Job Equity in the Downsized South: A Special Report on Work in the 1990s

This is an excerpt from the report “Dislocation and Workforce Equity: The South at Work in the 1990s,” released by the Institute for Southern Studies in November 1997.

Southern workers are in a crisis. Real wages have stagnated over the past twenty years. Workers have become all too familiar with the trend of downsizing. It is harder than ever to count on keeping a good job. Secure jobs with good wages and benefits are now being filled by an expanding contingent labor force that has little hope for advancement and faces major legal barriers to forming unions and gaining other rights on the job.

The changing face of the workforce—the entry of those once excluded from these occupations, such as women and people of color as well as new immigrants—has contributed to rising tensions as well as unprecedented opportunity for solidarity across the lines of gender and race. In the face of this tremendous change in the region’s workplaces, several myths have taken hold that blame certain people—women, African Americans, Latinos and other people of color for negative change in the job market.

The Institute for Southern Studies has conducted a study of workplace equity in our region: where the jobs are, who are the workers, and the impact of job and workforce changes, using the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s data in Job Patterns for Minorities & Women in Private Industry.

Taken together, our findings show what southern workers already know: Better jobs are more scarce for all workers, and all workers face significant job insecurity. Our findings also show that far from being the cause of white men’s loss of better jobs, women and people of color remain concentrated in many of the lowest paid, most insecure occupations.

We cannot afford to be misled by myths that encourage workers to pit themselves against each other. Rather, we need to put our energy toward understanding and transforming an economy increasingly unaccountable to the needs of all workers and their families.

 

What Kind of Jobs? The Growing Divide

Losses in traditional manufacturing jobs have dramatically changed the work Southerners do. In broad terms, data collected by the EEOC indicate a shift of 10 percent of the South’s jobs from blue-collar work to white-collar work. Blue-collar jobs, which dropped from 57 to 47 percent of all jobs in the South, remained the largest job category for southern workers in 1994, while the number of white-collar jobs grew from 29 percent of all the workforce in 1975 to 39.2 percent in 1994.

The South’s growth in white-collar positions comes from a boom in sales and technician jobs, as well as those designated as professional—a mixed blessing, because many of these jobs are being filled by the influx of highly educated migrants from the North and Midwest rather than applicants from the region. The South is the most miserly region in the country in per-student education spending, suffering the consequences in low rates of high school graduation, and significant numbers of workers who are unprepared for the new technician and sales jobs.

At the same time, the South’s best blue-collar jobs—skilled craft and semi-skilled operative positions—dropped in number from 40.3 percent to 28.2 percent of the job market from 1975 to 1994, while the number of lowest paying blue-collar jobs—low-skilled laborer and service positions—increased from 16.7 percent to 19 percent of the job market in that same period.

Changes in what kinds of jobs are available reflect a growing divide between rich and poor. The growth in the numbers of professional and technician jobs promotes the movement of some southern workers into the upper-middle class. The number of middle-income blue-collar jobs, increasingly technical in nature, is shrinking. Previously-middle-income blue-collar workers are either moving to upper-middle class white-collar jobs or are being squeezed down to the lowest paying blue-collar work.

The only decline in white-collar work has taken place in official/managerial positions, which went from 11.2 percent of the jobs in 1985 and to 10.1 percent in 1994, after having grown during the previous decade.

 

Who’s Working Where? The Persistence of Segregation

Which people are working which jobs in the South? People of color and women remain overwhelmingly concentrated in lower-paying, lower-status jobs. Comparing ratios for people of color in white-collar versus blue-collar work indicates the continued segregation of our workplaces.

In 1994, close to 30 percent of white men worked in the two highest-paying categories of white-collar jobs—officials/managers and professionals. Meanwhile, only 13 percent of employed white men worked in the more poorly compensated laborer and service positions. By contrast, in 1994 over 40 percent of all black men worked in laborer and service positions, and only 8 percent of all black men worked as officials/managers or professionals. Such disparities in white and black men’s work—essentially workforce segregation—help explain why southern states continue to have the highest rates of black poverty in the nation.

The statistics for women also show continued disparities. Men outnumber women of all races more than two-to-one in the best compensated white-collar position of officials/managers. The concentration of both white women and women of color in gender-stereotyped occupations remains virtually unchanged from 1975. Despite substantial gains in professional positions, white women have continued to find the largest share of their work in pink-collar and sales jobs. In 1994, fully 41 percent of employed white women worked pink-collar or sales jobs—a concentration little changed from the 1975 rate of 43 percent.

