ABSTRACT
Consequently, using the labor utilization framework of Clifford C. Clogg and Teresa A. Sullivan, this chapter presents several indicators of black underemployment in the nonmetropolitan South. It provides the distributions of underemployment for nonmetropolitan areas of the South for 1970, 1975, 1980, and 1985. The South, particularly the rural South, was a backwater region according to virtually every economic indicator. Black employment conditions in Southern rural areas have not been elevated to the generally more favorable conditions found elsewhere. Rather, black employment conditions elsewhere have become increasingly like the depressed employment conditions historically found in the rural South. Black underemployment in the rural South, although substantial, appears to have converged somewhat with that of blacks living elsewhere. The Labor Utilization Framework is a hierarchical measurement scheme in which underemployment categories are ordered by "hardship," with workers evaluated sequentially from most to least hardship.
