Field Perspectives on the Causes of Low Employment Among Less Skilled Black Men

Introduction For decades, academics and policymakers have decried the employment crisis among less skilled African American men) Only half of working-age black men without a high school degree were employed in 2006 as compared to 80 percent of similar white men, and these numbers do not even account for higher incarceration rates among African American men. (2) Two features of this racial employment gap are striking: it is limited to men, and it has changed little in over 20 years. (3) Researchers have offered many explanations for low employment rates among less skilled black men, yet the crisis is little diminished. It is time for researchers to reexamine this problem in an effort to find innovative, cost-effective, and near-term solutions. This article takes an informal but quantitative approach to the problem. In the summer and fall of 2006, my research team used structured surveys to interview less skilled black men and their potential employers in the labor market around the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana. Our approach was similar to that employed by William Julius Wilson and his colleagues in the 1988 Chicago Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey (1996: ch. 5) in that both demand and supply side participants in a specific local labor market were interviewed. Our survey focused on a more limited set of issues than Wilson's. In particular, we devoted a large share of survey space to labor market problems that social scientists have discussed but not rigorously evaluated since Wilson's work. Our interview approach was also less open-ended than Wilson's. However, respondents sometimes replied using open-ended options to multiple choice questions and some of the African American men in our sample were also interviewed in focus groups. Different surveys were circulated to less skilled African American men without college degrees and to employers in the low skilled labor market. I refer to these as the employee and employer surveys, respectively. In addition to questions about family and educational background, the employee survey focused on questions about work attitudes and risk taking as well as job search strategies and Internet use in particular. The employer survey focused on the interactions that hiring managers had with job applicants and on employer perceptions of job candidates from different race and gender groups. The results provided a number of useful perspectives from the field. First, African American men looking for work consistently highlighted difficulties in "getting through the door" as the major obstacle they faced in finding employment. They pointed to felony convictions, drug testing programs, low skill levels, and employer bias as major barriers to hiring. Other potential explanations received much less emphasis, including difficulties finding job openings, problems completing applications, and personal aversion to distasteful types of work. Work disincentives created by enforced child support payments--another recent explanation--were mentioned as a hardship but not a deterrent to working. Employers reported negative perceptions of black male applicants that were largely consistent with the supply side reports. They believed that black men were less likely to have the desired interpersonal skills and work ethic and less likely to pass a drug test, a common applicant screening procedure. Employers also reported that they did not differentially scrutinize applicants or reward employees of different races. In addition to the work by Wilson, this research parallels several other studies that survey labor market participants directly, asking questions that evaluate hypotheses based on self-reported participant behavior. This approach has been used by both economists (Freeman and Holzer 1986; Holzer 1996; Maxwell 2006; Gruber and Mullainathan 2002) and sociologists (Newman 1999, 2006; Pager and Quillian 2005), and several survey-based studies examine the low wage labor market specifically (Maxwell 2006; Newman 1999, 2006; Moss and Tilly 2001; Holzer 1996. …