Pager and Western’s article on Race at Work, shows us that discrimination most definitely still exists in today’s society. Since the 1960’s researchers have led us all to believe that our racial discrimination problem has been solved. This is clearly not true when looking at employment rates in America.
Pager, Western, and Bonikowski recently did a study to identify patterns of discrimination in the low-wage labor market of New York City. They took a number of real entry-level jobs and had three different races of young, mostly college-educated, males apply to them. The results were astounding. They used whites, Latinos, and blacks. They found that whites are about twice as likely to get the job rather than the black applicants. And Latinos suffered a little for their minority status. The interviewers made it not so clear that they were discriminating during the interviewing process. They told the blacks and Latinos similar things, such as, “The position has been filled, but we will call people in if it doesn’t work out, and you can leave your resume here with me”. These answers were not given to the white males though. Some were hired right on the spot, and others were told to come in for a second interview. The minority males would have never known that the employer was discriminating against them, if not for their white counterparts.
Finally, they did a study involving whites who just got out of prison, Latinos with no criminal background, and blacks also with no criminal background. You’ll never guess the results for this one! They were just about as ridiculous as the first study. They found that employers were more likely to hire whites who have been convicted of a felon over minorities who have a clean record. Even though this discrimination goes on to this day in the workplace, most of us are still not aware of it. It is quite sad, and I strongly believe that we must learn to look past the physical appearances of people. Just because someone is not exactly the same as us, does not mean that they are not as good as us, and that we should automatically overlook them. We must be open-minded and judge people on facts, not on personal opinions.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
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Is their really doubt that discrimination still exists. I don’t really think that’s what he was trying to get across It was more why this is happening. I don’t think that any one ever believed that it was really solved but their defiantly was progress. The difference in unemployment has to do with a lot of things. The places they grow up affects the schools that they go to and the education and motivation they get to go to college. It is a statistic that lower income people do not go to college or have higher drop out rates.
ReplyDeleteThe whites that were beating out the blacks and Latinos for job had the same skills and education. Is this direct discrimination? I wonder what their reasoning is for this if they were confronted. Maybe some places don’t realizing their doing it, but maybe some companies are missing out on great employees that are willing to do anything and work very hard for their job for possibility a white upper class male that has been handed everything his whole life and would rather just have the title then work hard for the job.
As far as the criminal record goes the companies that were hiring these people don’t always require their employees to be conviction free. I also again wonder what the companies would say if confronted. Did they study what they were convicted for because that could make a large difference