INTRODUCTION

For many U.S. workers, the past twenty years have been an era marked by declining real wages and benefits, rising income inequality, a reduction in bargaining power relative to employers, and poorer working conditions. Through lived experience and media analysis, many workers know that corporate America's efforts to restore profitability and compete effectively have dramatically transformed the economic landscape. Businesses have relocated (“capital flight”), increased the use of contingent and “home” work, engaged in active union busting, and expanded the service sector in their quest to lower costs and restore profit levels.

This chapter focuses on the race and gender consequences of economic transformation for blacks and whites of both sexes. Specifically, we both document and seek to explain the divergent labor market outcomes for white women and African Americans during the 1970's and 1980's. Both our research and our critical reads of current scholarship affirm the importance of research and policies that use gendered race-based analysis (i.e., sort race-ethnic groups by gender) and racial gender-based discussions of restructuring and labor market outcomes (i.e., disaggregate sex groups by race, ethnicity, and nationality). Few analyses to date have examined systematically restructuring's impact on the race–gender distribution of earnings; fewer still have addressed the gender and race contours of unemployment.