Princeton Weekly Bulletin November 9, 1998

Finding work is harder for blacks

By Mary Caffrey

Professor of Sociology Marta Tienda finds plenty of food for thought in the relationships among minority status, education, fertility, poverty and unemployment. Like many others, she has found limitations in the data used to sort out these links. But in her forthcoming book, "Color and Opportunity: Welfare, Work and the Urban Underclass," Tienda tries to break through those limitations to show that when the effects of one's background and place of residence are stripped away, race matters.

Marta Tienda (r) with her assistant, Pamela Bye-Erts (photo: Susan Geller)

Color, or minority group status, Tienda says, "limits economic opportunity -- that is, chances to work and earn a living wage -- more than can be attributed to declining employment options."

Tienda, director of the Office of Population Research, came to Princeton in 1997 from the University of Chicago, where she spent 10 years as a professor of sociology and three as department chair. At Chicago she was given access to data from the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago. The survey's principal investigator, William Julius Wilson (now at Harvard), used the data for his most recent book, When Work Disappears.

Tienda says Wilson's argument, that the effects of concentrated joblessness differ from those seen among the poor in general, acknowledges the point that she has explored in greater detail: A person's color significantly affects opportunity to obtain work.

An important thread through Tienda's work is the distinction between between poor people, who may or may not live among others who are poor, and poor places, which are areas with high levels of poverty. This comparison revealed how Chicago's poor blacks fare worse than whites, Puerto Ricans or Mexicans.

Tienda started with maps of the city of Chicago prepared by Jeff Morenoff that analyzed census tracts first by race, then by employment status. This step allowed Tienda to identify how the characteristics and employment behavior of residents changed as a neighborhood's poverty level increased. Given Chicago's high level of segregation, Tienda had good information about those who live in the highest concentrations of poverty. This data was compared to national data about the poor, who live in many types of neighborhoods.

The analysis showed that Chicago's poor blacks are very highly segregated, both from other racial groups and from jobs. "Hispanic and other ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods do not exhibit the extraordinary levels of joblessness and economic deprivation that characterize Chicago's black neighborhoods," said Tienda.

Many of her findings deflate stereotypes about the poor and their use of welfare. She challenges the argument that a disproportionate share of welfare goes to urban ghettos -- in fact, Tienda found that, with respect to welfare behavior and employment, those in concentrated poverty behave no different from the general urban poor with similar characteristics. Contrary to stereotypes, she found that among the jobless, black fathers were more willing to work -- and to settle for a lower wage than white fathers.

Who gets welfare

Tienda found that racial and ethnic differences in welfare participation were linked to family background. Was the recipient poor as a child? Did she have a child before marriage? At the national level, racial and ethnic differences in welfare participation disappeared when these factors were taken into account. But that was not true in Chicago, the most highly segregated city in the country. Tienda found that black and Puerto Rican women in poor neighborhoods were more likely than white and Mexican women to use welfare.

One might assume that a "welfare culture" has developed in certain Chicago neighborhoods, Tienda said. "But an alternate hypothesis is that the observed inequities may also reflect ever more limited job opportunities. Specifically, black and Puerto Rican residents may face more formidable labor market barriers than Mexican immigrants, who allegedly have been crowding out native minority workers from the low-wage market."

Wanting to work

The racial and ethnic differences in Chicago caused Tienda to examine whether various groups preferred welfare to work. All groups said they preferred work, and the vast majority of those on welfare said high welfare use reflected limited job prospects. Yet Tienda wanted to look further. Had the replacement of higher paying manufacturing jobs with lower paying service jobs affected willingness to work?

"Exactly what do respondents mean when they say they want a job?" Tienda asked. "Will they accept a job if offered one?"

Tienda found that willingness to work differed by race. One hundred percent of jobless Mexican fathers wanted to work five days a week, followed by black fathers at 90 percent, Puerto Ricans at 82 percent and whites at 75 percent. Among jobless mothers, the differences were even sharper, with white mothers the least willing to work.

Survey respondents were asked what wages they would accept, that is, their "reservation wage." Whites reported the highest reservation wage; blacks, the lowest. When Tienda examined actual wages paid to similarly educated men, she found that blacks earned 60 percent of what whites earned.

"For Chicago's inner-city residents, there is a clear penalty for color," she said.

Early childbearing

Having a child before marriage proved to be the most important link to welfare use, Tienda found in research with Haya Stier of Tel Aviv University and Renata Forste of Brigham Young. The sequence of entry into family life has lasting effects, Tienda said; mothers who later marry the child's father do not completely erase the effects of having the child before marriage.

Early childbearing has been on the rise among all racial groups, but especially among black inner-city residents.

"Because minority mothers are more likely than white mothers to have been reared in poverty, it is difficult to disentangle the influence on family formation patterns of poverty and minority status," Stier and Tienda wrote in 1997. "Yet this is precisely the distinction needed to support claims about the emergence of ghetto-specific and race-specific behavior."

Again, the difference between poor people and poor places was crucial. Stier and Tienda isolated the effects of race and place of residence by comparing highly segregated Chicago to national urban samples. Results showed that both played a role. Among low-income white and Hispanic urban mothers, about a third had a child before marrying; among blacks, the rate was nearly 80 percent. The Hispanic community was not a monolith: Puerto Rican women were far more likely than Mexican women to have a child out of wedlock.

Thus, for nonblack mothers, poverty was the factor that influenced the likelihood of having a child before marriage. Among Chicago blacks, the concentration of poverty was a factor, but clearly not the only one. "Chicago black mothers exhibit a faster rate of entry to family life via birth than black mothers nationally, but also compared to nonblack mothers residing in poor Chicago neighborhoods."

The connections among race, poverty, fertility and employment are just one area that interests Tienda. She is also the author of The Hispanic Population of the United States (with Frank Bean, 1987) and coeditor of Divided Opportunities (1988) and The Drug Connection in U.S. Mexican Relations (1989).

Before going to Chicago, Tienda spent 11 years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she taught in the departments of sociology and rural sociology. She earned her undergraduate degree at Michigan State University and her PhD at the University of Texas. She became director of the Office of Population Research on July 1.