Arbitraging a Discriminatory Labor Market: Black Workers at the Ford Motor Company, 1918–1947

Abstract

The 1918–47 employee records of the Ford Motor Company provide a rare opportunity to study a firm willing to hire black workers when similar firms would not. The evidence suggests that Ford did profit from discrimination elsewhere, but not by paying blacks less than whites. An apparent “wage‐equity constraint” prevailed, resulting in virtually no racial variation in wages inside Ford. An implication was that blacks quit Ford jobs less often than whites, holding working conditions constant. Arbitrage profit came from exploiting this nonwage margin, as Ford placed blacks in hot, dangerous foundry jobs where quit rates were generally high.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 108 citations exist upstream.