Black and Latino Low-Wage Workers and the Social Organization of Metropolitan Labor Markets

Niki Dickerson, Rutgers University

The under-employment of black and Latino workers, specifically their concentration in low-wage work, is of keen interest to researchers of labor market inequality. Previous research has identified structural explanations in the larger economy to account for this inequality, namely industrial restructuring, immigration, skills mismatch and minority population size. An ample space and work literature has demonstrated that inequality and the underlying factors that cause it vary spatially, most often examined within and across local labor markets. This paper asks: Does the spatial configuration of blacks and Latinos relative to whites in a metropolitan area (i.e. residential segregation) affect the percentage of blacks and Latinos employed in low-wage work, in conjunction with the structural features of local labor markets described above? To assess the contribution of both individual and metropolitan-level factors, this study utilizes a unique dataset of the structural characteristics of the 95 largest U.S. cities.