Massachusetts is basking in the economic glow of a record low unemployment rate, which dipped to just over 2 percent last fall. But not all parts of the state share this good fortune. As of October, the cities of Lawrence and New Bedford reported unemployment rates more than double the statewide average. Levels of joblessness are similarly high in inner-city Boston neighborhoods such as Mattapan, North Dorchester, and Roxbury–and in inner-city areas across the nation.
The plight of the inner-city work force is a familiar story. So, too, is the diagnosis most often given: These workers simply don’t have adequate skills. The solution, then, typically consists of improving public schools and improving job training. Some observers point out that there is also a geographic dimension to the jobs dilemma: The manufacturing, service, and retail jobs once located in the cities have dispersed to far-off suburbs. Overcoming the so-called “spatial mismatch” between jobs and job-seekers by encouraging investment in the city and improving transportation links to suburban job sites is another requirement for the occupational advancement of inner-city workers.
What’s missing from this widely accepted analysis is any reference to racial discrimination by employers. This is striking, since inner-city poverty is disproportionately a black and Latino phenomenon. In 1990, three out of four poor blacks and one out of two poor Latinos were living in high-poverty neighborhoods–those with a poverty rate of 20 percent or more–compared to one in four poor whites. But it has become intellectually, as well as politically, unfashionable to dwell on prejudice as a cause of joblessness among nonwhites. Many liberals acknowledge that racial discrimination still exists, but see it as secondary to skill deficits and too-distant jobs. Meanwhile, conservatives maintain that affirmative action has, if anything, tilted the playing field in favor of minorities.
We beg to differ. Our research suggests that racial prejudice is still widespread in hiring decisions. But the employment discrimination of today is hardly racism of an overt type. Rather, we found that prejudice infiltrates the very way employers evaluate the skills and fitness of nonwhite applicants. Very few employers profess outright bias against any race or ethnic group. But when they talk about the skills of African-American and Latino workers, or of workers from the inner city generally, their assessments are often laced with stereotypes. This suggests that policies aimed at improving job prospects for inner-city minorities are bound to fail if they boost skills and overcome transportation obstacles but ignore the subtle forms of discrimination that doom job seekers based on who they are and where they’re from.
From the employer’s mouth
Working in collaboration with other researchers, we recently completed and analyzed a telephone survey of 3,510 employers in four metropolitan areas (Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, and Los Angeles) and followed up with in-depth, face-to-face interviews of 365 managers involved in hiring at 174 businesses. We asked about jobs that require no more than a high school education–jobs that, in principle, ought to be available to inner-city job seekers.
Here’s what we learned from thousands of conversations with employers: Even for jobs requiring a high school education or less, employers are indeed looking for a higher level of skill than in the past. Yet, contrary to much media hype, computer skills are not the issue in these low-rung jobs. What employers primarily seek in new employees are greater command of basic skills–literacy and numeracy–on the one hand, and so-called “soft” skills on the other. More than one employer in four reports a growing need for soft skills in their employees. Managers say two of these skills are most important: interaction (the ability to get along well with customers, co-workers, and supervisors), and motivation.
There is no question that, as the service sector has grown and even manufacturing is carried out in teams rather than on assembly lines, the need for these workplace social skills has increased. But the assessment of applicants invariably involves a degree of subjectivity, especially when it comes to imagining how a job candidate will get along with customers or co-workers. With this subjectivity often come broad generalizations based on racial stereotypes.
Nearly half of the managers we interviewed denigrated the skills and work habits of blacks in the work force. Specific comments branded African-Americans as “scary,” “lazy,” and having an “‘I don’t care’ attitude.” Most common–heard from one out of three managers–were criticisms of the work ethic of African-Americans. Many employers blamed blacks’ perceived work deficits on single motherhood, welfare, or the urban environment, including the public schools. Some employers also described Latino workers in negative terms, but such comments were outnumbered by positive ones, often citing the “immigrant work ethic.” Asians were viewed even more positively, for much the same reason.
Some negative employer perceptions are simply a reflection of reality–for example, the lower educational attainment of blacks and Latinos, and of inner-city workers in general. However, others reveal cultural gaps. A young, inner-city African-American man who has not finished high school and a middle-aged, suburban, college-educated white manager speak different languages, not only in vocabulary and syntax, but in dress, work expectations, body language, and conventions of social interaction. What a black inner-city resident sees as maintaining a minimum of self-respect may translate to some employers as a bad attitude. Still other employer views are simply based on outright stereotypes.
In addition, even real performance differences can be traced in part to self-reinforcing management practices. A number of employers sympathetic to the plight of minority workers pointed out that some differences in workplace behavior and performance are due to low wages and harsh supervision in those jobs that are now occupied largely by blacks and Latinos.
“[I]f I take the basic labor jobs, I’m not so sure that when they were Caucasian dominated, 20 years ago, that people weren’t leaning on a shovel and gold bricking,” remarked a public sector human resource manager in Los Angeles. “Many times the classifications we normally associate with being more lazy or finding ways to avoid work are the entry level, lower skilled ones. And now those happen to be dominated by blacks and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics.”
Negative perceptions were echoed and amplified when we asked managers about the inner city itself. Employers generally express disparaging views of inner-city workers and of the inner city as a business location. Not surprisingly, the ways employers describe inner-city workers conform in great measure to their descriptions of workers of color. Connected to racial perceptions are perceptions of a host of inner-city problems–notably crime–that compound the stereotypes of race and help to explain the shortcomings of minority workers in employers’ eyes.
As long as business decision-makers shun–even fear–the inner city and its work force, neither subsidies for inner-city investment nor van pools that transport city dwellers to suburban industrial parks will crack inner-city isolation from jobs.
Soft skills and hard answers
The racial and anti-urban prejudice we found among hiring managers suggests that discrimination remains a hazard for minority job-seekers. The question is, what to do about it? After all, discrimination is already illegal, and the influence of stereotypes in employer decisions is often so subtle that it may be hard to detect, and therefore combat.
One way to root out such insidious discrimination is by limiting subjective evaluation as much as possible. It is widely recognized that recruiting through formal means such as newspaper ads and government or community agencies yields more black applicants than outreach through word of mouth and personal networks. Similarly, businesses that rely less on pre-employment interviews are more likely to hire nonwhite applicants. It appears that squeezing out opportunities for subjectivity reduces discrimination.
But subjectivity is not likely to disappear from the hiring process, especially as employers become more focused on the soft skills of their work force. Rather, it becomes important that we recognize soft skills for what they are–and aren’t. The soft skills that are vital for workplace success need to be incorporated into job training in a sensitive but systematic way. And those supposed soft skills that are simply prejudice with a human-resources veneer need to be identified and rooted out.
In shaping skill training, it is important to realize that some soft skills can‹and should–be learned. But the category of soft skills is so elastic that it includes items that are not worker skills at all, but cultural gaps and employer biases. It is unreasonable and counter-productive to expect worker training to erase these barriers as well.
For instance, many employers insist–and we would agree–that inner-city workers behave according to the norms of the workplace, even when those norms differ from their cultural experience. That is, they must learn to handle conflict over attitudes and expectations and alter their demeanor and speech when necessary.
This isn’t necessarily easy, nor is it the exclusive responsibility of minority workers to conform. Blacks, and to a lesser extent Latinos, face employers who often view them through negative stereotypes. Even when there is not outright bias, misunderstandings are common, and it shouldn’t always be up to minorities to smooth things over. But when blacks and Latinos react with anger, they play into stereotypes of defensiveness and hostility. Skills in conflict resolution–learned and practiced on both sides of the racial divide–can help to avoid this trap.
There is widespread agreement among the employers we talked to that training programs should include a “values” component that instills a solid work ethic. We agree that training programs should be structured to impart and reinforce work-friendly values. However, it is not at all clear that a lagging work ethic is the problem employers think it is.
Harvard’s Katherine Newman, in her insightful ethnography of young African-American and Latino workers in Harlem fast food restaurants, No Shame in My Game, points out that these marginally employed members of the working poor voice utterly mainstream sentiments about the importance of work. Studies of the “reservation wage,” the lowest wage a person is willing to accept, likewise reveal that young whites, blacks, and Latinos–men and women alike–are about equally willing to work for the wages available to them.
