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Women and People of Color Down for the Count in Jobless Recovery |
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In this cross-post from Huffington Post, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says women and people of color are being hit hardest by the recession.
A close look at the unemployment figures shows that while white males are taking it on the chin in this recession, women and people of color are down for the count.
Although, in this recession, unemployment is rising faster for whites than for African Americans, the fact is that the jobless rate for minorities is still significantly higher than that of whites and has been for a long time. And with this recession looking to be long and deep, these higher rates of unemployment could have dramatic consequences for economic security, homeownership and child poverty rates, among other things.
Testifying last month before a U.S. House committee, Algernon Austin, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), pointed out that in this recession, America’s racial and ethnic minorities are hurting more than the average worker.
For example, in September 2009, the white unemployment rate reached a high of 9 percent. However, the African American unemployment rate was more than 70 percent higher-15.4 percent.
For the 11 months prior to the start of the recession in December 2007, black workers’ unemployment rate averaged 8.2 percent. It was not until April of this year that the white jobless rate reached 8 percent.
Even in “good” economic times, minority communities suffer from rates of unemployment that are often double those of white workers.
At the same time, Hispanic Americans have experienced the greatest percentage increase in their unemployment rate. The Hispanic unemployment rate was 6.2 percent in December 2007. It more than doubled to reach 12.7 percent in September of this year.
When you factor in workers who are not counted in the official unemployment figures because they are too discouraged to look for work, the numbers go even higher–reaching 20.9 percent for African American males, 14.7 percent for Hispanic males and 11.8 percent for white males in 2007, according to Austin’s analysis.
Add in the underemployment rate of workers who would like to work full-time but only have part-time work and the picture gets even bleaker. Nearly one in four Hispanics (23.8 percent) and African Americans (23.4 percent) are unemployed or underemployed.
The prospects for young workers of color are even worse. Just 10 years ago, 60 percent of 16-24-year-olds had a job. Today, just 48 percent do, the lowest rate of young worker employment since World War II. Young workers are nearly twice as likely to be unemployed as the overall population–18 percent, compared with the overall unemployment rate of 9.8 percent. The jobless rate soars to 27.3 percent for young African American workers and 21.3 percent for young Hispanic workers.
For women, who actually have a lower jobless rate than men, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. Working women also have been hurt by manufacturing job loss during this recession. The impact is often worse for women because many are single parents.
A new report by the public policy research group Demos shows when women lose manufacturing jobs, they rarely manage to get back into jobs with similar pay or benefits.
One reason women workers are so adversely affected by manufacturing job loss is that they are concentrated in industries that have been drastically affected by the surge in cheap imports over the past decade, such as textiles, apparel and leather. Women make up more than 50 percent of the total workforce in these industries. Faced with high levels of foreign competition, these jobs have had high levels of trade-related job displacement.
The authors estimate the industries with the highest percentage of women workers lost nearly 500,000 jobs between 1999 and 2008. And when women do get new jobs, they still are hurting because they get paid less. Women are still paid only 77 cents to every dollar paid to a man, and with the price of everyday necessities going up, women who support families are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.
Lisa Belkin, writing in the New York Times, says women also are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted.
This economic crisis is a jobs crisis, and there can be no strong and sustainable recovery until employment begins to grow. The Obama administration’s aggressive actions have clearly brought us “back from the brink” of what might have been a second Great Depression, but we will need a lot more sustained and expanded fiscal stimulus and direct job creation if we are to see a robust recovery.
The Obama administration and Congress should continue to extend unemployment benefits and bolster aid to budget-constrained states and cities. Further, the administration must speed public investment in education and training, repairing our nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and building a greener economy.
Working Americans, male and female, of all races and ethnicities, also need the Employee Free Choice Act to ensure that when our economy rebounds women and people of color will be able to share in the recovery.
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An immediate consequence of unemployment is that workers are unable to keep up payments on credit card debt, further compounding the misery resulting from unemployment. Here from today’s WSWS details this aspect of unemployment.
(Read the full article here:)
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/debt-o14.shtml
The American way of debt: Turning a profit by preying on the poor
By Nancy Hanover
14 October 2009
The increasingly desperate financial crisis facing large sections of the American working class has been writ large in statistics. In September, 15.1 million people were unemployed, with over 5.4 million out of work for six months or more. Counting discouraged and involuntary part-time workers, the unemployment figure in America is now 17 percent, while those still holding a job are down to an average of 33 hours a week, a record low.
Millions in the US are facing impossible levels of personal debt, rising credit card delinquencies, utility shutoffs, foreclosures and homelessness.
