No Blacks Need Apply

This article at American Affairs puts a little academic heft behind a point I’ve been making here for some time to the effect that Hispanic workers, particularly immigrant Hispanic workers, are displacing blacks in the low wage workforce:

One of the first studies in this area reported by Skrentny, which was widely influential in galvanizing interest in on-the-ground research on low-wage employment, was published in the late 1980s by sociologists Joleen Kirschenman and Kathryn Neckerman.7 Working with the well-known sociologist William Julius Wilson, they conducted and reported on interviews with hundreds of Chicago-area employers and managers. When assured of anonymity, those in charge repeatedly bemoaned the poor quality of the native workforce, especially blacks. What emerges clearly from their research is employers’ uniform preference for Hispanic and Asian immigrants, as well as praise for the work habits of those groups as compared to native workers.

That hierarchy was confirmed by a wealth of interviews conducted in the Chicago area a few years later as part of the massive Urban Poverty and Family Life Study (UPFLS). As reported in William Julius Wilson’s book When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Knopf, 1996), the study, which was specifically focused on the employment prospects of inner-city blacks, repeated the patterns revealed in the ground-breaking Kirschenman and Neckerman article. When asked to comment on the job skills, attitude, work ethic, interpersonal skills, or dependability of black workers as compared to other categories, including immigrant laborers from different groups, the great majority of managers and supervisors interviewed—126 of the 170—expressed their belief that inner-city blacks brought traits to the workplace that negatively affected their job performance. Many complained that blacks, as well as other native American workers, had a poor work ethic compared to recent immigrants, and especially Hispanics and Asians. Native-born workers, black and white, were also perceived to be less cooperative, more demanding, and more entitled. A hotel manager stated, “I see far more blacks thinking the employer has the obligation to give him a check for doing nothing. There are some whites that think that way. . . . Not so much Hispanics.”

When I was in the low wage workforce, admittedly many years ago, there were no harder or more conscientious workers than blacks. Maybe things have changed. Or maybe some combination of bigotry, stereotypes, lack of understanding of the social affect of blacks, and that Hispanics are reluctant to organize for higher pay or better conditions has impelled employers to prefer them.