Maybe Oprah Winfrey knew something about workplace dynamics that other people didn't.
Winfrey, of course, is the multimillionaire founder of a media empire that includes not only her syndicated talk show but also O magazine, a members-only website, books and even weight-loss camps. By choosing self-employment over working for a TV station or network -- she began her career as a news anchor in Nashville -- Winfrey may have avoided a pitfall for many black women in the workplace, namely, being stuck in their jobs. Black women are less likely to be promoted than males and white women, according to a group of labor economists and human resource specialists who recently gathered at Wharton.
Even as two big labor unions decided this week to defect from the AFL-CIO, claiming that it had failed to stop declining union membership or push hard enough for labor reform, participants in a conference entitled "Careers and Career Transitions: New Evidence for a New Economy" debated the alchemy of promotion -- who gets it, when and why. The conference was organized by Wharton's Center for Human Resources and sponsored by career transitions firm DBM. Scholars presented evidence from different places -- Fortune 500 companies, call centers, Canadian firms -- and parsed it in various ways. But two findings arose repeatedly: Minority females are less likely than others to win promotions, and white males are more likely to.
Other studies probed the dynamics of promotion -- including the concept of the "fast track," the effect of corporate restructurings on professional advancement and the likelihood of promotion for insiders vs. recent outside hires, among other things. The goal of the conference was to understand how modern labor markets operate -- nearly everyone agreed that today's economy appears to allow for more employee mobility among firms -- and what this means for workers.
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