High Technology, Work, and Inequality in Southern Labor Markets

Abstract

The relationship among high-technology industrialization, skill levels, and economic inequality is the subject of considerable controversy among social scientists and policymakers. We explore these relationships in this article, drawing on classic post-industrial, skill upgrading, and deskilling debates. Using several types of local labor markets in the South, we compare high-tech workers to other workers with respect to industrial, occupational, and earnings distributions. Our findings suggest that much of the conflicting evidence is due to differences in definitions of high technology and to the local labor market context in which high-tech industries are located. The earnings distributions of some high-tech workers exhibit considerable inequality and suggest that deskilling may be occurring. Other high-tech workers have more equal earnings distributions that may be a product of skill upgrading. We also find that minority labor force participants—women and blacks—experience more earnings discrimination in high-tech industries than in other industries. We attribute these findings to variations in local labor market contexts and to the widely differing stages of product cycles that high-tech encompasses.