Little Relief for Jobless Black Workers in 2011
Unemployment for African American workers has remained virtually unchanged, hovering between 15 percent to 16 percent throughout 2011, while unemployment for the rest of the workforce dropped below 9 percent, according to a new report by the University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center.
Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the center and author of the report, said:
[C]urrent unemployment rates for Black workers are still higher than in June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and well above December 2007, when the downturn began.
Read the full report here.
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.
Women, Black Workers Hard Hit by Attacks on Public Employees
The improved jobs figures out last Friday obscured the ongoing decline in public-sector jobs. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics noted when releasing the March unemployment data:
Employment in local government continued to trend down over the month. Local government has lost 416,000 jobs since an employment peak in September 2008.
The loss of such jobs is important because the nation’s well-being depends not only on job numbers increasing, but on the creation of quality jobs—those that pay decent wages and enable people to attain or maintain a middle-class life. According to National Employment Law Project (NELP), the new jobs being created aren’t as good as the ones that have been lost. NELP found that jobs in lower wage industries, such as retail and food preparation, made up 23 percent of the jobs that were lost in the recent recession. Yet they made up 49 percent of the jobs the economy has gained in the past year. As the BBC Business puts it:
In other words, it appears that while people may finally be returning to work, they have to work for less pay.
Assaults on Public Employees Deal a Sharp Blow to Blacks
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Assaults on public employees’ right to bargain for a better life hurt all working people. But blacks are being hit especially hard. Black unemployment was 15.7 percent in January, compared with a national rate of 9 percent. Calls to slash the freedom of public employees could hit black job seekers especially hard because so many blacks are public employees.
In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, says these attacks are already dealing a sharp blow to the black middle class.
The main reason is that a large number of blacks work in the public sector. In fact, before the recession, 18 percent of black men and 23.3 percent of black women were public employees, making this sector the leading employer of black men and the second leading employer of black women. In urban areas with large black populations, the role of the public sector in providing good jobs and creating a middle class for the black community is undoubtedly greater, Pitts says.
Civil Rights Leaders Urge Passage of Employee Free Choice
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Martin Luther King Jr. often drew the parallels and connections between the civil rights and union movements. Today, on the eve of the anniversary of King’s assassination, national civil rights leaders called for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would give workers the choice of how to form a union.
During a telephone press conference, Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of some 200 organizations, pointed out that unions have been one of the main vehicles for African Americans to move into the middle class.
The Employee Free Choice Act has been largely written about as a labor bill but those of us in the civil rights community know it is so much more…workers’ rights are civil rights; and that the right to organize is a civil and human rights issue of the first magnitude.
