Catching up: wages of black men

摘要

This is a summary of recent trends in the wages of African-American men (black men) relative to the wages of European-American men (white men). The 1960's and the early 1970's witnessed rapid improvement in the relative status of blacks, and the research that studied this trend tried to disentangle effects of antidiscrimination legislation and executive-branch edicts from responses to increasing educational levels and to the school-provided resources devoted to education. James P. Smith and I observed that, although the relative wages of blacks were increasing, there was little evidence of improvement within cohort; instead the gains were dominated by the labor-market arrival of cohorts who would do better than earlier arrivals, but not as well as those to follow (Smith and Welch, 1977, 1984, 1989). Furthermore, although there was clear evidence of employment shifts toward industries with concentrations of firms presumed to be more sensitive to affirmative-action pressures (industries with high proportions of employees in firms that were federal contractors and those with the larger firms required to report to EEOC), the wage gains were pervasive and not restricted to these industries. As such, we argued that improvements in the quantity and quality of schooling were more important than the legislation. As a counterpoint, James Heckinan and Brook Payner (1989) used case studies of firms to argue that legal sanctions against segregation and discrimination created opportunities for nondiscriminatory behavior by employers that make them less vulnerable to reactionary pressures from clients, patrons, and white employees.