The Transportation Trap: Unveiling The Invisible Hand That Steers Black Workers Into [Unsafe] [Low-Quality] Jobs

Heat waves can be lethal. Each year, an estimated 67,000 Americans visit emergency rooms due to heat exposure. Hundreds die.

But few bear the brunt of extreme heat like the delivery drivers racing to deliver the millions of products we purchase online directly to our doorsteps.

Many of them are Black.

In fact, while Black workers make up just 13% of the U.S. workforce, they comprise 20% of the transportation industry, which has been famously slow to incorporate heat-related safety precautions—like air conditioning—into delivery vehicles and warehouses. According to BLS data, “transportation incidents” were the leading cause of death for Black workers, who already die on the job at higher rates than all other workers. The concentration of Black workers in transportation jobs stems, in part, from the shift to e-commerce during the record-setting post-COVID economic recovery. Since the end of 2019, the economy added 1.6 million jobs in transportation and material moving, and about 20% of those jobs have been filled by Black workers.

Transportation jobs have, in part, attracted Black workers because they are among the few that pay well without requiring education beyond high school. According to the BLS, the median annual wage for transportation workers was $40,050, a significant upgrade over the salaries of the 43% of frontline Black workers in retail, leisure and hospitality, or low-end healthcare roles, which typically pay less than $30,000 annually.

Articles with frothy titles like Jobs prospects for Black workers have never been better in The Wall Street Journal; Black workers are enjoying a boom in America in The Economist and Black Americans ‘trade up’ to higher paying jobs amid labour market squeeze in Financial Times extol the progress of Black workers in the transportation industry.

But there is another side to this story.

It has taken one of the strongest economies on record to create the conditions for Black workers to secure jobs in the sector.

After all, pent-up pandemic demand played a big role in motivating employers to drop discriminatory hiring practices in the fierce talent competition.

Additional vacancies were created by the retirement of older white workers in the Great Reshuffle, where (mostly white) workers used the hot labor market to upgrade to better jobs.

For all the extraordinary developments that have created opportunities for Black workers in the transportation industry, they are still overrepresented at the bottom of the sector. It’s not that Black workers’ gains in transportation should not be celebrated. But the quality of a job is not solely determined by compensation.

Transportation offers a powerful example of the ways in which the invisible hand of occupational segregation steers Black workers into jobs that may pay more but also provide insufficient protection from unsafe conditions or disruption because of artificial intelligence or automation.

Transportation jobs are, after all, also on the front lines of automation risk, with investment in autonomous vehicles expected to exceed $100 billion in the coming years. Forty states are now testing autonomous delivery systems. Experts predict that autonomous delivery services will be widely available within 5-10 years.

Against that backdrop, it becomes clear why identifying and disrupting patterns of occupational segregation is key to boosting economic mobility. Wage gains and job safety may, in fact, be inversely correlated. AI risk may not track with short-term opportunity.

Setting the stage for durable and sustainable gains over time means not just steering workers toward opportunities that are easy to quantify today, but doubling down on the sort of training that can create more durable pathways in the future. It will challenge us to think twice about worshipping at the altar of increased wages, and instead ask critical questions about what quality jobs look like, and the factors that allow workers to translate their skills and efforts into not just short-term wages, but long-term upward mobility.