Labor Relations Commons^™

Introduction To A Special Issue On Inequality In The Workplace (“What Works?), Pamela S. Tolbert, Emilio J. Castilla

Pamela S Tolbert

[Excerpt] While overt expressions of racial and gender bias in U.S. workplaces have declined markedly since the passage of the original Civil Rights Act and the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a half century ago (Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Schuman, Steeh, Bobo, and Krysan 1997; Dobbin 2009), a steady stream of research indicates that powerful, if more covert forms of bias persist in contemporary workplaces (Greenwald and Banaji 1995; Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009; England 2010; Heilman 2012). In line with this research, high rates of individual and class-based lawsuits alleging racial and gender discrimination suggest that many …

Race, Gender, And The Rebirth Of Trade Unionism, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Dorian T. Warren

Kate Bronfenbrenner

[Excerpt] Diversity is not the enemy of solidarity. We contend that solidarity can, and must, be built among an ever-diversifying labor movement, nation, and world. The labor movement's very survival depends on it.

Bias In White: A Longitudinal Natural Experiment Measuring Changes In Discrimination, Brian Rubineau, Yoon Kang

Brian Rubineau

Many professions are plagued by disparities in service delivery. Racial disparities in policing, mortgage lending, and healthcare are some notable examples. Because disparities can result from a myriad of mechanisms, crafting effective disparity mitigation policies requires knowing which mechanisms are active and which are not. In this study we can distinguish whether one mechanism—statistical discrimination—is a primary explanation for racial disparities in physicians’ treatment of patients. In a longitudinal natural experiment using repeated quasi-audit studies of medical students, we test for within-cohort changes in disparities from medical student behaviors as they interact with white and black patient actors. We find …

Economic And Statistical Analysis Of Discrimination In Hiring, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Robert Smith

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Legal and administrative determinations of employers' compliance with "equal employment opportunity" (EEO) requirements often hinge on the Issue of the availability of protected class members to employers. That is, courts and affirmative action review agencies compare the hire rates of protected class members (the ratio of the number of protected class members hired to the number who applied or who were potentially available) to the comparable ratio for other applicants, in assessing whether an employer's hiring policies meet the standards required of them by equal opportunity regulations. The purpose of this paper is to review what economic theory suggests affects …

Did Teachers’ Race And Verbal Ability Matter In The 1960’S? Coleman Revisited, Ronald Ehrenberg, Dominic Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Our paper reanalyzes data from the classic 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity, or Coleman Report. It addresses whether teacher characteristics, including race and verbal ability, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. We find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic gain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers …

Do Historically Black Colleges And Universities Enhance The College Attendance Of African American Youths?, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Donna S. Rothstein, Robert B. Olsen

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Recently, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have become the center of intense policy debates. Do HBCUs enhance the college attendance of African American youths? Previous research has been inconclusive. Among other improvements, our study adjusts for the relative availability of HBCU enrollment opportunities in each state. We find that African Americans are more likely to choose HBCUs over other colleges if more HBCU openings are available. However, more HBCU openings don't increase overall African American enrollment. As we have shown elsewhere, attendance at an HBCU does enhance African American students' college graduation rates.

Do Historically Black Institutions Of Higher Education Confer Unique Advantages On Black Students? An Initial Analysis, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Donna S. Rothstein

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Despite the declining relative importance of HBIs in the production of black bachelor's degrees, in recent years they have become the subject of intense public policy debate for two reasons. First, court cases have been filed in a number of southern states that assert that black students continue to be underrepresented at traditionally white public institutions, that discriminatory admissions criteria are used by these institutions to exclude black students (e.g., basing admissions only on test scores and not also on grades), and that per student funding levels, program availability, and library facilities are substantially poorer at public HBIs than …

Are Black Colleges Producing Today's African-American Lawyers?, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

In past years, almost all of America's black lawyers came from historically black colleges and universities because these schools were the only ones that would admit black students. Today, it appears that black colleges are producing increasingly fewer of the nation's black lawyers.

