ABSTRACT
The past two decades have seen significant economic gains for native-born blacks. The labor force participation rate for adult black males has actually decreased over the past ten years, and there appears to be an increasing disparity between educated middle-class blacks and black high school dropouts who never secure a firm hold on the labor market. The comparison between blacks and immigrants in the construction industry is similar to the comparison in restaurants. In construction, both as workers and as owners, blacks have had more success in gaining access to the more formal and institutionalized sectors of the industry, and even in those sectors, a major problem for blacks is the extent to which informal processes and networks pervade the industry's supposedly rule-bound functioning. In contrast, recent immigrants are found more in the open-shop sector where they appear to be better able than native blacks to use informal contacts and community networks to establish themselves in the industry.
