Shifting Gears

By: Kimbriell Kelly This is the first installment in a three-part series, for Chicago Matters: Beyond Borders, to explore the impact of immigration in Chicago and the region.

Chicago Matters is an annual public information series made possible by The Chicago Community Trust, with programming by WTTW 11, Chicago Public Radio, the Chicago Public Library, and the Reporter.

For more information, visit www.chicagomatters.org.

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Lessie Gowdy knew what her boss really meant when he told her to come back when her health was 100 percent. After working 31 years as a machine operator at the Tootsie Roll Industries, Gowdy, who had been struggling with her bad back, packed her customary brown pants, cotton hair net and white shirt with the company logo and began collecting unemployment benefits.

Gowdy, a 53-year-old from West Garfield Park on the city's West Side, had been with the candy company since 1975, when about half of workers at its factory were fellow African Americans. By the time she left, Latino workers dominated the workforce, she said. Many of them were willing to work for less and sided with management's wishes during union negotiations. Some black workers, meanwhile, left the company for higher wages, while others either retired or were dismissed for one reason or another.

Last year, Gowdy joined their ranks. She managed to find a job at a chocolate factory but found herself laid off a few months later. She looked for other manufacturing jobs, but there were no promising leads, she said. So she did what many other African Americans are doing: She found a job in the service sector, providing home health care for seniors.

Gowdy's story is an example of what has been typically interpreted as evidence that immigrants, many of them undocumented, are taking over jobs that African Americans could otherwise get.

But a Chicago Reporter analysis of census and employment data suggests that there are other issues at play. Since 1980, for instance, unemployment rates for African Americans in Illinois have remained relatively steady-like Gowdy, they are finding jobs.

And there has been a major shift in where African Americans are working. Gone are the days when a vast majority of blue-collar black workers held jobs in manufacturing, transportation and other manual, low-skilled industries. In manufacturing, for instance, the Reporter analysis shows that there were more than 57,000 fewer black Chicago workers in 2000 than in 1980-a 64 percent decline. Now, more African Americans are holding jobs in the service sector, working at restaurants and bars or providing health and day care services. Between 1980 and 2000, one census category of industries labeled "outpatient, home health and other health care center "saw an increase of more than 8,200 African-American workers-a jump by 300 percent. Similarly, about 5,800-or 160 percent-more African Americans were working in "child day care services" in 2000 than in 1980.

Some experts say the forces of a global economy are the cause of this shift. In the 1980s, they say, businesses began moving their operations from the Midwest-then the heartland of the manufacturing industry-to the South, and eventually to Mexico, in order to produce their products cheaper by hiring workers who cost them less. As Mexico became less competitive, companies moved further into South America and later to China and India.

The total number of manufacturing jobs, for example, dropped by about 49 percent in Chicago between 1991 and 2006, from 164,354 to 84,445, shows the Reporter analysis of the Illinois Department of Employment Security data.

"Globalization and outsourcing of jobs-it is a very simple formula," said Zaragosa Vargas, professor of labor history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We export jobs. And we import workers. That's the United States."

Sylvia Puente, director of the Center for Metropolitan Chicago Initiatives of the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies, said the negative impact of a global economy, felt particularly among African Americans, is often mistakenly attributed to immigration.

It is "not because people are competing with blacks but because globalization has caused a global shift," she said. "The real culprit here, if we're going to have a culprit, is corporate interests." But others aren't convinced that immigrants are having little effect on the economy.

Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington D.C.-based think tank that advocates for controlled immigration policy, said the Reporter's analysis does not take into account the fact that there are millions of natives who aren't captured in the statistics.

Among them are people who have given up looking for work and part-timers who would like full-time jobs. Official unemployment rates ignore these groups, defining the unemployed only as people actively looking for a job and counting as employed anyone who works at least one hour each week. This segment of potential workers could use the jobs that immigrants now hold, he said.

Camarota added that his studies have shown that looking at the overall unemployment rate can be misleading. The national rate, as of March, is 4.4 percent, but when the number is broken down by industries, the rates can be in the double digits for fields in which immigrants occupy a high share of the workforce-like construction, farming, and building cleaning.