Two Tales Of A City: Nineteenth-Century Black Philadelphia, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] In the tension between Forging Freedom and Roots of Violence certain themes present themselves for further research and thought. Neither volume successfully analyzes the historical roots of the African-American class structure. This is especially evident in each book's treatment of the black middling orders. While neither defines the category with clarity, their basic assumption that small shopkeepers and regularly employed workers were critical to the community's ability to withstand some of the worst shocks of racism is important. The clash between these books also raises questions concerning the role of pre-industrial cultural values in the transition to industrial capitalism. …

[Review Of The Book Discrimination In Labor Markets], Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In sum, I consider Discrimination in Labor Markets a fine volume. Anyone who has the slightest interest in the analysis of labor-market discrimination should seriously contemplate purchasing it. The relatively nontechnical nature of the papers will appeal to a wide range of readers, and the book should quickly find its way onto reading lists for undergraduate and graduate courses that discuss the economics of discrimination.

Black Youth Nonemployment: Duration And Job Search: Comment, Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Holzer's paper has a number of attributes that I find very appealing. It focuses on an important topic and uses two different data bases to test the robustness of its findings. It uses alternative specifications of the variable of interest (reservation wages), examines the sensitivity of the results to alternative sets of control variables, uses a variety of statistical methods to confront a number of statistical issues, and honestly reports cases in which any of the above leads to differences in results. Finally, the paper does not claim more than the evidence warrants—a feature not present in enough academic …

Role Models In Education (Symposium Introduction), Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

It is our hope that by assembling these papers in one place, the Review will contribute to future policy debate on the importance of role models in education. Moreover, the papers' findings may have even broader importance. In many respects, the relationship between teachers and students can be viewed as analogous to the relationship between supervisors and employees. If the race, gender, and ethnicity of teachers "matter," so may the race, gender, and ethnicity of supervisors in the employment relationship. These papers thus suggest analogous types of research that could be profitably undertaken that relate to the employment relationship.

Do Teachers’ Race, Gender, And Ethnicity Matter? Evidence From The National Education Longitudinal Study Of 1988, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Daniel D. Goldhaber, Dominic J. Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations of their students. For example, test scores of white female students in mathematics and science did not increase more rapidly when the teacher was a white woman than when the teacher was a white man, but white female teachers evaluated their white female students more highly than …

The Underrepresentation Of Minority Faculty In Higher Education: Panel Discussion, John Brooks Slaughter, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Eric Hanushek

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The 3 July 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education described the matter we are discussing today in these words: "Taken together. African-Americans and persons of Hispanic origin represent only 8 percent of full-time faculty nation-wide, and while 5 percent are African-American, half of them work at historically black institutions. The proportion of black faculty members at white institutions is 2.3 percent, virtually the same as it was 20 years ago." We are privileged to have the opportunity to explore this issue from two different perspectives. The first contends that unless major changes occur, the number of minority …

Workers, Racism And History: A Response, Nick Salvatore

Nick Salvatore

[Excerpt] This intimate dependence of white egalitarianism upon black exclusion forms the central theme of Herbert Hill's essay. Arguing that this condition is neither episodic nor solely of historical interest, Hill asserts that these racist attitudes (and the action that flowed from them) were systemic across two centuries of working class development and actually provide the central continuous rational for understanding institutional trade union activity from the early nineteenth century into the present. America's labor unions. Hill writes, are "the institutional expression of white working class racism, and of policies and practices that resulted in unequal access, dependent on race, …

The Latino Immigrant Labor Experience As Depicted In Film, Duane Wright

Duane E Wright II

The author argues that traditional macro-level methods of gathering data on populations create an impersonal depiction of the group. A useful pedagogical tool for teachers to counter this is to use fictional accounts in film and literature to put a more human face on the subjects being studied. Two films, Bread and Roses and El Norte, are used in this way to enhance or add another dimension to studies of the labor experience of Latino immigrants in the United States. The films are looked at through various sociological theories, Assimilation, Competition, and Neo-Marxist. The author concludes that Neo-Marxist theory best …

Ethnic Democracy And Its Ambiguities: The Case Of The Needle Trade Unions, Gerd Korman

Gerd Korman

[Excerpt] During the years between World War I and World War II the conduct among well-known Jewish labor leaders seems to have foreshadowed events in the history of America’s nationality following the tumult of the 1960’s. In the 1920’s and 1930’s America’s elected or appointed officials still used a pecking order based on assumed inequalities of race, ethnicity, and gender in making policy decisions. They presumed that their private interests, those of the “insiders,” the “leading groups,” or “controlling minorities,” were the only appropriate ones for determining public policy. It was then, especially in the Depression years, when the New …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …