Latino progress in jobs hits blue-collar ceiling

You’ve heard of the glass ceiling (women) and the bamboo ceiling (Asian Americans). It turns out there’s a blue-collar ceiling for Chicago Latinos.

So says a new study from DePaul University’s New Journalism on Latino Children project and the Latino Policy Forum. They analyzed Hispanic representation in 480 occupations identified by the U.S. Census Bureau and found that both Mexican immigrants and many of their U.S.-born counterparts are overrepresented in low-skilled, low-pay manufacturing, food service, and construction industries.

Considering that Latinos represented three of every five new entrants to the region’s labor force over the past decade and that their dismal high school graduation rates — a mere 59 percent — are colliding with a time when our city is turning toward a knowledge-based economy, this is very bad news.

Bad for Hispanics, you ask?

Well, sure, no community wants to see its future rooted in jobs that either seem gone forever (new construction) or are well on their way towards extinction (manufacturing, once Chicago’s strength), especially since we’re talking about people who came to this country for economic opportunities.

Nevertheless, this lack of upward mobility must be particularly painful for parents who made countless sacrifices to come to Chicago.

This report — reinforcing others — found that at least 40 percent of U.S.-born Mexican Americans are working in the same low-paying, low-skilled industries as their Mexico-born immigrant counterparts, a trend that hasn’t budged in a decade. In fact, Latinos of Mexican origin have the lowest intergenerational mobility of any minority groups in the Chicago area.

But this isn’t just a Latino problem; it’s a Chicago regional work force problem.

Though media coverage of the Hispanic community gives the impression it’s solely concentrated in the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods, Latinos are scattered across the city and suburbs, comprising about 22 percent of the Chicago region’s population — double a decade ago. READ MORE