Black Unemployment Rises Faster
Unemployment among blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the mid-1970’s, and the jobs lost have been mostly in manufacturing, where the pay for blacks has historically been higher than in many other fields.
Nearly 2.6 million jobs have disappeared over all during the last 28 months, which began with a brief recession that has faded into a weak recovery. Nearly 90 percent of those lost jobs were in manufacturing, according to government data, with blacks hit disproportionately harder than whites.
At the same time, jobless black Americans have been unusually persistent about staying in the labor force. Having landed millions of jobs in the booming 1990’s, they have continued to look for new ones in the soft economy, and so are counted now as unemployed; if they gave up trying to find work, they would not be counted.
These two phenomena help to explain why the black unemployment rate, though still not high by historic standards, is rising twice as fast as that of whites, and faster than in any downturn since the mid-1970’s recession. Low-wage workers and women who went from welfare to work in the 1990’s have largely kept their jobs; factory breadwinners have borne the pain, men and women alike.
“The number of jobs and the types of jobs that have been lost have severely diminished the standing of many blacks in the middle class,” said William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.
In Indianapolis, for example, Autoliv, a Swedish manufacturer of seat belts, is closing a plant and laying off 350 workers, more than 75 percent of them black. Many are young adults who were hired in the late 1990’s when the unemployment rate in Indianapolis was only 2 percent and Autoliv, to recruit enough workers to expand production, hired young men without high school diplomas.
“They were taken from the street into decent-paying jobs; they were making $12 to $13 an hour,” said Michael Barnes, director of an A.F.L.-C.I.O. training program that helps laid-off workers in Indiana search for new jobs. “These young men started families, dug in, took apartments, purchased vehicles. It was an up-from-the-street experience for them, and now they are being returned to their old environment.”
It is not only the recently hired who are losing jobs. So are tens of thousands of textile workers in the South, many with long tenure, as production in the industry shifts to China and India. Bruce Raynor, president of Unite, the union that represents textile workers, ticked off a few of the more recent losses: 1,000 jobs lost in the last two years as mills closed in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.; another 1,000 in mill closings in Columbus, Ga.; 1,500 lost in the closing of a sweatshirt factory in Martinsville, Va.
These workers are mostly black men and women who were earning $11 an hour plus benefits in small towns where other jobs, if there are any, do not pay as well.
“This is not like the cyclical downturns in the old days, when you got furloughed for a few weeks and then recalled,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “These jobs are gone, and that represents a potentially significant slide in living standards.”
Black employment in manufacturing, once concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, is now spread across every state as companies have migrated to lower-wage towns and cities. With an increasing number of these companies migrating again, this time overseas in search of yet lower labor costs, the job loss in manufacturing has intensified. Every state has lost manufacturing jobs over the last three years, according to a study by the National Association of Manufacturers.
In 2000, there were 2 million black Americans working in factory jobs, or 10.1 percent of the nation’s total of 20 million manufacturing workers. Blacks were represented in the overall work force in roughly the same proportion. Then came the recession that began in March 2001; since then, 300,000 factory jobs held by blacks, or 15 percent, have disappeared. White workers lost many factory jobs, too — 1.7 million in all. But because they were much more numerous to begin with, proportionally the damage was less, just 10 percent.
These job losses figure significantly in the rise in the unemployment rate among blacks 20 years of age or older. It has gone up 3.5 percentage points since the onset of the recession, while the rate among whites has risen less than half as much, 1.7 percentage points.
Most damaging, blacks’ share of the remaining manufacturing jobs has slipped to 9.6 percent. “Half a percentage point may not sound like much,” Mr. Bernstein said, “but to lose that much in such an important sector over a relatively short period, that is going to be hard to recover.”
Hispanic workers, in contrast, have fared better over the last 28 months, even expanding their share of manufacturing jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Their overall unemployment rate rose 2.2 percentage points, in line with the increase for the nation as a whole. The national unemployment rate now stands at 6.4 percent.
