The principal objectives of this paper were to identify variations in the quality of a worker's employment in explaining the sources of job satisfaction and their applicability to subsamples of the workforce. More importantly, utilizing racially distinct subsamples allowed for the results to suggest which of two traditional approaches for predicting the attitudes of black workers was more likely to be appropriate. Within a "personality-deficit" approach to the understanding of black workers, little correspondence was expected between measures of Quality of Employment and measures of Job Satisfaction. The associations between these two measures were expected to be lower among black than among white workers. A social systems approach, however, predicted a more direct relationship between working conditions and job attitudes. It was expected that among black workers, one's job satisfaction would correspond to the amount of his or her Quality of Employment and that there would be no difference between the races in the associations between Quality of Employment and Job Satisfaction. With regard to overall Job Satisfaction and Quality of Employment, the results provided no support for a "personality-deficit" approach. The findings indicated that the lower Job Satisfaction of black workers paralleled their poorer Quality of Employment. For both black and white workers Quality of Employment explained a substantial amount of the variance in Job Satisfaction scores. (Author)