Pension Mismanagement Hits Blacks Hardest

The American Interest:

One of the under-appreciated tragedies of black history in the United States is that they have tended to win access to employment in certain sectors of the economy just as those sectors were starting to decline—or, as WRM put it several years ago, “blacks often only get to the gravy train when the locomotive is coming to the end of its run.”
Toward the end of the 19th century, when employers had access to mass low-skilled European immigrant labor, blacks were more-or-less shut out of Northern factory jobs, one of the underpinnings of middle class prosperity. Blacks started to make their way into manufacturing by midcentury, but by the 1970s, this sector of the economy had already peaked.

Ditto for government employment. A key objective—and success—of the civil rights movement was to grant blacks access to middle-class professional jobs in the civil service. In the 1970s and 1980s, blacks flocked to public sector jobs that provided middle-class wages and strong retirement security. But now state and local finances are starting to deteriorate, burdened by can-kicking legislators and mismanaged pension funds.