Report: Blacks Lag Behind Others in Slow Economic Recovery
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While the economic recovery is moving slowly for everyone, African Americans, especially teens, are trailing far behind other workers, according to a new report.
“The Black Labor Force in the American Recovery,” released today by the U.S. Department of Labor, shows that last month the unemployment rate for blacks was 16.2 percent; down only 0.3 percentage points from the peak of 16.5 percent in March and April of last year. The national jobless rate in May was 9.1 percent.
Wanted: Jobs for 25.5 Million Americans
There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage. Or, as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) put it, Democrats shouldn’t advertise the package as jobs legislation
because it’s just extending a bunch of tax policy and related items that we need to do.
Unions Pave Way for African American Progress
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Union membership has been a pathway to the middle class and leadership for generations of African American workers. Unions have done more to provide jobs, physical safety, education, adequate housing and medical care for African Americans than any other institution, according to labor educator Edgar Moore.
In “African Americans Win With Unions,” a guest column at the AFL-CIO website, Moore, a faculty member at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s William Brennan Institute for Labor Studies, writes:
Unions serve the African American community well. It is true that unions, like the rest of American society, delayed opening their doors to African Americans for too long, but enormous progress has been made since it happened.
In turn, the union movement benefits from African American membership, Moore points out. He cites a study that shows more African Americans hold leadership positions in labor unions than in any other social institution in America, except the black church.
