The tech and auto worlds have been touting the future of driverless vehicles. Cars that will basically drive themselves while you sit back and relax.
Sounds like an intriguing notion, but Maya Rockeymoore, PhD, founder and CEO of Global Policy Solutions LLC, a social-change strategy firm, and the Center for Global Policy Solutions, a think tank and action organization dedicated to driving society toward inclusion, wonders if this innovation might actually but Black people out of work.
While Rockeymoore contended that driverless vehicles might help alleviate the dangers of driving while Black, she pondered if “the advent of fully autonomous vehicles brings a different set of concerns for African Americans, particularly those who make their living driving delivery and heavy trucks, buses, taxis and chauffeured cars,” she wrote in The Root.
Her organization, the Center for Global Policy Solutions, conducted a study called “Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work” and found that “whites make up the largest number of our nation’s drivers and would be especially vulnerable to job loss in the event of a rapid transition to autonomous-vehicle technology. Nevertheless, with 4.23 percent of Black workers employed in driving jobs, compared with 2.85 percent of all workers in these jobs, Blacks rely on driving jobs more than any other racial or ethnic group and would lose a greater-than-average share of jobs under conditions of rapid automation.”
And these jobs are nothing to cough at. African Americans in such positions earn a median annual wage that is $2,500 more than they earn in nondriving jobs.
The driving industry, while still dominated by men, has seen a boost in Black female drivers as well. “Although men of all races and ethnicities dominate all categories of driving jobs and receive much higher wages (earning 64 percent more than women) across these positions, it’s worth noting that bus-driver positions employ the greatest number of women and that the number of Black female bus drivers (70,000) comes ‘close’ to reaching numerical parity with Black male bus drivers (86,000), even though they are still paid less—earning an annual median wage of $22,000 versus $32,000 for black men—for doing the same job.”
And if these Black women drivers, who may be heads of households, lose their jobs it could have far reaching societal effects.
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