Question

How will we lessen discriminatory effects in relation to wages?

In the novel, We Wanted Workers, in the chapter titled, "The Self-Selection of Immigrants" George Borjas explains the differences in wages between immigrants and people from different ethnicities compared to native, White Americans. When comparing the average Mexican worker, Black worker, and native, White worker, wages differ dramatically, with the White worker making more money on average. Borjas discusses how differences in education and skill level attribute to some of the differences in wage that we witness across ethnicities as Mexican individuals are less likely to achieve as much years of schooling as a White person. However, when looking at Black Americans, differences in education and skill level only account of 1/3 of the difference in wages. This leads us to believe that there is a discriminatory factor in play when it comes to wages for Black Americans.

Throughout America's history, Black individuals have had to fight for their rights after breaking from the chains of slavery that White people put them under. Although some may believe that every American, no matter age, sex, gender, or other characteristics, have the same rights, however that could not be more untrue. This is because of the way society discriminates towards certain groups, one in particular being Black Americans, as we have evidence of as seen through the wage differences reported in the novel. Another group that is being unfairly compensated compared to its counterpart are women. Women still receive only $0.81 to every dollar that a man makes. Under the same conditions, with similar educational backgrounds and skills, women still receive less than a man because they associate with the female sex. These discriminatory effects are unfairly placing people in certain groups at a disadvantage and they need to be eliminated within our society.

What are some ways that you think would help lessen the discriminatory effects to wages that people of certain groups realize in our society? Is this a solution of policy or is this a broader change of cultural norms and society as a whole?

Answer 1

Ans.

Discriminatory Effects to wages

The ratio of wages for black workers to white workers rose substantially in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, but has not changed much since then. The ratio of wages for female to male workers changed little through the 1970s, but has risen substantially since the 1980s. In both cases, a gap remains between the average wages of black and white workers and between the average wages of female and male workers. Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In one of the largest class-action sex-discrimination cases in U.S. history, 1.2 million female employees of Wal-Mart claimed that the company engaged in wage and promotion discrimination. In 2011, the Supreme Court threw out the case on the grounds that the group was too large and too diverse to consider the case a class action suit. Lawyers for the women regrouped and are now suing in smaller groups. Part of the difficulty for the female employees is that the court said that local managers made pay and promotion decisions that were not necessarily the company’s policies as a whole. Consequently, female Wal-Mart employees in Texas are arguing that their new suit will challenge the management of a “discrete group of regional district and store managers.” They claim these managers made biased pay and promotion decisions. However, in 2013, a federal district court rejected a smaller California class action suit against the company.

On other issues, Wal-Mart made the news again in 2013 when the National Labor Relations Board found Wal-Mart guilty of illegally penalizing and firing workers who took part in labor protests and strikes. Wal-Mart has already paid $11.7 million in back wages and compensation damages to women in Kentucky who were denied jobs due to their sex.

We possibly could call the different patterns of family responsibilities discrimination, but it is primarily rooted in America’s social patterns of discrimination, which involve the roles that fathers and mothers play in child-rearing, rather than discrimination by employers in hiring and salary decisions.

Our society is moving through a set of significant transitions, and depending on how the lens is
focused, different components of this transition are evident – economic restructuring and the
reductions to public sector expenditure, major shifts in demographics that in some societies are
presenting new challenges for living together, the severity of environmental and climate change, and the increasing recognition of the inadequacies of many of our existing governance structures.Changes of this scale are all taking place at a time when there is a strong political force for reform and modernisation. Although such an array of issues can be construed as ‘cultural’ in the broadest sense,there also needs to be a closer examination of the impacts of such profound economic and societal shifts on the cultural sector itself, provoking a re-shaping of its current models. Some might say that further development of the cultural sector will be primarily a question of its own ability for adaptation and invention.

Social and cultural norms are rules or expectations of behavior and thoughts based on shared beliefs within a specific cultural or social group. While often unspoken, norms offer social standards for appropriate and inappropriate behavior that govern what is acceptable in interactions among people. Social and cultural norms are highly influential over individual behavior in a broad variety of contexts, including violence and its prevention, because norms can create an environment that can either foster or mitigate violence and its deleterious effects.
Different social and cultural norms influence how individuals react to violence. Researchers have hypothesized that the social and cultural norms that lead to the tolerance of violence are learned in childhood, wherein a child experiences corporal punishment or witnesses violence in the family, in the media, or in other settings . Witnessing violence in childhood creates norms that can lead to the acceptance or perpetration of a multitude of violent behaviors or acts, but it also may provide a potent point of intervention for violence prevention efforts. Although research in this area is limited, many preliminary studies show promise in actively influencing or altering existing social norms in order to reduce the occurrence of violence within a given population.