Race and Jobs: People of Color Disproportionately Don’t Have Access to Good Jobs

Posted on November 22, 2009

In the midst of the lingering economic crisis, we should not just look at how many people are not working who want to, but we also need to look at the quality of the jobs. The Economic Policy Institute just released a study on how people of color fare in accessing good jobs. The answer is not pretty. Here’s their paper’s opening statement:

“The lack of “good” jobs is a serious problem for all Americans and an especially dire problem for America’s people of color. The current recession has highlighted overall job loss and the need for robust job creation; however, we must also look at the quality of those jobs. The United States has too few good jobs, and the share has been declining over time. A recovery that creates millions of low-wage, no-benefit jobs is not a real recovery at all.

“This Briefing Paper uses a minimal definition of a “good” job. It defines a good job as one that pays a wage that can support a family and that provides health care and retirement benefits. Using this minimal standard, the paper shows that Hispanics are less than half as likely as whites to have good jobs, and African Americans are about two-thirds as likely. When comparing workers of the same educational level, whites are also more likely to have good jobs than Asian Americans. The large share of college graduates among Asian Americans, however, hides their disadvantage when one examines the group as a whole. Generally, people of color have less access than whites to quality jobs.”

About Andrés

Andrés Tapia is President of Diversity Best Practices, the preeminent diversity and inclusion thinktank and consultancy. In this role, he helps companies create first-in-class diversity strategies and develop innovative solutions for culture change. Previously he served as Hewitt’s Chief Diversity Officer and Emerging Workforce Solutions Leader. As a published writer and prominent speaker, Andrés offers thought-provoking views about diversity’s impact around the world. He is the author of The Inclusion Paradox: The Obama Era and the Transformation of Global Diversity. Find his bio here.

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Comments

One Response to “Race and Jobs: People of Color Disproportionately Don’t Have Access to Good Jobs”

Curtis Edwards says:

November 24, 2009 at 11:26 AM

This article is particularly interesting in the sense that it so loosely defines a “good job.” With only those three requirements, one would assume that a more significant percentage of men would have good jobs, regardless of race or ethnicity.

With that aside, I wonder, are those three requirements the true definition of a “good job,” or does the notion of a “good job” culturally vary? Perhaps people of color emphasize other factors, such as proximity to home, work-hours, and other variables over health care and retirement. For example: take a look at the study that Hewitt and Ariel Investments published earlier this year on race and retirement contribution rates. The results disclose that there are significant differences in regards to contribution rates and race and ethnicity: perhaps there is a correlation between those results and this particular study.

Being an optimist, I can only hope that there are more individuals in culturally relative “good jobs” than this study shows.