Metropolitan Area Characteristics and the Persistence of White Advantage in U.S. Labor Markets

• In Event: 231 - Section on Sociology of Population Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Critical Social Issues

Abstract

There is a persistent and well-documented racial employment gap in the U.S. whereby White workers have had and continue to have odds of employment that are twice or more those of Black workers. Studies of such disparities often try to explain them by identifying individual attributes that contribute to group level differences in the odds of employment. In a rare departure from this approach, Samuel Cohn and Mark Fossett (1995) examined White and Black odds of employment across 99 U.S. metropolitan areas and sought to explain why the gaps were larger in some metropolitan areas and smaller in others by looking at the characteristics of metropolitan areas. They found that racial gaps were larger in the Northeast and Midwest and in metropolitan areas characterized by high rates of union membership, low rates of economic growth, and relatively few small firms. They used 1980 U.S. Census to arrive at these findings. In this paper, I use American Community Survey data from a 2005-7 to see whether patterns they observed persist a generation hence. My results suggest that racial employment gaps are at least pronounced in 2005-07 as they were in 1980. However, union membership no longer bears on those gaps. I explore other predictors of racial exclusion in metropolitan area labor markets and discuss their pressing theoretical and policy implications.

Author

• Amon S. Emeka, Skidmore College