> Yoshie is not wrong to pose the question of whether racism is economically
> rational fot the workers. That is not the only question. Ian is right to
> remark on nonrational psychopathological bases. But it matters whether these
> are reinforced or opposed by group economic interestss. If racism is
> economically rational for workers, it will be harder to dislodge. If it is
> economically irrational, that gives us a wedge to crack the irrational
> psychopathologies. As the the latter, do people know Winthrop Jordan's White
> over Black, on the irrational racist origins of slavery? --jks
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My frustrations with Yoshie's argument stems from overlooking what seems to be missing in Heather Boushey's analysis and may continue to be a problem for gathering evidence of a race based wage premium.
The main source of potential data as regards the emergence in statistical correlations of a wage premium [or lack thereof] are the records of scores of thousands of firms payroll policies. As these are largely proprietary information under capitalist property rights, there is an enormous methodological barrier to getting a rock solid case either way [Quine-Duhem redux]. However the point I haven't made because I've let my anger stemming from personal experiences of racism get in the way [apologies to all], is that we would have to look at the decision dynamics in firms that lead to the creation of the wage premium. As those decisions would be irrational because a belief in race is irrational, it would seem to follow that even if, as a statistical measure racism generated a wage premium for white workers, the causal dynamics that constitute it's emergence are themselves irrational.
African American workers at FedEx were VERY interested in trying to find out if the company used anything even remotely racist in criteria determinative of wage policy formation, especially since the company had a lot of non-white employees. In DC, Philly, Detroit and many other urban area's courier facilities, the minorities were the majority, so a lot of time and effort during our union drive went into trying to get a handle on pay differentials in different districts as the company does have different pays scales within the same job classification etc.
Needless to say FedEx HQ wasn't about to give us their data--turns out they use a firm based in Redmond WA to help compile cost of living analyses etc. We couldn't find any explicit racist criteria [go figure :-)]. What was correlated was the recalcitrance with which the company would heed calls for pay raises from those stations in which minorities were the majority. These criteria were based on market growth and productivity growth. The problem was the company was hoping that by building bigger stations they could get increasing returns to scale in urban markets where non-whites comprised the majority of staff. In fact, as many industrial engineers in the firm told me, the big places actually gave them diminishing returns to scale [I always wondered "well how is it you still hove your job then?"]; thus leading to far more conflict ridden workplaces due to HQ throwing ugly budgets at the stations. This really was the locus for racist acts by white managers; some of whom cheated employees out of their overtime pay on a sytematic basis, gave poor performance reviews etc. When we busted them, they were gone in a day. To the extent they didn't do it to white workers or, when they did, they did less of it, indicates just how a "law of unintended consequences" synergizes with racism to generate just one possible loci of the origin[s] of a wage premium.
Now we would need to be able to have the above kind workplace microeconomics done on a massive scale taking into full consideration Quine-Duhem as we go. We'd also need to get the EEOC to open it's books [talk about regulatory capture by the Corps.] which is also a potentially huge mine of data.
I guess my question at this point is how do we get rationality on a statistical level when, if what I recounted above is typical of how racism plays out at a firm level, the behavioral dynamics that are actually generative of the data are themselves irrational?
Yoshie, my apologies to you for being terse. This thread has brought back ugly memories.
Ian