Roanoke Times Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: THURSDAY, October 20, 1994 TAG: 9410210013 SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Black workers tend to be less experienced, they say, less educated and concentrated in low-level jobs where firings are common.
All that's statistically true, it turns out. But a powerful new study adds this disturbing news: Even allowing for differences in age, education, job performance and a score of other factors, African Americans are fired at nearly twice the rate of whites.
The disparity holds true not just in Washington, where a sixth of the federal work force is employed, but all across the country.
If the same tendency holds true in the private sector - and there is some evidence that it might be worse - the impact is devastating: an annual loss to black communities nationwide of at least 40,000 jobs. By comparison, black workers lost 103,000 jobs in the last recession, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It's impossible for the research to take every factor into account - the quality of each individual's education, for instance. Still, the findings are likely to be seized as hard evidence of continuing workplace discrimination in an era when overt bias is taboo. They also may provide powerful new ammunition for fired black workers who sue claiming racial bias.
The new research - a meticulous, independent examination of the cases of all 11,920 federal workers fired in 1992 - was commissioned by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in December. The action followed a Knight-Ridder Newspapers report that minority government workers had been fired at three times the rate of whites.
The study's goal was to measure and then adjust for the effects of more than 20 possible factors on job performance so that minority and white firing rates could be considered on exactly the same terms.
After every measurable factor was discounted, Hilary Silver of Brown University in Providence, R.I., a leading labor sociologist, found that race stood out starkly. Black skin, she found, was more important in predicting which federal workers would be fired than education, experience, job performance ratings or even prior disciplinary history.
Black workers were fired in disproportionate numbers at nearly every pay grade, from clerks to senior executives, according to a source familiar with Silver's study. By contrast, Hispanic workers were no more likely to be fired, and Asian-Americans were fired less often than white workers who were the same in every measurable respect.
Only Native Americans seemed to be fired at rates comparable to blacks, but their numbers were too small to prove a pattern. Women in every racial and ethnic group were dismissed less often than men, the study determined.
The federal government, which many minority workers consider to be a relatively colorblind and fair employer, is America's largest employer of African Americans.
In 1992, the year studied, 360,725 blacks were in the federal work force of 2,175,715. They made up 16.6 percent of federal employees but 39 percent of those fired.
by CNB