End of an era? Managerial losses of African American and Latinos in the public sector

•African American and Latino managers are progressively losing racial wage parity with Whites in the public sector.•African American and Latinos are losing the public sector as a long-standing occupational niche.•Latinos are losing the public sector their occupational niche more quickly than Latinos.•The sizes of racial wage gaps in the public sector are larger among men than women.

In this article, we examine whether “new governance” reforms in public sector work over the last two decades have generated managerial wage losses for African Americans and Latinos. Findings from Integrated Public Use Micro-Series data across three time points indicate that the new “business logic” encompassing, most notably, increased employer discretion has progressively disadvantaged African American and Latino men and women relative to their White and gender counterparts. Indeed, for both African Americans and Latinos in the managerial ranks, relative parity in wages that were witnessed in the public sector progressively eroded between 2000 and 2010. Qualifications to these findings indicate that levels of inequality become pronounced for African Americans, and more so among men than women. We discuss the historical niche status of public sector work for racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. and the importance of conducting further analyses of the public sector because of its fluid nature as a locus of racial stratification.