MIAMI — For the Ingram clan,
working for the Miami-Dade County transit system has led to regular paychecks, a
steady advance up the economic ladder and even romance.
By driving buses in Miami’s
sun-scraped communities, Richard Ingram and his wife, Susie, were able to join
the ranks of the black middle class, moving with their four sons from a rental
in the down-and-out neighborhood of Overtown eventually into their own house in
central Miami.
Two of their children later
followed them to the county bus depot. The eldest son, also named Richard, met
his future wife there when she was assigned to the same route as his father.
“I tell you, my job is a godsend,”
Richard Ingram Jr. said.
Now his older son, 21-year-old
DQuan, is applying to take the transit system test, hoping to become a
third-generation driver. But Mr. Ingram said that unlike when he was hired,
today the competition is tougher and the jobs are a lot scarcer.
For the Ingrams and millions of
other black families, working for the government has long provided a dependable
pathway to the middle class and a measure of security harder to find in the
private sector, particularly for those without college degrees.
Roughly one in five black adults
works for the government, teaching school, delivering mail, driving buses,
processing criminal justice and managing large staffs. They are about 30 percent
more likely to have a public sector job than non-Hispanic whites, and twice as
likely as Hispanics.
“Compared to the private sector,
the public sector has offered black and female workers better pay, job stability
and more professional and managerial opportunities,” said Jennifer Laird, a
sociologist at the University of Washington who has been researching the
subject.
During the Great Recession,
though, as tax revenues plunged, federal, state and local governments began
shedding jobs. Even now, with the economy regaining strength, public sector
employment has still not bounced back. An incomplete recovery is part of the
reason, but a combination of strong anti-government and anti-tax sentiment in
some places has kept down public payrolls. At the same time, attempts to curb
collective bargaining, like those led by Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, a
likely Republican presidential candidate, have weakened public
unions.
The Labor Department counts half a
million fewer public sector jobs than before the start of the recession in 2007.
That figure, however, understates just how much the government’s work force has
shrunk, said Elise Gould, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a
labor-oriented research organization in Washington. That is because it fails to
account for the normal growth in the country’s population: Factor that in, she
said, and there are 1.8 million fewer jobs in the public sector for people to
fill.
The decline reverses a historical
pattern, researchers say, with public sector employees typically holding onto
their jobs even during most economic downturns.
Because blacks hold a
disproportionate share of the jobs, relative to their share of the population,
the cutbacks
naturally hit them harder.
But black workers overall, women
in particular, also lost their jobs at a higher rate than whites, Ms. Laird
found. There was a “double disadvantage for black public sector workers,” she
said. “They are concentrated in a shrinking sector of the economy, and they are
substantially more likely than other public sector workers to be without
work.”
In Miami’s public schools, many of
the layoffs in recent years have fallen on secretaries, school monitors and
paraprofessionals, said Fedrick Ingram, president of the United Teachers of Dade
and one of the Ingram brothers. His bargaining unit lost more than 6,000
positions since 2009 at the same time the number of students was increasing, he
said.
“During the recession, we had a
really hard time in the school system,” said Mr. Ingram, 41, who was previously
a music teacher, a career spurred on by the music and dancing lessons his mother
insisted he and his brothers take. “They’re still hiring a lot more people part
time so they don’t have to pay benefits. Even for teachers, there’s no tenure
and very little job security.”
Melody Glenn, 47, an elementary
schoolteacher in Dade for 22 years, is a second-generation public sector
employee, earning $55,000 a year. Her mother was a cafeteria supervisor in the
public schools, while her father worked as a mechanic for the Postal
Service.
Now she lives in the middle-income
suburb of Miami Gardens, a few blocks away from Fedrick’s brother Richard. On a
recent Saturday morning, she and Richard stood together on the sidelines,
snapping photos as their 12-year-old sons ran drills in a free training camp
sponsored by the Miami Dolphins.
Ms. Glenn said her 25-year-old
daughter, Courtney, has two part-time jobs, one providing after care in the
schools and the other working for Tri-Rail, South Florida’s commuter rail
system.
“She can’t find a full-time job,”
Ms. Glenn said. “She’s waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting for an
interview right now.”
To make ends meet, they all live
together: Ms. Glenn, her three children and her two grandchildren.
