Comparable salary does not equal comparable wealth across races in healthcare

Evidence

And even when black and white healthcare workers earned comparable salaries, there were huge discrepancies in their overall wealth, which Meschede’s report attributes to the lack of access to “asset-building benefits”—the health insurance and retirement benefits that make up one-third of total employee compensation. Black health aides earning 23,100 in income had median wealth of 900; white health aides earning 23,600 had median wealth of 5,300. Among registered nurses, black and white nurses reporting comparable incomes near 55,000 reported median wealth of 20,000 and $93,500, respectively. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 368

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why do benefits alone explain a fivefold wealth gap between nurses earning the same $55,000? Worth chasing the Meschede report for the full mechanism beyond benefits.