Dead-end jobs and the American occupational structure: The workplace experiences of high school educated African American women, 1970--2000

This dissertation challenges the dominant frameworks used to understand the structure of opportunity available to African American women workers throughout the postindustrial era. Although many studies on African American female employment exist, it turns out that we have yet to make sense of their structure of occupational opportunities because the majority of these studies focus on the employability of the poorest and the most affluent segments of the population. I address gaps in how we understand the occupational opportunities available to African American women workers by limiting the analysis to working class African American women and accessing the structure of their job holding patterns throughout their employment career.;This is a mixed method study that consists of (1) a quantitative and (2) a case study component. The quantitative component of the study, which draws from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), helps illustrate the structure of occupational opportunities available to high school educated African American women workers across age cohorts between 1970 and 2000. The case studies of urban transit and department store jobs in the San Francisco Metropolitan area offer situated examples of job change in occupations that have significantly increased their share of black female workers over the period of study. These case studies benefited from interviews with African American women employed as urban transit operators and department store clerks, who revealed the obstacles they encounter and the strategies they use during this time of immense work restructuring.;Through this study, I illustrate the complexity of postindustrial era workplace inequality by documenting the extent to which workplace inequality is tied to cross group differences in returns to education and skill, as well as cross group differences in job holding patterns over time. As a group, working class African American women workers did experience a positive change in the type of occupational opportunities available to them. However, given the emergence of postindustrial era workplace innovations in worker surveillance, industry specific shifts in the organization of work, and the influence of intersecting race and gender prejudice within workplaces, evidence from this study illustrates that this progress wanes over time.