Budget cuts have compounded the
struggles of black communities. “We lost a lot of programs,” Ms. Glenn said,
remembering, for instance, summers in the parks where she spent entire days as a
child, swimming, playing tennis and going on field trips, with lunch and
tutoring thrown in.
Richard Ingram Jr. nodded his
head. “All you had to do was sign up,” he said. “Now the park doesn’t have
staff.” He tries to fill in, running a sports league, chauffeuring his son’s
friends to practices and even supplying cleats when one of them cannot afford a
pair.
The recession
was particularly hard on the black middle class, erasing three decades of
economic gains. A new analysis of foreclosures between 2005 and 2009 by
researchers at
Cornell, for example, found that “mostly black and mostly Latino
neighborhoods lost homes at rates approximately three times higher than white
areas.”
Today, blacks are less likely than
whites to own their own homes or have sizable retirement savings, two of the
primary ways most families accumulate wealth. In 2013, the median white family
had net assets of $142,000 compared with $11,000 for the median black family,
according to the
Pew Research Center. The difficulty in closing that gap is compounded by the
fact that the median income for black households is just 60 percent of that of
whites.
Many employed blacks are stuck in
lower-wage industries that tend to have fewer benefits and higher turnover,
which is one reason public sector jobs — more likely to be unionized and subject
to stricter anti-discrimination protections — have been such a magnet for
blacks.
Thanks to a series of presidential
executive orders and court decisions that began in the 1960s, a rapidly
expanding public sector welcomed blacks and women who had been locked out of
other corners of the labor market. With the federal government paving the way,
state and local governments soon followed, and they continued to expand their
work forces through the late 2000s even as the size of the federal government
stabilized.
“Where else can you get a
middle-class job without a college degree?” asked Bruce Bodner, the lawyer for
the Transit Workers Union Local 234 in Philadelphia. A bus driver there who has
been on the job for more than four years earns an average of $64,000 a year
including overtime pay, he said, and skilled craft workers, like mechanics and
carpenters, can earn more. Nearly 60 percent of the roughly 5,000 people who
work for the city’s transit system, he said, are black.
State and local government workers
earned an average of $28.17 an hour in December 2014, according to the Labor
Department, in addition to a basket of other benefits worth nearly $16 an hour.
(For a typical 35-hour week, that is roughly $51,000 a year, plus $29,000 in
benefits.) Often their paychecks are supplemented with overtime.
In Miami, a bus operator’s base
pay falls between $32,000 and $50,000, without overtime, according to county
figures.
The senior Richard Ingram, now 62,
worked as a porter, short-order cook and roofer before he got a job cleaning
buses with the transit authority in 1979 as a result of a now defunct federal
jobs training program.
After more than 30 years, most of
them spent driving, Mr. Ingram — his uniform a medley of green down to his
avocado-color leather shoes — is now off the bus, checking drivers’ schedules
and paperwork, beginning at 4:30 a.m. each weekday and leaving at 2:30 p.m. He
is thinking of retiring this year with a pension, as his wife, Susie, did in
2013 after 20 years behind the wheel.
Their son Richard, 42, also
remembers a string of low-paying jobs, including stints at Burger King and Jiffy
Lube, and as a security guard and D.J., before he joined the transit system in
2000.
“That was the stability I was
looking for,” said Mr. Ingram Jr., who works a 52-hour week. His younger
brother, Randy, who began driving at the same time, recently switched to a job
as a transit electronic technician, working from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. With children
at home, he found the night shift a struggle, but he wanted the opportunity to
move up.
Supporters of curbs on the
collective bargaining power of government employee unions like the one led by
Mr. Walker, of Wisconsin, said they were aimed at saving taxpayer money and
improving efficiency.
But some researchers and union
officials also see a racial undercurrent in the campaigns.
“With public employment in general
being under attack, it’s really an attack on these communities,” said Mr. Bodner
of the Philadelphia transit workers union, referring to black people.
Florida government workers have
been targeted as well, Fedrick Ingram said, noting that the Republican Gov.
“Rick Scott went directly after the unions here.”
In Miami, the drivers have
resisted attempts to take away benefits, Richard Ingram said, but temporarily
lost some paid holidays, overtime and bonuses.
Still, he is grateful for what he
described as a “a job that you can count on and that could get you what you
wanted if you worked hard enough.”
A version of this article appears in print on
May 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Public-Sector Jobs Vanish, Hitting Blacks Hard
.