Race, space and skills in metropolitan Detroit: Explanations for growing wage and employment gaps between black and White workers.

This dissertation uses a survey-based qualitative research methodology to evaluate the relative merit of race, space and skill-based explanations for growing wage and employment gaps between relatively unskilled blacks and whites. It is based on interviews with employers in the auto-supply industry in the Detroit Metropolitan area. The methodology uses a case-match format matching thirteen white-owned and thirteen black-owned firms. Each firm pair is matched by size, location in the city or suburbs, and product produced. This design attempts to separate out racial differences in employer attitudes and practices by contrasting the responses from the white-owned firms to those from the black-owned firms. Black employers hire a greater percentage of black workers for their firms than white employers. However, black-owned firms pay lower wages, even though there seem to be no major differences in skill requirements for entry-level jobs in the matched firms. However, just under half of both the white and black respondents reported overall skill differences between black and white applicants, while an additional 20 percent of all respondents reported skill differences between city and suburban residents regardless of race. These skill differences may also explain the lower average wages in firms with workforces that have the greatest percentage of black workers. Geographic inaccessibility of suburban jobs for black urban residents is a reason given by many employers for the smaller percentage of black workers in suburban firms. However, suburban black-owned firms, as well as white-owned firms with strongly enforced anti-discrimination programs, managed to hire much higher percentages of black workers than white-owned firms who did not have such programs. These results suggest that skill, space, and racial discrimination are all operating to reduce the employment and earnings prospects of African-American workers, and that policies to solve these problems must be similarly multi-faceted. The provision of increased geographic access to suburban jobs should be supplemented with policies to alter the racial attitudes of suburban employers. Similarly, raising the skills of urban youth will make them more competitive in a changing work world, but a racial gap will remain if they do not have equal access to job openings in white-owned firms, especially in the suburbs.PhDUrban, Technological and Environmental Planning: Urban and Regional PlanningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104876/1/9610256.pdfDescription of 9610256.pdf : Restricted to UM users only