But a section of business has turned the growth of poverty into a gold mine. Standing behind the big banks are several layers of an increasingly complex and parasitic finance industry. In the middle of this food chain are the professional debt buyers and securitized investors. At the bottom are the collection agencies, the scavengers who relentlessly pursue individual workers.
The idea that women earn 77% of what males earn for the same job belies the fact that women do not get the same jobs. In high technology, a white male age 40 may be on his second management promotion, whereas a woman with high technology education and expertise will be laid off and will be unemployed. So the real difference is $140K for the males in management versus poverty for women. This includes women with Ph.D.s and Master’s degrees in science, who are stuck in temporary jobs like technical writing or substitute teaching and tutoring and who are locked out of the opportunity to work in the fields of their education. This is why a government public works program is necessary with the opportunity for people to work not just at menial jobs, but in the occupations they trained for. Our government has spent a lot of money on public education and universities for the education of women but then women are denied the opportunity to utilize their education. It is not a glass ceiling. It is a brick wall.
What I don’t understand is the Union continuing to support Amnesty for 15-20 million illegals. I’m unemployed right now and would gladly take one of those jobs Americans supposedly won’t do. No other Country in the World admits as many legal immigrants as the United States. I say it’s time to put a moratorium on all immigration until all Americans who want one has a job. We also know the Democrats and the Unions hierarchy will never support this. Why I don’t know, maybe someone can enlighten me.
The single best, cheapest, and easiest way to put more people back to work or to put them in better jobs is to stop the flood of immigrants and work-visa holders that are coming into the US daily. We allow over a million legal immigrants into the US yearly, many of whom are coming as extended family of current legal immigrants. We are granting 125,000 new temporary and permanent work permits a month. This conveyor belt of competition for jobs is idiocy when according to the NYT there are 6 job-seekers for every job opening right now.
It will do our un/underemployed (True rate of un/underemployment is now 17%.) absolutely no good to create more jobs in the US and then import workers into the US to take them.
If the President and Congress really cared about unemployed - and underemployed - US workers, they would call at least a temporary halt to bringing more foreign workers into the US. The problem is that they really don’t care about US workers.
Maybe they will in 2010??
Don’t blame everything on immigrants folks. After all, unless you are Native American, your ancestors were immigrants. Most people come here hoping to make a better life for themselves and their children. As for folks saying that they would take a job done by immigrants, I for one don’t believe they know what that might mean. Would they be willing to work in the fields for very little money and under terrible conditions? Would they be willing to be dishwashers or janitors? These are minimum wage positions and no health care benefits are part of the employment package. Be careful what you hope for. We are in a global economy whether we want to accept this or not. Most of the manufacturing jobs that went elsewhere will not come back. Time for a strategy change on the part of all.
To Retired Nurse, when I was a teenager who do you think did those jobs? I hauled hay,chopped cotton,drove tractor, pitched watermelons, etc,etc,. There was no laying up watching TV,playing on the Computer or smoking dope. Maybe you were one of the ones with the proverbial sliver spoon in your mouth. The kids I was raised with worked for what they got. We also partied hard and could read and write when we finished High School. The immigrants that came over years ago wanted to be Americans, we also needed people back then. Today contrary to popular belief we don’t need people. If anything we need to get rid of people. Namely law breaking illegals, who could care less about this Country. A Retired Nurse? Maybe you should plan on unretiring as many of the health professional I know plan on doing something else if Obama gets his health care. ENJOY!!
GWF is correct I don’t know about retired nurse but I did farm labor,janitorial and restuarant work when I was young.I finally got into an apprenticeship program that taught me a good trade but I learned how to work and the value of labor unions in those other jobs.I’m not against immigration I’m against those that feel it’s alright to jump ahead of people willing to do what it takes to come here legally.There is no excuse for what they do they are not special or more dissevering than legal immigrants.Ask any Native American what happens when you can’t control immigration.
First of all, one can hardly blame an immigrant for coming here to work; however, what I am saying is that we need to stop the conveyor belt bringing them in because the biz interests are using them to replace US workers and drive down wages. Look below for a few well researched papers:
Jobs American Won’t Do?
http://www.cis.org/illegalImmigration-employment
Broader Measures of unemployment
http://www.cis.org/WorseThanItSeems
How a raid made working conditions better for US meatpacking workers
http://www.cis.org/SmithfieldImmigrationRaid-Unionization
And last but not least, how our very own federal government protects illegal aliens while not informing us that they have taken our SS#’s, causing potential identity problems
http://www.cis.org/IdentityTheft
If people knew the extent to which massive immigration is impacting their lives and livelihoods, there would be riots in the street.