Shifting gears: frustration over not finding jobs has caused workers from different groups to blame each other. Some say the global economy and corporate interests are to blame.

Lessie Gowdy knew what her boss really meant when he told her to come back when her health was 100 percent. After working 31 years as a machine operator at Tootsie Roll Industries, Gowdy, who had been struggling with her bad back, packed her customary brown pants, cotton hair net and white shirt with the company logo and began collecting unemployment benefits.

Gowdy, a 53-year-old from West Garfield Park on the city's West Side, had been with the candy company since 1975, when about half of workers at its factory were fellow African Americans. By the time she left, Latino workers dominated the workforce, she said. Many of them were willing to work for less and sided with management's wishes during union negotiations. Some black workers, meanwhile, left the company for higher wages, while others either retired or were dismissed for one reason or another.

Last year, Gowdy joined their ranks. She managed to find a job at a chocolate factory but found herself laid off a few months later. She looked for other manufacturing jobs, but there were no promising leads, she said. So she did what many other African Americans are doing: She found a job in the service sector, providing home health care for seniors.

Gowdy's story is an example of what has been typically interpreted as evidence that immigrants, many of them undocumented, are taking over jobs that African Americans could otherwise get.

But a Chicago Reporter analysis of census and employment data suggests that there are other issues at play.

Since 1980, for instance, unemployment rates for African Americans in Illinois have remained relatively steady--like Gowdy, they are finding jobs.

And there has been a major shift in where African Americans are working. Gone are the days when a vast majority of blue-collar black workers held jobs in manufacturing, transportation and other manual, low-skilled industries. In manufacturing, for instance, the Reporter analysis shows that there were more than 57,000 fewer black Chicago workers in 2000 than in 1980--a 64 percent decline. Now, more African Americans are holding jobs in the service sector, working at restaurants and bars or providing health and day care services. Between 1980 and 2000, one census category of industries labeled "outpatient, home health and other health care center" saw an increase of more than 8,200 African-American workers--a jump by 300 percent. Similarly, about 5,800--or 160 percent--more African Americans were working in "child day care services" in 2000 than in 1980.

Some experts say the forces of a global economy are the cause of this shift. In the 1980s, they say, businesses began moving their operations from the Midwest--then the heartland of the manufacturing industry--to the South, and eventually to Mexico, in order to produce their products cheaper by hiring workers who cost them less. As Mexico became less competitive, companies moved further into South America and later to China and India.

The total number of manufacturing jobs, for example, dropped by about 49 percent in Chicago between 1901 and 2006, from 164,354 to 84,445, shows the Reporter analysis of the Illinois Department of Employment Security data.

"Globalization and outsourcing of jobs--it is a very simple formula," said Zaragosa Vargas, professor of labor history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We export jobs. And we import workers. That's the United States."

Sylvia Puente, director of the Center for Metropolitan Chicago Initiatives of the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, said the negative impact of a global economy, felt particularly among African Americans, is often mistakenly attributed to immigration.

It is "not because people are competing with blacks but because globalization has caused a global shift," she said. "The real culprit here, if we're going to have a culprit, is corporate interests."

But others aren't convinced that immigrants are having little effect on the economy.

Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for controlled immigration policy, said the Reporter's analysis does not take into account the fact that there are millions of natives who aren't captured in the statistics. Among them are people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would like full-time jobs. Official unemployment rates ignore these groups, defining the unemployed only as people actively looking for a job and counting as employed anyone who works at least one hour each week.

This segment of potential workers could use the jobs that immigrants now hold, he said.

Camarota added that his studies have shown that looking at the overall unemployment rate can be misleading. The national rate, as of March, is 4.4 percent, but when the number is broken down by industries, the rates can be in the double digits for fields in which immigrants occupy a high share of the workforce--like construction, farming and building cleaning.

"There is significant evidence that immigration is adversely affecting natives at the bottom end of the labor market," he said.

For Gowdy, the matter is more than just an economic debate.

She lasted only two weeks as a caretaker for seniors but in January managed to defy the odds and find another job in manufacturing--at the same chocolate factory. Her new job, however, is proof that the industry in which she has toiled for more than 30 years is no longer the same. At Tootsie Roll, she was earning $16.63 an hour; she's now paid less than half that amount. Now, her bills are behind. "When I went to pay my gas bill and [if] it was $600, I [used to] pay $600. Now I pay on it whatever I can," she said.

Still, Gowdy's determined to stay put. "I want to stay in the factory until I get too old or can't work," she said. "It's what I know."

Rodney Wright Sr. was finally starting to make inroads. The 47-year-old from the South Side's Woodlawn neighborhood had done 11 stints in prison, and that's been his main obstacle in finding a stable job. But he got a break in 2000 and found a job working as a security guard for a construction company.

But Wright said he was fired when his boss found a Latino worker who was willing to do the job for less. The boss "told me, 'Economics. Why should I give you $750 a week when I can get this guy for $250 a week?'" he said.

