Affirmative Action and the Racial Wage Gap.
分析美国男性种族工资差距停滞的原因，考察平权行动政策（尤其是里根时期）的影响，发现EEOC资源削减和种族案件占比下降是关键因素。
Among the many disturbing changes in the structure of wages in recent years, the stagnation in the male racial wage gap may be the most disheartening. Race remains America's oldest and most persistent cause of social and economic disparity, but many of us had been encouraged by the steady and significant economic progress since the Second World War. The recent stagnation challenges that optimism. In this paper, I attempt to identify the reasons why the wage stagnation took place. Many Americans, particularly those in the media and political arena, believe they already know the reason. According to them, this stagnation is the predictable consequence of the affirmative-action policies associated with the Reagan administration. One reason why many believe that the Reagan era deserves principal responsibility for the racial stagnation is the belief that Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) resources were gutted during this period. EEOC inflation-adjusted budgets grew almost 15 percent per year during the 1970's. While there was some slowdown in the last half of the decade, constantdollar EEOC budgets expanded by 7.2 percent per year during the Carter administration, and almost 1,400 budgeted positions were added to the EEOC (a growth of 50 percent) between 1976 and 1980. There is no question that the Reagan era witnessed an abrupt end to the growth in resources that would have taken place. EEOC constant-dollar budgets actually fell during this period, and the number of positions declined by almost one thousand; and as EEOC resources and personnel fell during the 1980's, so did the measurable outputs. The sharp break in the 1980's was not so much in the aggregate level of activity, but in its composition and the resources available per case. Spurred by the passage of the Age Discrimination Act in 1979, age came into its own during this decade. Starting with only 14 cases in the year after passage of the act, the number of age cases rose at an astonishing pace to over 30,000 by 1992. Even without this explosion in age-related charges, the significance of race was declining. While the number of race charges increased by 10 percent after 1980, sex charges were expanding by 40 percent. By 1992, only 40 percent of all cases involved race issues, compared to 85 percent of all charges in 1970 and 61 percent in 1980. The declining importance of race in the EEOC's agenda reflects a more general dilution of race as the core civil-rights labormarket concern. Since 1965, the road to equal rights has become very crowded. The quest for racial justice was the clear moral force behind the civil-rights act with women added in an unsuccessful attempt to scuttle the legislation. Subsequently, Hispanics have begun to rival blacks in their political clout, and protected minority-group status was extended to men over 40, those with a disability, and gays. The end result is that more than three-quarters of today's labor force enjoy protected minority-group status. Blacks are now a minority within the protected minority class, which itself represents the majority.