Progress Illinois

Wage growth among African-American workers has taken a double hit since 1979 due to the growing black-white wage gap and overall wage stagnation, according to a new paper from the Economic Policy Institute. 

The left-leaning think tank finds that median hourly wages for black workers “could be 87 percent higher in the absence of racial and class inequality.”

Researchers examined the 1979 to 2015 time period, during which “overall median wages did not track productivity growth and racial wage gaps did not close, but instead widened.”

“This kept wage growth for black workers much, much lower than it would have been otherwise,” the report adds.