Today, Wright is still looking for permanent work. "I've been trying to go back to the manufacturing industry, but nobody wants to give me a job," said Wright, who used to work in a factory making laminations. "There aren't many jobs left. It wasn't like that 15, 17 years ago."

Wright's complaint that he lost his job to a Latino is a common one, said Rey Lopez-Calderon, executive director of Alianza Leadership Institute on the Southeast Side. "It's real but it's misplaced tension. We tend to attack each other," said Lopez-Calderon, whose agency provides leadership education on worker issues.

Ari Glazer, director of the San Lucas Workers Center, which organizes day laborers, said the businesses are the ones that have created the fight over jobs. "They want to take the focus off of them as the exploiter," she said. "Instead of the African-American worker saying, 'I'm not finding work because this agency is discriminating against me or is violating my rights,' they'll say, 'I'm not finding work because these damn Mexicans are taking these jobs.'"

Leon Fink, distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the sharp decline of manufacturing jobs has been one of the biggest changes in the last few decades, but the resulting tension is nothing new. "The question of job competition among different racial groups is not a new one," he said. "Whether you're talking Irish, Italian, Poles, Jews to African Americans--it's almost an age-old problem or aspect of Chicago life."

Patricia Watkins, executive director of the TARGET Area Development Corp., an economic development group on the South Side, said the black community needs to adapt to the new economy. She came of age after the Civil Rights Movement--when the mostly white and male-dominated steel mills were reaching out to include women and African Americans like her. At 16, she recalls getting a job at a mill earning $3.17 an hour--roughly the same as her mother, who had a college degree and was the director of respiratory care at a nearby hospital. They both drove new cars, Watkins a 1974 Buick Century and her mother a Chrysler. "The jobs were just available. That's not happening anymore," Watkins said. "Now we have to choose what we're going to become."

Part of the problem, Watkins said, is that African Americans are still being trained for the kinds of work that have disappeared. She said they need better access to more training that will put them in a position to get hired into in-demand jobs that pay more. "I don't like when people say [immigrants] are taking black people's jobs," she said. "What are [they] saying? We're only taking the lower-skilled jobs that make no money? We need to go higher than that."

Corey Barnes, organizing director for the Coalition of African, Arab, Asian, European and Latino Immigrants of Illinois, is providing a gathering place to bring the groups together through conversations about their collective needs in the face of a proposed immigration bill.

The bill, called The STRIVE Act sponsored by U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of Chicago, allows for additional high-skilled jobs to be filled by immigrants through H-1B visas. These "are high-tech jobs that African Americans could apply for," Barnes said. "I thought, 'What if we had training to prepare people to apply for jobs?'"

"We have to start advocating around [this issue], instead of fighting over this little sliver of jobs," Watkins added. "We're not competing with the local community. We're competing with a global economy. And the sooner we realize that, we can be prepared for it."

Power Points

Today, many Latino immigrants occupy jobs in low-skilled industries, such as manufacturing, that have historically been the sources of employment for African Americans. This has been interpreted by many as evidence of the negative impact immigration has on native workers. But it may reflect more about the change in the country's workforce than about the effects of immigration, a Chicago Reporter analysis shows.

The Reporter found:

* Despite a large influx of immigrants, unemployment rates for African Americans in Illinois have stayed relatively steady between 1980 and 2000.

* There has been a major shift in where African Americans are finding jobs. Black workers no longer hold as many jobs in manufacturing, transportation and other manual, low-skilled industries as they used to. Instead, more African Americans are in the service sector, working at restaurants and bars or providing health and day care services.

For more information about the people and organizations we write about, go to www.chicagoreporter.com

Global effects

Between 1980 and 2000, the following industries saw the largest increases and decreases in employment numbers among African Americans living in Chicago,

Top Five                                            Jobs

Restaurants/bars                                    +8,982
Home health care                                    +8,208
Day care                                            +5,811
Nursing care facilities                             +5,266
Housing/emergency services                          +4,477

Bottom Five                                         Jobs

Manufacturing--printing services                    -9,634
Hospitals                                           -9,298
Mail order houses                                   -5,234
Manufacturing--audio/video                          -4,875
Postal service                                      -4,377

Source: The U.S. Census Bureau; analyzed by The Chicago Reporter

Methodology

The Chicago Reporter reviewed Public Use Microdata Samples for Illinois from the 1980 Census and the 2000 Census. The files contain records for a sample of all housing units, showing the full range of responses to long-form census questionnaires. The questionnaires included questions on race, ethnicity, ancestry, age, sex, income, education, occupation, citizenship status, languages spoken at home, means of travel to work, travel time to work and other subjects.

However, the questionnaires from 1980 and 2000 varied in the questions asked and the range of available responses. To identify shifts in work industries, the Reporter reviewed industry categories for both data sets and matched nearly 200 categories. In some instances, multiple categories in one data set were combined to match an equivalent in the other. The Reporter analyzed the matches for changes in the racial and ethnic composition of industries from 1980 to 2000.