Reaffirming affirmative action
In order to counter the preconceptions that work against the urban work force, we must focus on the employers as well as developing employee skills. A key policy for altering employer behavior is affirmative action. But affirmative action–at least as we have known it–is in the process of being rolled back. Court decisions, executive actions, and plebiscites alike have reduced or threatened to reduce its reach in employment, contracting, and access to higher education. Anti-discrimination enforcement, a major spur to affirmative action, has fallen off. In fact, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that opposition to affirmative action among white males has cooled, because they no longer see it as a serious threat.
We believe that government must not abdicate its enforcement role. But clearly, there will be no turning back the clock to a version of affirmative action that is seen, rightly or wrongly, as giving hiring preference to underqualified candidates. Instead, we urge what we call an evangelistic approach to affirmative action–going beyond traditional monitoring and enforcement functions to implement policies that improve the skills of nonwhite job seekers, teach employers how to hire and manage a diverse work force, and make it harder for employers to discriminate based on subtle stereotypes. This approach will not only make a new case for affirmative action, it will make compliance easier and enforcement more effective.
Specifically, we advocate three new policy steps geared to the low-skill end of the labor market:
- Link affirmative action to stronger education and training programs.
Widespread skill deficits among black and Latino workers compound the dam- age of discrimination, reinforcing the stereotypes that underlie bias. Until employers can be assured that minority applicants are coming to them skilled and ready to work, subtle prejudices will continue to creep into the hiring process. The best way to provide that assurance is an education and training system whose providers become reliable sources of affirmative action hires. For instance, the Center for Employment Training, based in San Jose, Calif., trains a largely low-income, Latino work force so successfully that area employers seek out its graduates.
- Help employers learn how to manage a diverse work force.
Disadvantaged workers need to learn new skills, but so do the managers who employ them. Many businesses consider managing diversity an important business practice, but don’t know how to do it. One way to fill this gap would be a Diversity Management Extension Service.
The US Department of Agriculture’s extension service, which provides information and technical assistance to farmers, has helped make this country’s farms the most productive and successful in the world. In the last several years a number of states have begun to adapt this idea to manufacturing, establishing industrial extension programs to help make local companies more competitive.
These programs vary but generally offer training and consulting, especially to small and medium-sized businesses, which have less in-house capacity for management education (and which, incidentally, are also less likely to hire minority job candidates). Extension services also conduct research and gather information about best practices in industry, feeding information into higher-education curricula in management and other specialties. Diversity management could be incorporated as well. The legitimacy of this effort would no doubt be enhanced if it were combined with existing extension programs that focus on competitiveness.
- Document continuing discrimination to demonstrate why affirmative action is still needed.
Many employers–including those who voice racial stereotypes–and much of the (white) public see employment discrimination as a thing of the past. It is up to government to make a modern case for affirmative action.Government must make a modern case for affirmative action.One appropriate tool for doing so is the audit study. Originally pioneered to test for housing discrimination, audit studies send out trained pairs of testers–from different racial and ethnic groups, but with equivalent qualifications–to apply for jobs. Recent audit studies have demonstrated that identically qualified African-Americans and Latinos get fewer job offers than non-Latino whites. Following the release of these studies, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination carried out its own audit study of retailers, then publicized its findings and announced plans to prosecute one egregious company offender.
Audit studies sound a powerful wake-up call. Unlike standard statistical studies, they expose to public view the “smoking gun” of discrimination.
Numerous challenges are conspiring to lock less-skilled workers, and particularly less-skilled blacks and Latinos, out of jobs in the coming century. Discrimination is a continuing factor that plays out in new ways as well as old. Rising skill demands, the growing weight put on soft skills, declining formality in recruiting and hiring, waning affirmative action pressure, and the ongoing flow of businesses to the suburbs translate into serious obstacles for workers of color. But new approaches to work force policy–approaches that can be adopted by nonprofit and private-sector actors as well as government–offer the very real promise of enhancing skills, curtailing discrimination, and helping to open the way to a more inclusive workplace and more equitable society.
Philip Moss and Chris Tilly are professors in the Department of Regional Economic and Social Development at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and co-authors of Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America.