The economy has experienced
12 straight months of job growth above 200,000 and the overall unemployment rate has dropped 5.5 percent. But the recovery isn’t such great news for black Americans.
The unemployment rate for black people was 11 percent in the fourth quarter of last year and was
10.4 percent in February. Both rates are still
higher than the peak the national unemployment rate reached at the worst point of the recession — 9.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
While the national unemployment rates at the end of 2014 for white and Hispanic workers were both within 1 percentage point of where they were before the recession hit, the black unemployment rate was still 2.4 percentage points higher than at the end of 2007, before the crisis. State-level data draws an even starker picture. In Wisconsin, the black unemployment rate was nearly 20 percent last year, and 26 states and Washington, DC saw double-digit unemployment rates for their black residents. The highest the white rate reached in any state, on the other hand, was 7 percent in Nevada.
Things don’t look poised to get all that much better for black Americans. The overall unemployment rate is projected to fall to 5.4 percent by the end of this year, and white unemployment is expected to remain around 4.5 percent. But black workers are expected to have a 10.4 percent rate by the end of the year. While that’s a good deal higher than the 8.6 percent rate they experienced before the beginning of the recession, black Americans have experienced double-digit unemployment for
most of the last half century.
And while the black unemployment rate has been double that of the white rate for many recent months, the black rate has
always been at least 60 percent higher than the white rate since the data was first collected in 1972.
Black workers face many economic hurdles, but one is certainly racial discrimination. One experiment sent out equivalent résumés to hundreds of low-wage, entry-level jobs from white, black, and Latino applicants and found that equally qualified black applicants were
half as likely as as white ones to get a callback or an offer, while a black applicant with no record did just as well as a white applicant just released from prison. Another found that employers
discriminate against hiring black workers in service jobs because they anticipate their customers not wanting to be served by them. White people in positions of power are also
likely to pass on opportunities to their mostly white networks, leaving people of color out.
Policy choices have also hurt black Americans. They were
30 percent more likely to be working in public sector jobs before the recession hit, but after it devastated state budgets and
someRepublican governors have chosen to institute huge tax cuts at the expense of public spending, 665,000 government jobs have been shed since the beginning of the recovery period, 581,000 of them at the state and local level.
Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/03/26/3639201/black-unemployment-recession/
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