Among many findings of a study titled, "A Generation of Widening Inequality: The State of California, 1979-2006," is the fact that income has become greatly concentrated among the state's wealthier citizens and reduced for its low-wage workers in that 27-year span.
And the case of Latino workers appears to have gotten significantly worse.
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Among Latinos, whites, and the umbrella category of "Asian and Other," Latinos were the only group to suffer a loss in the purchasing power, or real-world value, of what they get paid for their labor. Asian and other racial groups enjoyed an increase in their hourly wage of 25.4 percent.
Researchers spent a year on the report and relied on U.S. Census data, particularly the Current Population Survey, for its wage analyses.
Another way to look at the numbers would be to examine the hourly wages themselves, independent of percentages. In that case, Latinos made an average of $13.33 per hour in today's money back in 1979, and only $12.31 per hour in 2006. Whites, meanwhile, made $18.67 in today's money back in 1979, and make $21.09 per hour today.
"It's really shocking," said Alissa Anderson-Garcia, the California Budget Project's primary report author. "We did a report a few years ago, focusing just on the Bay Area, and we found the same thing."
Anderson-Garcia said that controlling the data by education narrows the gap, but only slightly.
When Latinos and whites each have at least a bachelor's degree, Latinos make 77 cents on the white dollar - which shows only a 6 percent gain on what all Latinos made in comparison to the white dollar in 1979.
Anderson-Garcia said that two-thirds of California's Latino population had a high school education or less, while less than a quarter of California's white population fit into the same educational slot.
"The fact that we still see a gap means that we still have other things to consider," Anderson-Garcia said. Occupation, industry, number of years of experience - "even discrimination, something that we can't measure very well," she added - might all affect the study's stark numbers.
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