Split Labor Market

The term split labor market comes from Edna Bonacich's landmark study of how the differential price of labor for competing ethnic or racial groups plays a role in the creation of ethnic antagonism and [Page 892]conflict. Within a capitalist market economy, the combination of key factors such as employers' imperative to maintain a cheap labor supply and competing ethnic groups who draw from diverse and limited resources, in turn, results in a mulfitiered labor market, ethnic antagonism, and sometimes violence between these groups. This important 1972 study moves beyond explanatory models of ethnic antagonism that focus exclusively on religious and linguistic differences, skin color, and cultural learning and examines instead how conflicts are produced by interactions between groups. Split labor market theory reveals how ethnic and racial social conflict is shaped by economic competition, unequal distribution of resources, and class strife and, therefore, fits within a neo-Marxist theoretical paradigm. This theory has been widely applied in historical and comparative sociological analyses that examine ethnic and racial conflicts in relation to the labor market and class stratification and, in particular, in studies of new contact situations with immigrant or migrant laborers as well as racial antagonism during the American postwar period.

Specifically, Bonacich outlines how a split labor market contains differences in the price of labor—that is, the sum cost of wages, recruitment, benefits, and worker strife—for the same occupation of at least two groups of workers. This difference, therefore, is not the result of a direct discriminatory response to a particular racial or ethnic group. Rather, this stratification emerges as an effect of long-term processes and/or social conditions that create inequalities in resource distribution between these groups. Group differences in resources (e.g., economic, political, general knowledge) and motives (e.g., workers' desire to obtain temporary versus permanent work, investment in labor disputes, and willingness to participate in unions) lead to a preliminary gap in the cost of labor. Ethnic groups new to the labor force may, for instance, be willing to accept low-paying or undesirable jobs and be less likely to engage in labor strikes. For the higher-paid labor group, the split labor market provokes fears of being displaced by the new ethnic group and/or accepting lower wages. The lower-paid labor group does not intentionally undermine the higher-paid laborers, but is more effectively exploited by employers because of their relative lack of resources with respect to the higher-paid group. In turn, growing hostilities between these groups produce further antagonism and violence and occasionally result in outcomes driven by the higher-paid group such as ethnic exclusion and the creation of caste systems. While ethnic exclusion policies draw divisions around ethnic members and severely limit their ability to participate in society (e.g., immigration caps), caste systems depend on the labor of ethnic members yet simultaneously exploit the group and debilitate their overall employment (e.g., South African apartheid). Other studies have investigated how employers play an active role in creating ethnic or racial divisions and examined alternative historical outcomes to the split labor market.