ABSTRACT
One of the greatest areas of controversy is joblessness. Even throughout most of the prosperous 1990s, African American redundancy rates came to fully double those of whites, sometimes two and a half times as great. The year that provided the one exception was 1991 when recession in many white-collar sectors hit Caucasian employees rather hard and that proved to be fairly short lived. Gathering information about unemployment is one way of trying to learn whether there is discrimination in the workplace. Perhaps another is by comparing income and earnings, or the amounts of money received over set periods of time, by race. In the early part of the 1990s Washington, D.C., seemed willing to give consideration to minority arguments. Apparently concerned at accusations that blacks, women and others were not getting their fair share of promotions at the workplace, President Bush agreed to the establishment of a Federal Glass Ceiling Commission in 1991.
