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INTRODUCTION
Demographic shifts in the ethnoracial profile of the East Bay have raised concerns about uneven access to public services along the fault lines of language. On May 8, 2001, in an effort to facilitate limited English speakers' access to critical municipal service, Oakland--the largest municipal of Alameda County, California--became the first American city to implement a bilingual employment policy in public administration via the passage of the Equal Access to Services Ordinance (EAO) (Oakland City Council 2001). The legislation mandates that important public administration documents be translated and bilingual staff be hired in public contact positions for languages reaching a minimum population threshold. Prior to this date, comparable legal statutes had been operative at the state-level and, broadly so, for federal government. For example, California's Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act (DABSA) was passed in 1973 to urge state and local public agencies serving a sufficient number of limited English-speaking persons to hire bilingual staff.
Since the passage of the act, political controversy regarding the implementation (and lack thereof) of EAO policy has arisen from both inside and outside the City of Oakland administration. One political camp ("discriminatory non-enforcement") questions the effectiveness of municipal efforts in implementing EAO policy, while the other political camp ("discriminatory enforcement") asserts that the implementation of EAO policy has resulted in an uneven loss of jobs for monolingual English workers. This study concerns itself with identifying the labor market effects of implementing the bilingual employment policy on Alameda County workers. In particular, this study evaluates the labor market impact such policy has on the employment profiles of: 1) Spanish and Chinese bilingual speakers--the intended targets of the policy; and 2) Black monolingual English speakers--the unintended targets of the policy.
Using IPUMS-USA data from the 5% 2000 Census and the 1% 2005-2011 American Community Survey, this study conducts a trend analysis to examine the intended and unintended changes in ethnoracial segmentation in several labor market outcomes pertinent to bilingual employment policy implementation with a special focus on how the policy affected Black and Brown people. Specifically, within this study, the likelihood of having jobs with local government employers, public contact jobs within local government, and public administration jobs within local government is considered to be a function of...