• Nationwide, workers of color account for about 38 percent of the workforce, but they are underrepresented in many higher-paying jobs such as legal occupations, the sciences, management, business operations, and finance.
• Women comprise nearly half (48 percent) of the workforce but are critical to the healthcare system, making up the vast majority of workers in healthcare support occupations (85 percent) and healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (75 percent). They are also highly overrepresented in office and administrative support, personal care and service, and education instruction and library occupations.
• Immigrants comprise 17 percent of the workforce in the United States and are critical to the nation’s food supply accounting for 43 percent of workers in agricultural occupations.
• Looking at detailed occupations within an occupational group reveals further and often starker patterns of segregation. For example, within healthcare support occupations, more than half (65 percent) of home health aides are people of color, while about three-quarters of physical therapist assistants and aides as well as veterinary assistants and lab animal caretakers are white.

Current-day patterns of occupational segregation in the United States are rooted in deep legacies of racist employment practices. The long-term employment of workers of color and immigrant workers in low-wage, low-quality jobs — factory work, mining, farming, domestic labor, and custodial and food services — is central to American labor history, as the social and political vulnerability of these workers made them easier to exploit. The concentration of people of color (particularly Black and Latinx workers) in more precarious industries is a practice that has persisted, even as the US economic base has shifted from agricultural to industrial to postindustrial over the past two centuries. Enduring patterns in housing segregation and educational inequity, along with exclusionary hiring and retention practices in some high-wage workplaces, continue to wall out many workers of color from lucrative sectors. Building an equitable labor market requires eliminating structural and systemic barriers to the best-compensated occupations, while simultaneously ensuring high standards of job quality for all workers.

• Invest in robust, disaggregated data collection and reporting systems and utilize granular insights on differential outcomes to drive systems change.

• Grow new good jobs by making smart investments in infrastructure projects, supporting economic development strategies to grow high-opportunity industries, and helping entrepreneurs of color start and scale up their businesses.

• Reduce employment barriers for people with records by "banning the box" — eliminating questions about conviction history on job applications (for private as well as public employers).

• Connect unemployed and underemployed workers to the jobs created by new development through targeted local hiring, community workforce agreements, and community benefits agreements.

• Invest a portion of infrastructure investments in job training.

• Implement sector-focused workforce training and placement programs and apprenticeships that create pathways to good jobs for workers with barriers to employment.

• Invest in innovative training and credentialing models that democratize the economic benefits of a bachelor’s degree to a wider swath of the workforce, such as paid-on-the-job training and portable, stackable credentials and microcredentials to facilitate upward career transitions.

• Enact strong language access policies requiring interpretation and translation services for English-language learners and facilitate naturalization among green card holders.

• At the federal level, institute a federal jobs guarantee, dedicate 1 percent of infrastructure investments to a fund for inclusive job and contracting supports, set aside a share of public contracts for businesses owned by people of color to mirror area demographics, reform the Community Reinvestment Act to expand access to fair financial products and services for entrepreneurs of color, and ensure that releases from federal prison receive essential identification documents to support job attainment.

• Reports: Race and the Work of the Future: Advancing Workforce Equity in the United States; How Covid-19 Is Affecting Black and Latino Families’ Employment and Financial Well-Being; 10 Principles for a Federal Job Guarantee; Exploring Targeted Hire; Despite Continued Job Growth, Long-Term Unemployment Persists; Hiring Bias Black And Latino People Face Hasn't Improved In 25 Years
• Data: Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker (Low-Income Employment); Metro Monitor; State of Working America; Understanding Long-Term Employment