New Strategies for Transforming Low Wage Work

Project Leaders:  Mark Barenberg (Law School) and Dorian Warren (Political Science and School for International and Public Affairs)

Problem Statement

One of the most significant and outstanding challenges for racial justice advocates in the post-civil rights era is the issue of increasing economic inequality, especially among communities of color. The broader structural transformation of the American economy, coupled with the significant decline in union density among workers of color has been overlooked in most discussions of inequality and poverty in communities of color. For example, the heavier job losses among black workers are due to the continued hemorrhaging of heavily unionized manufacturing jobs, the de-unionization and downgrading of building, food and home care services, and the adverse effects of privatization of the public sector, the occupations where many black workers had been concentrated since World War II. Replacing this massive disappearance of quality employment have been low-wage, nonunion jobs in the service sector, creating what Steven Pitts calls the two-dimensional crisis of work in black communities: unemployment and bad jobs.

But the crisis of bad jobs is not limited only to African-American workers; other workers of color including the overwhelming majority of immigrants and female workers are also disproportionately concentrated in low-wage industries. The dominant approaches to addressing the structural issue of racially segmented low-wage work have been either employer-driven policies, or individualistic human capital remedies. Human capital approaches in particular focus on “upgrading the worker” in order to enhance their employment prospects.  In contrast, we aim to explore alternative approaches to the problem of racialized low-wage work that focus on new and innovative structural remedies. These strategies strive to achieve two goals that separate them out from mainstream and dominant approaches: 1) “upgrading the job” and 2) empowering and incorporating worker voice in workplace decisions and processes.

Project Goals

The Transforming Low Wage Work Project explores a family of recent strategies (voluntary and private arrangements, including private-public hybrids) through interdisciplinary and collaborative case studies of several innovative mechanisms that reduce racial and economic inequality and produce structural change. These voluntary agreements often are related to public policy efforts to regulate the racialized low-wage economy, though are often outside the bounds of direct government regulation. The project open up and explores areas of inquiry into these recent efforts to address the concentration of workers of color (and especially women of color) in low-wage work such as:

• What are the range of policy or institutional tools or mechanisms available to address the racialized low-wage economy?
• What is overall pattern of these (new) types of voluntary agreements?
• What is the nature of these voluntary agreements? What is their scope? How and why have they emerged?  What contextual factors account for the emergence and success or failure of alternative forms of voluntary agreements?
• Are these agreements promoted or impeded by existing legal and political arrangements? What legal and political reforms would best facilitate and embody the knowledge produced by these strategies?
• How are these agreements monitored and enforced?
• What types of organizations and collaborations are advancing these new approaches?
• What is the relation between social mobilization and institutionalization in each of these strategies?  Do particular forms of institutionalization nurture continued mobilization by groups with the capacity to sustain the effectiveness of the institutions?
• What are the mechanisms of accountability, transparency, and legitimacy in the formation and functioning of these agreements?
• What are the strategic advantages and drawbacks of these policy tools or mechanisms in addressing the structural inequalities of a racialized low-wage labor market?