Who gets stuck in low-wage jobs and who advances to higher paying jobs? How have tighter labor markets and the welfare-to-work legislation affected low-wage workers? Eight years ago, Katherine Newman of Harvard University conducted a study of fast-food workers in Harlem and reported the results in her book No Shame in My Game. In a follow-up study in 1997, she found that one-third of her interviewees had experienced wage gains of more than $5 per hour; another third was stagnant; and the remaining third was worse off.
In 1998 and 1999, the Foundation issued an open-ended request for proposals to conduct case studies of low-wage jobs in the United States. The twelve best proposals were funded, yielding rich studies of 25 industries that employ workers at low pay. Yet none of these studies covered work in the retail sector, where 14% of the labor force is employed, many of them at low wages.
In a New York Times survey that followed the 2000 Census, four out of ten people who listed multiple races on the Census later changed their self categorization. Kenneth Prewitt, the Director of the 2000 U.S.
More immigrants have settled in Southern California since the 1960s than in any other metropolitan region in the world. Los Angeles County, which in 1960 had the smallest proportion of immigrants of any large city in the U.S.—eight percent—now counts ethnic minorities as 71 percent of its total population, making it the largest ethnic-minority population in the country. Indeed, all the counties of Southern California have a so-called minority majority, with populations that are more than 50 percent minority residents—most of them immigrants or children of immigrants.
Hurricane Katrina irrevocably changed the face of New Orleans. In addition to the physical devastation, 50 percent of the population was either temporarily or permanently displaced. The combination of population flight and the intense rebuilding process has triggered an urgent demand for labor and an unprecedented influx of Latino immigrants. These changes have drastically altered the racial and ethnic composition of the city. Blacks, who once constituted 67 percent of the population, now comprise 47 percent, while the Latino population jumped from 3 percent to at least 10 percent.
Supplemental Award: $35,000, March 2008
Literature on the role of social networks in employment has shown that although most blacks, Latinos, and whites search for work through their friends and relatives, blacks are significantly less likely to find work this way. The contacts of black job-seekers are less prone to assist in the employment search, for example, by making a recommendation to an employer. Why don’t blacks help as much as their Latino and white counterparts?
- Read a summary of the project's main findings
- Read the full report: Leaves That Pay: Employer and Worker Experiences with Paid Family Leave in California (PDF)
- Watch Eileen Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman present the report at U.C. Berkeley
- Related RSF Publications
Introduction