Hispanic and Latino HR and Labor Relations
Hispanics, Latinos and Latins are fast transforming the character of the American workplace. Consider a few tantalizing facts:
- Hispanics are almost a decade younger (9.5 years) than the general population
- More than a third of Hispanics are younger than 18 years old
- Fertility rates of Hispanics are higher than the natural replacement level
- Hispanic women who attain graduate degrees earn 15% more than their non-Hispanic counterparts
These changes have not unfolded without comment. “It is a turning point in the nation’s history, a symbolic benchmark of some significance,” Roberto Suro, then-director of the Pew Hispanic Center, said of the emergence of Hispanics as the largest minority, displacing the historic position held by African Americans. “If you consider how much of this nation’s history is wrapped up in the interplay between black and white, this serves as an official announcement that we as Americans cannot think of race in that way any [longer].” Other voices have been raised in acknowledgement—and alarm. “The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Hispanics have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami— and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant values that built the American dream,” Samuel Huntington, of Harvard University, wrote in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
These demographic changes are also of profound socioeconomic consequence, simply because, unlike other immigrant groups, Hispanics have reached a “tipping point,” economically mandating that Spanish be one of the languages of business, and through higher birth rates, fundamentally changing the character of American society in this century.
Hispanic Economics is uniquely qualified to provide strategic solutions to help managers, supervisors and other administrators understand, and be effective managers of, their Hispanic and Latino employees.
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