Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1998 17:09:52 -0400 From: Heather Boushey <HBoushey at compuserve.com> Subject: comments Sender: Heather Boushey <HBoushey at compuserve.com> To: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> MIME-Version: 1.0
I'd like to comment on a few of the comments on my article in the LBO (#84).
First, with respect to some comments by Lipow, I would like to point out that my analysis, modeled using standard wage regressions and accounting for differences in individual's human capital, industry, and occupation, suggests that in locations where unemployment is relatively high, wages will be lower. African Americans experience the largest wage penalty for living in a high unemployment locality. Whites benefit from skin privilege in that they do not suffer as much as African Americans do when they work in an area where the local aggregate unemployment is high. Further, in locations where the white unemployment is high, whites suffer less than do blacks who live in locations where the black unemployment rate is high. Given that in African American unemployment tends to be double the white unemployment rate across cities, this finding is especially disturbing. What this means for cross-racial organizing is unclear, however, I don't believe it indicates that there is no hope. As has been pointed out, all workers benefit from low unemployment and organizing efforts must be aware of the fact that even in a tight labor market, whites are benefiting from greater employment opportunities and less wage penalty for living in a high unemployment region.
With respect to Kliman's comments, I think the above addresses all of them except how these findings fit in with the notion of segmented labor markets. The finding that the elasticity of wages with respect to unemployment is substantially different for whites with respect to the white unemployment rate and blacks with respect to the black unemployment rate (and females with respect to the female unemployment rate) does count as evidence for segmentation. I do concede that the effects of black unemployment of all workers' wages should be smaller than the effects of white unemployment on white workers' wages, however, this analysis was done on the 50 largest cities where the proportion of blacks is relatively large (15% of all working adults). That the effects of black unemployment on black wages are so large is then even more astounding and points to blacks competing in highly segregated labor markets.
Finally, with respect to the comments from Lear, my results differ from
Blanchflower and Oswald's because the sample is different. I explore the
wage curve in only the 50 largest cities in the nation. The larger
elasticities are most likely due to differences in the structure of urban
labor markets. (This is an issue I am dealing with in a current paper.) As
to why white women are the least susceptible to the negative effects on pay
>from unemployment, this may be for two reasons. First, many women are
already near the bottom of the labor market and thus the scope of their
wages to fluctuate downwards may be limited. Second, women's employment is
less cyclical than men's. Women still experience a high degree of
occupational segregation in the labor market and it may be that they are
employed in jobs that are not susceptible to demand fluctuations in the
same way that men are.
Heather Boushey Research Department NYC Housing Authority 250 Broadway, Room 711 New York, NY 10007 (p) 212-306-3372; (f) 212-306-6485 hboushey at compuserve.com