaluation of domestic and agricultural jobs and the simultaneous need for cheap labour, resulted in the rising employment of African American and Latinx workers in agriculture and household services. Surprisingly, this trend continues its persistence till date.
Therefore, a few economic changes combined with the government polices led to concentration of Black workers in certain low paying jobs. This is evident from figure 4. While Asian, Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino, comprise 36% of the U.S. workforce, they account for 58% of miscellaneous agricultural workers, 74% of baggage porters, bellhops and concierges and 70% of maids and housekeeping cleaners. Further, figure 5 shows the annual median wage by occupation for the year 2018. These are the occupations that have majority workers of Black skin colour. The graph is a testimony of the fact that the employment opportunities available to the unfortunate minority group has very less pay as compared to other occupations. For example, where all the other occupations had a median annual salary of $38640, food servers earned only $23290 in 2018. The Jim Crow rules and slavery devalued these occupations and pain of which is still born by these minority groups.
Figure 4: Overrepresentation of People of Colour in Some of the Lowest Paying Jobs
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics
Figure 5: Less Pay for Jobs Occupied by Coloured People
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics
Underfunding of Anti-discrimination agencies
The Black activists in the U.S. earned a landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. This created several federal agencies disbursed with the authority to penalize people and institutions that practised discriminatory laws. Although, these new laws marked for a turning point in the history of ethnic and racial discrimination, these organisations were never truly funded to be able to implement their strategies to the full extent. For example, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created in 1965 to enforce all rules and regulations that prohibited discriminating job applicants and existing employees on the basis of colour, race, sex, religion, genetic information, age, national origin or disability. Although, the organisation receives thousands of complaints every year, due to insufficient funds and number of staff members, it fails to help the victims. Figure 6 shows that while the U.S. population grew by 44% from 227 million to 327 million between 1980 and mid-2018, the EEOC’s inflation adjusted budget fell from $412.1 million to $379.5 million in the same time period. Furthermore, even the number of EEOC employees saw a decline of 1422 people.
Figure 6: EEOC Reduced Budget
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
As a result of the aforementioned reasons, innumerable workers of colour continue to be victims of racial discrimination and poor employment and wages. While the Congress should expand the budget of the various anti-discriminatory agencies, the federal government should not be standing alone in this fight against racism. The states in the U.S. have enough resources required to curb such practices, nonetheless, almost all of them fail to do so. The top 10 states with the highest black population, such as South Carolina, Maryland, Mississippi, Alabama, etc., fail to provide even 70 cents per resident towards the enforcement of non-discriminatory practices.
Conclusion
Racial discrimination in the workplace has led to the existence of stark inequalities in the economic well-being for people of different colours in the U.S. Eradicating these malpractices would require structural, long-term and targeted interventions on behalf of the state to ensure equality of economic opportunity.
At the onset, the U.S. government should reserve seats in the various governing bodies so that the people of colour have a fair representation in the executive and legislative organisations. Further, lawmakers must defend the rights of the workers by repealing the “right-to-work” laws and by suspending exclusions from the federal labour protections, permanently. Employment protections by eliminating all exemptions given to the employer from anti-discriminatory laws should be given and the resource allocation, both monetary and human, should be increased substantially for the anti-discriminatory agencies. Additionally, at the grassroot level, the education system should inculcate in the students the importance of the right to equal opportunity and the moral and ethical rationale behind anti-discriminatory practices alongside a federal program structured to help the labours of colour enter industries from which they have been historically included.
The rights denied to the minority black population in the United States depicts a very melancholic situation that the humanity is suffering from. Exclusion from things due to a reason which was not in the hands of the victims is parallel to the inhuman acts of even genocide. Amongst the innumerable problems that we suffer through, racial discrimination is at the helm of a bubble that is about to burst. With the unfortunate death of George Floyd and the uprising of protests all over the globe in favour of “Black Lives Matter”, the movement to end such practices is at its peak. Although, the aforementioned steps are not the panacea of success, they will definitely be the first steps towards a dream that has been in the hearts of millions of people throughout the world. As Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, it is our responsibility to imbibe the values that presents each fellow citizen, equal rights and opportunities, irrespective of the colour of the skin.
Comentários