"There is significant evidence that immigration is adversely affecting natives at the bottom end of the labor market," he said.

For Gowdy, the matter is more than just an economic debate. She lasted only two weeks as a caretaker for seniors but, in January, managed to defy the odds and found a job again in manufacturing-at the same chocolate factory. Her new job, however, is proof that the industry she has toiled in for more than 30 years is no longer the same. At Tootsie Roll, she was earning $16.63 an hour; she's now paid less than a half that amount. Now, her bills are behind. "When I went to pay my gas bill and [if] it was $600, I [used to] pay $600. Now I pay on it whatever I can," she said.

Still, Gowdy's determined to stay put. "I want to stay in the factory until I get too old or can't work," she said. "It's what I know."



Rodney Wright Sr. was finally starting to make inroads. The 47-year-old from the South Side's Woodlawn neighborhood had done 11 stints in prison, and that's been his main obstacle in finding a stable job. But he got a break in 2000 and found a job working as a security guard for a construction company.

But Wright said he was fired when his boss found a Latino worker who was willing to do the job for less. The boss "told me, 'Economics. Why should I give you $750 a week when I can get this guy for $250 a week?'" he said.

Today, Wright is still looking for permanent work. "I've been trying to go back to the manufacturing industry, but nobody wants to give me a job," said Wright, who used to work in a factory making laminations. "There aren't many jobs left. It wasn't like that 15, 17 years ago."

Wright's complaint that he lost his job to Latinos is a common one, said Rey López-Calderón, executive director of Alianza Leadership Institute on the Southeast Side. "It's real but it's misplaced tension. We tend to attack each other," said López-Calderón, whose agency provides leadership education on worker issues.

Ari Glazer, director of the San Lucas Workers Center, which organizes day laborers, said the businesses are the ones that have created the fight over jobs. "They want to take the focus off of them as the exploiter," she said. "Instead of the African-American worker saying, 'I'm not finding work because this agency is discriminating against me or is violating my rights,' they'll say, 'I'm not finding work because these damn Mexicans are taking these jobs.'"

Leon Fink, distinguished professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the sharp decline of manufacturing jobs has been one of the biggest changes in the last few decades, but the resulting tension is nothing new. "The question of job competition among different racial groups is not a new one," he said. "Whether you're talking Irish, Italian, Poles, Jews to African Americans-it's almost an age-old problem or aspect of Chicago life."

Patricia Watkins, executive director of the TARGET Area Development Corp., an economic development group on the South Side, said the black community needs to adopt to the new economy. She came of age after the Civil Rights Movement-when the mostly white and male-dominated steel mills were reaching out to include women and African Americans. At 16, she recalls getting a job at a mill earning $3.17 an hour-roughly the same as her mother, who had a college degree and was the director of respiratory care at a nearby hospital. They both drove new cars, Watkins a 1974 Buick Century and her mother a Chrysler. "The jobs were just available. That's not happening anymore," said Watkins, who is black. "Now we have to choose what we're going to become."

Part of the problem, Watkins said, is that African Americans are still being trained for the kinds of work that have disappeared. She said they need better access to more training that will put them in a position to get hired into in-demand jobs that pay more. "I don't like when people say [immigrants] are taking black people's jobs," she said. "What are [they] saying? We're only taking the lower-skilled jobs that make no money? We need to go higher than that."

Corey Barnes, organizing director for the Coalition of African, Arab, Asian, European and Latino Immigrants of Illinois, is providing a gathering place to bring the groups together through conversations about their collective needs in the face of a proposed immigration bill.

The bill, called The STRIVE Act sponsored by U.S. Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez of Chicago, allows for additional high-skilled jobs to be filled by immigrants through H-1B visas. These "are high-tech jobs that African Americans could apply for," Barnes said. "I thought, 'What if we had training to prepare people to apply for jobs?'"

"We have to start advocating around [this issue], instead of fighting over this little sliver of jobs," Watkins added. "We're not competing with the local community. We're competing with a global economy. And the sooner we realize that, we can be prepared for it."