Sociologist Jennifer Laird was researching unemployment among Mexican immigrants when she came upon some interesting numbers on black workers in the public sector and employment effects of the Great Recession. It piqued her interest and so she decided to keep digging.
She found that while public sector employment had long served as a source of stable employment among black Americans, often enabling mobility into the middle class, downsizing during the Great Recession disproportionately hurt black workers and resulted in greater racial disparities in the public sector. Specifically, Laird, a…
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