Rayfield Lucas had heard there were well-paying jobs to be had in the shale gas industry. Jobs that offered the opportunity to earn his way to a future more secure than the maintenance and warehouse work he’d done in the past could ever promise. He went for it. A little more than a month after investing in a ShaleNET training program, he had a commercial driver’s license, basic knowledge of shale gas operations and a job with energy giant Halliburton.
“I figure I only have 20 more years to work,”says Lucas, 47, of Hopewell. “From what I hear, the gas industry will be around a lot longer than that.”
His hiring is exceptional not for how quickly he landed a job with no previous experience, but for the fact he joins a local mining, gas and oil industry in which African Americans like him claim only 2 percent of the jobs.
It’s not much better for minority workers in several other southwestern Pennsylvania industries that offer employees the highest average incomes in the labor force.
Minority workers, as a group, tend to be concentrated elsewhere. They claim their largest share of jobs in several of the industries in which their incomes fall well below the average for all sectors. And when ranked by overall employment volume and average wages, minorities in the Pittsburgh MSA find themselves near the bottom of the benchmark regions.
Employment Patterns
Taken together, minority workers hold 20 percent of the jobs in administrative and support services, making that industry the most diverse in the Pittsburgh MSA. Those jobs range from marketing and office work to security, maintenance, cleaning services and waste disposal.
Minority workers in that sector have an average monthly income of $2,761 – one of the lowest of all employment sectors, according to 2013 U.S. Census Bureau LEHD data.
The average income for minority workers across all North American Industry Classification System employment sectors in the southwestern Pennsylvania labor market is $4,007 a month. That is one of the highest overall average incomes of minority workers across the benchmark regions, although minorities in the Pittsburgh MSA are less likely to take advantage of such incomes given the small share of the jobs they claim.
The lowest average incomes are seen among workers in the accommodation and food service industry, where the second-highest concentration of minority workers in the Pittsburgh MSA is found. Minorities claim 16 percent of the jobs in that sector, which includes work in restaurants and hotels. Their average income is $1,442 a month.
Minority workers do much better in the health care and social assistance sector, where they hold 14 percent of the jobs. Minority workers in those jobs have an average income of $4,560 a month, which is higher than the average among their white co-workers.
The region’s lowest concentrations of minority workers are found in the construction, mining, oil and gas industries. African American, Asian and Hispanic workers together hold only 5 percent of those jobs.
Minority workers in the region’s mining, oil and gas industries have an average income of more than $8,300 a month.
Minority construction workers have an average income of $4,213 a month, a little above the average income of all job sectors. Minorities are also less likely to work in the utilities industry. Those who do hold utility jobs have the second-highest monthly incomes of minority workers in the region overall.
“When you see the potential for occupational segregation or clustering into lower-wage jobs that don’t have a career trajectory, then you are going to see little growth in income and wealth through time for certain populations,” says RAND Sociologist Gabriella Gonzalez. “These trends could have repercussions for those specific families and the economic growth of the region as well.”
It also raises the risk that children of workers whose incomes are low and opportunities few will adopt a dim view of their own chances of success in the economy and will be left with little knowledge of the range of jobs and careers available and of the paths that lead to them. “It promotes an intergenerational cycle of clustering into certain types of jobs, which doesn’t have to happen,” Gonzalez says. “That is potentially what we are seeing in Pittsburgh.”
Such consequences fall more heavily on some minority workers than others.
Racial & Ethnic Differences
While the region’s African American, Hispanic and Asian populations each occupy a thin slice of the workforce, the jobs they’re more likely to work and the incomes they earn can vary. And the differences can be significant.
Asian workers, for example, are more concentrated in several industries in which employee incomes are among the highest, such as in the professional, scientific and technology sector, and management, wholesale trade and health care. But Asians are not immune to economic disparities. The poverty rate of Asians in the Pittsburgh MSA averaged 13.4 percent from 2006-10, American Community Survey data suggest. While that is the lowest rate of any minority group, it is higher than the 9.3 percent of whites who live in poverty.
The industries in which Hispanic workers are most concentrated range from education to accommodation and food service. While they earn less than whites in most job sectors, they do better than their white co-workers in a few, including mining, gas and oil, education, health care, and in hotel and food service jobs.
African Americans are the largest single racial and ethnic minority group, making up 8.2 percent of the general population in southwestern Pennsylvania. They also have the deepest roots and a long history of struggling to claim their share of jobs, particularly those that offer careers with opportunities to advance their position and income.
They are, for example, the only minority workers with average incomes lower than their white coworkers in every industry. An estimated 59 percent of African American adults are in the regional labor force. They claim their largest share of jobs in administrative and support and waste management services, where workers earn some of the lowest monthly incomes. They are also heavily concentrated in the accommodation and food service industry, where the average employee income is the lowest of all sectors.
African Americans do much better in health care and social work, where they hold 10 percent of the jobs and earn better-than-average incomes. Even then, the average income for African American workers in those jobs is much lower than what their white co-workers earn.
A Quality of Life Issue
Nowhere is the racial divide in southwestern Pennsylvania more apparent than in household income and the ability to make ends meet.
More African Americans report earnings in the lower income brackets than other races and fewer African Americans earn enough to put them in the highest brackets, according to data from the 2011 Pittsburgh Regional Quality of Life Survey done by Pittsburgh Today and the University Center for Social and Urban Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
Nearly 18 percent of African Americans in the region say they often or always have trouble paying monthly bills for basic needs, such as housing and utilities – more than twice the hardship rate residents of other races report. African Americans are much less likely to own a house. And they are more likely to skip a doctor visit in the past year because they couldn’t afford it and to live in neighborhoods they consider to be less safe than others.
“The quality of life is so very different, and that’s because of the jobs we are working. African Americans are not well represented in the [industry sectors] where there are opportunities for growth and high incomes,” says Esther Bush, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh. “Every time they come out with a study that says Pittsburgh is the most livable city, we say, most livable for whom? That is an honest question.”