Racial Equality Without Equal Employment Opportunity? Lessons from a Labor Market for Professional Athletes

Abstract

One rationale for Equal Employment Opportunity legislation and its enforcement is that market forces alone are insufficient to counteract discriminatory effects in labor markets. Whether highly competitive markets diminish the extent of invidious outcomes for minorities is a question that deserves rigorous empirical scrutiny. This chapter uses data from a professional labor market, that for major league baseball players, to examine the competition-equality hypothesis. While this market is relatively small, it contains both cross-sectional and longitudinal variation in the degree of effective market competition. The findings show that minorities are in a better position relative to whites when labor market competition is more intense. However, this outcome is itself a contingent one: It only operates for a subset of players who are in ‘noncentral’ positions, i.e. position players. Finally, the existence of high levels of competition in the baseball labor market is itself a phenomenon that is enacted and sustained within a web of rules, agreements, and negotiations.