Back in the bad old days, blacks made far less money than whites – sometimes even with the same seniority and in the same job. That was especially true in the South, and very much the way things worked before the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s changed the playing field.
Michigan State University Professor Charles Ballard has been studying and specializing in our state’s economy for decades, though he looks at wider issues as well. Recently he’s been studying the gap in earnings between black and white workers, a gap that was dramatically narrowing for a while, and was always greater in the South than in the North.
After all, if you worked on the line in an auto factory in Detroit, you were paid what your UAW contract said you would be paid, regardless of color, sex, or anything else. But things have changed and evolved. We’ve gradually become more of a service economy and less of a manufacturing one. Economic disparity did indeed narrow among all workers for decades after the Great Depression – but then began to widen again, starting around 1981.
So Professor Ballard decided to look what has happened to the difference between what blacks earn and what whites earn, starting about 1976. What he found was shocking.
To quote him directly, in this part of the world, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, “the real earnings of the median black man are lower now than they were forty years ago.” That’s adjusted for inflation of course. But think about that: not only is the gap still there between what the races earn, blacks are actually worse off than they were in 1979.
Ballard, who presented his findings to a dinner group in Ann Arbor earlier this week, is still doing research and is still not completely certain of all the reasons why. Preliminary data indicate, however, that the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs have been a factor.
But so has the huge number of white women entering the work force; the age when married middle and working-class women commonly stayed home, the era of TV sitcoms like “Leave it to Beaver,” ended long ago. Professor Ballard found other interesting changes too. Back as recently as the 1960s, there was a huge gap in what black workers in different regions made, with northern blacks making vastly higher incomes than southern ones.
That’s why hundreds of thousands of black folks came north in what historians call the “Great Migration.” Now, that gap has almost entirely vanished.
Black workers are doing better than they ever have in the South, which is good. However, that may be outweighed by something else Ballard found. Throughout the nation, black women have lost considerable ground to non-Hispanic white women, a trend that’s continuing.
In fact, the disparity is greater among those who are making more money. What Charles Ballard has established is that since the 1970s, the gap between what blacks and whites earn has been getting wider again, reversing the trend toward more equality that started in the 1930s.
This is something that, as far as I know, almost no politicians have been talking about. But it is certainly a trend we need to understand, and which desperately needs to be reversed.
And which policy makers, and all of us, ignore at our peril.