The Reporter analyzed the 2000 data for occupations and characteristics of workers living in Chicago and eight neighboring counties to test stereotypes about various racial and ethnic groups. The Reporter also analyzed the data for indicators of work ethic and reliability, like average hours worked per week and length of travel time to work.

Stereotype-busters

STEREOTYPE: All cab drivers are immigrants.

FACT: Immigrants represent more than two-thirds of all cab drivers in Chicago. But their share is significantly smaller in the suburbs and nearly nonexistent in the rest of the state.

Immigrant cab drivers

Chicago--67%
Suburban Chicago--43%
Downstate Illinois--1%

Note: Table made from bar graph.

STEREOTYPE: All contrucstruction workers, cooks and dishwashers are Mexican.

FACT: Though Mexicans make up 16.9 percent of Chicago's labor force, nearly half of dishwashers, a third of cooks and a quarter of construction workers are Mexicans. The disparities are even larger among dishwashers and cooks in the suburbs, where Mexicans are less than 10 percent of the labor force.

Occupation                 Percent Mexican

                         Chicago        Suburbs

Chef/cook                  33%            38%
Dishwasher                 49%            53%
Construction worker        27%            12%

STEREOTYPE: Mexicans are hard workers.

FACT: If longer work hours were the measurement of "hard work," Mexicans come up short against an average Chicagoan. Among full-time, year-round workers, Mexicans work an average of 42.8 hours each week, while all non-Mexicans in Chicago work an average of 44.3 hours.

STEREOTYPE: Black people are lazy workers.

FACT: Despite often being labeled as "lazy," African Americans are more willing than any other group to work at odd hours and to communte longer to a workplace. Black workers in Chicago and its suburbs are nearly three times more likely than white workers to have a job that requires them to leave their home between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. African Americans in Chicago are also three times more likely than white workers to commute for longer than two hours, though black commuters in the suburbs are almost half as likely to do so than their city counterparts.

Scholars disagree on effects of immigration

Over the years, a considerable number of studies have focused on whether immigrants take job opportunities from native workers. Some researchers, such as George J. Borjas, an economics and social policy professor at Harvard University, argue that immigration is detrimental to the U.S. economy, especially for unskilled workers. Others, such as David Card, an economics professor at University of California at Berkeley, maintain that the negative effect of immigration on unskilled workers is negligible. Below are summary examples of academic arguments.

"The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market"

Author: David Card

Year: 1990

The study examined how an increase in immigration affected Miami's low-skilled workforce when more than 125,000 Cubans emigrated from the Port of Mariel, Cuba, to Miami in 1980. With about half of these Mariel immigrants remaining in the area, Miami's economy amassed approximately 45,000 new workers--a 7 percent increase in its labor force. Still, Card concluded that "the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled non-Cuban workers."

But Miami's unemployment rate rose from 5 percent in April 1980 to about 7 percent the following July, and some attributed this increase to the arrival of Mariel immigrants. Card, however, studied labor markets in four comparable cities--Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston and Tampa-St. Petersburg--and found that they followed a similar pattern to that of Miami. To Card, the findings suggest that Miami's economy was able to absorb the increase in immigration fairly rapidly with little damage.

Card also noted that a constant flow of immigrants to Miami during the 20 years leading up to the Mariel Boatlift prepared it for an influx of workers who spoke little English. The city also had a strong industrial economy to absorb these low-skilled workers.

"immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks"

Authors: George J. Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon H. Hanson

Year: 2006

Using census data from 1960 to 2000, the authors reached what they acknowledge might be a controversial conclusion: that immigration is strongly linked to higher unemployment and incarceration rates among African-American men between 18 and 64.

The study showed that a 10 percent "immigrant-induced" increase in the supply of one skill group means a decrease in the employment rate by 2.4 percentage points and a spike in the incarceration rate by almost a full percentage point for black men.

The authors theorize that the demand for labor decreases with an increase in immigration, and that has forced some natives out of the labor market into crime. They also say it is "reasonable to assume" that natives are more likely to engage in illegal activities than immigrants, who could face deportation as well as incarceration.

The researchers acknowledge that, without immigration, unemployment and incarceration rates for African Americans would still have risen in the studied time period. But they concluded that, even after adjusting for other factors, immigration still had a "numerically important" effect on these figures.

"The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration"

Author: National Research Council

Year: 1997

At the request of a Congressionally appointed Commission on Immigration Reform, the National Research Council, a nonprofit group of scholars dedicated to advising the federal government on scientific issues, assembled a team of experts to study the effects of immigration. These experts concluded that, overall, immigration betters the American economy.

Their study found that immigration expands the pool of available workers, particularly in low-wage, low-skill job categories, and this leads to higher production and profit. This is a boon for the highly skilled natives, who are needed to oversee the growth in workers and production; a rise in demand for their skills encourages a rise in wages.

Those who compete with immigrants for the low-level jobs, meanwhile, are seeing their wages go down. But the study found that the impact on the wages is "small--possibly reducing them by only 1 or 2 percent."

--Michelle Sibery

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