The majority of black women still work in the least secure, poorest paid occupations: pink-collar, service and laborer jobs. In 1994, 50.8 percent of black women were employed in these jobs, a proportion virtually unchanged from 51.4 percent in 1975. Moreover, black women’s largest gains in white-collar work have been at the bottom rung in the traditionally white female occupation of sales. Where 5.5 percent of all black women’s work in 1975 was in sales, 1994 saw sales work make up more than 12 percent of jobs held by black women.

 

Who Bears the Burden of Job Insecurity?

While 20 years of dramatic redistribution of jobs in the South has affected all groups of southern workers, the repercussions have not been felt equally. While all southern workers now face proportionately fewer jobs in the most desirable occupations, white men have not been dislocated by people of color. Rather, the strain of a shrinking pool of better jobs has been most severely felt by people of color.

Job losses for black and white men in the South have been most strongly felt in blue-collar skilled crafts and semi-skilled operative positions, which accounted for 46.7 percent of the male workforce in 1975 and now only accounts for 37.7 percent of men’s work, a 19.3 percent loss. Available data suggests that white men are more likely today than 20 years ago to work in laborer positions and that men, both black and white, are going to work in the service industry in significantly higher numbers than 10 or 20 years ago.

However, it also shows that people of color have always had less job security when it comes to layoffs than their white counterparts in the workforce, and despite the efforts of affirmative action, this has changed little in terms of recent history. In the recession of the early 1980s, when job loss was especially concentrated in manufacturing, 9.1 percent of black working men were displaced, compared to 6.6 percent of white working men. Even during the recovery from the early 1980s recession, black men remained about 20 percent more likely to be displaced than white men.

Women are also facing increasing rates of job loss, making up 42.4 percent of the workers displaced in 1993 and 1994—up from 34.3 percent in the period from 1981 to 1982.

It is important both to note the wider reach of job insecurity and to recognize the reality that job loss continues to be more serious for people of color and women. Black workers continue to remain longer without work after being fired, have a lower rate of re-employment and suffer greater losses in benefits—especially health care—upon re-employment. And women workers, when compared to men, are less likely to be re-employed, and, if re-employed, are more likely to end up with part-time jobs.

 

Who Really Benefits?

EEOC data confirm what southern workers already know: better jobs are more scarce for all workers. Job growth is expected to continue in lower-paid, less-secure positions. And all workers face significant rates of job loss, with white workers being affected by unprecedented job loss while people of color bear the brunt of the strain of economic restructuring. Clearly, workers of all racial backgrounds have suffered from displacement and the resulting loss of income and benefits.

The relatively new experience of displacement for white workers has encouraged the myth that unqualified minorities are taking white workers’ jobs. The EEOC data show that workers’ increased job insecurity is not the result of job losses to “other” workers, but rather the effect of larger structural changes in the workplace. Far from demonstrating a trend of white men being displaced by people of color and women, EEOC data shows that white men are holding onto the best jobs better than anyone else. Nobody in the workforce has benefited from the trend toward less secure, less desirable jobs.

The real beneficiaries are the companies and corporations. Record increases in productivity and profits have been fueled by an increasingly globalized economy where, among other things, companies have more freedom to move jobs where labor is cheapest, replace full-time workers with a disposable workforce of contingent workers, and shut down companies in the wake of mergers that provide record stock increases.

 

Agenda for Change

For southern workers, the bottom-line is clear: to achieve an equitable workplace, we need to see the increasingly widespread economic insecurity for what it is—the result of an attack on workers’ earning and negotiating power, not the result of affirmative action or “set aside” programs. White industrial workers have experienced unprecedented displacement and real loss of wages and benefits in recent years. Black workers have been hit even harder by the downward loss of jobs. Economic hard times have heightened existing tensions in working class communities between Latinos, African Americans and whites.

There are two possible responses to the hurt and frustration that hard economic times bring. One is resentment against black workers, who have long struggled for economic survival in the South, and against Latino and Asian American immigrants, who have come here in search of a livelihood. This would be a tragic mistake that would result in a weakened bargaining position, weakened job security and weakened health and safety protections for all workers.

The other response is for workers to organize against the conditions that stand in the way of decent, dignified work with fair wages in a sustainable economy. This involves the hard work of challenging racial resentment that pits workers against each other. And it involves the process of developing a widespread strategy to hold corporations accountable to the needs of working people, their families, and their communities.

The challenge for all workers is to turn shared insecurity into the basis for an alliance across race, class and gender lines that can envision—and fight for—better jobs and an economy that provides a living wage and the basis for strong communities for all Southerners.