While blacks have been big losers in the 28 months of recession and weak recovery, they made big gains in the tight labor markets of the late 1990’s. Their unemployment rate, which had soared as high as 18 percent in the aftermath of the severe 1981-82 recession and was nearly 13 percent in the early 1990’s, fell to less than 7 percent, on average, in 1999 and 2000 — close to the overall rate of less than 5 percent. Never since the Labor Department began to track unemployment by race in 1972 had black unemployment been so low for a sustained period. Now it is 10.5 percent for blacks 20 years of age or older.
The shift in fortunes is evident in a poll that David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, conducts periodically among blacks, asking 850 people representing a cross section of the black population whether they consider themselves financially better off than a year before, worse off, or the same. In October 2000, the responses were quite positive: 45 percent better off, 10 percent worse off, 44 percent the same. But by October 2002, only 18.9 percent said they were better off than a year earlier, while 36.7 percent considered themselves worse off and 42.6 percent said their circumstances had not changed. “That is an enormous shift,” Mr. Bositis said.
For all the setbacks, black Americans have not diminished their presence in the labor force. During the late 1990’s, the percentage of black Americans who were in the labor force — that is, either held jobs or were actively looking for them and therefore counted as unemployed — rose by two percentage points to more than 68 percent, the highest level on record. Significantly, in the subsequent downturn that high participation rate has held.
That means that the number of black people looking for jobs is higher now than in previous eras — a statistic that some analyst see as a reason for optimism. “People are coming out of a favorable labor market,” said William Spriggs, executive director of the National League for Opportunity and Equality. “They are still optimistic, and they are more skilled, which means they are more willing to continue to look for work.”
Others see suffering in the same data. Not since the Depression has the nation’s work force contracted for so many months after a recession began. “Reluctance may be part of the reason blacks are not leaving the labor force,” Mr. Bernstein said, acknowledging Mr. Spriggs’s point. “But you leave a lousy labor market because you can afford to do so, and in a jobless recovery that has persisted for so long, many blacks don’t have the savings to make a go of it without a paycheck.”
(Source: NYT)
July 14th, 2003 at 8:15 am
Kendall, what is the solution? You provide tons of statistics but no solution.
What is happening is capitalism at work. Corporations are in the business of maximizing profits. Moving overseas operations is just the latest trend to maximize profits. It is not only happening to blue collar jobs, it is also happening to white collar jobs such as software development. I should know. I have been laid off twice in two years and most likely be laid off in the near future once my company shifts my job duties to India.
As a capitalist I understand the reasoning behind it even though I will be out of work. What is the solution? Adapt to the situation. Pick up a new skill. Start your own business. Change your career. I know for some people it is easier said than done but in rapid changing times workers need to be one step ahead of the curve.
July 14th, 2003 at 11:13 am
Kendall, what is the solution? You provide tons of statistics but no solution.
Uh… I’m supposed to solve this problem, by myself, in a weblog post? Sheesh.
What is happening is capitalism at work. Corporations are in the business of maximizing profits. Moving overseas operations is just the latest trend to maximize profits.
Uh, no. You must not have read the article very carefully, if at all. What is it about capitalism per se which explains the differential between white and black unemployment rates? (While there were deep historical connections between racism and the rise of capitalism, that’s a conceptually distinct issue.)
Nothing you’ve said here even addresses, much less explains why this bad economy is hurting blacks disproportionately. *That’s* the point of the story, after all. (The other serious flaw in your response is that the US economy isn’t really capitalist at all. But that’s a bigger, slightly tangential issue…)
As a capitalist I understand the reasoning behind it even though I will be out of work.
That’s a helpfully compliant, subservient attitude. Capital is always happy to find such workers.
What is the solution? Adapt to the situation. Pick up a new skill. Start your own business. Change your career.
These are hard to do in the ideal case, right? Vastly harder when you face barriers to educational access, capital investiture, and employment generally.
I know for some people it is easier said than done but in rapid changing times workers need to be one step ahead of the curve.
This is vague… Who are these “some people” and why is it harder for them than for others? Out and out racism is one such reason, but that’s not a reason I’m willing to dismiss as “simply capitalism at work”.
July 14th, 2003 at 12:08 pm
“Uh… I’m supposed to solve this problem, by myself, in a weblog post? Sheesh.”
Typical…you rather complain about the problem instead of coming up with a solution.
Yes, I understood the gist of your blog. All it did is re-state the fact that there is racism in the country.
Here is a solution: Why don’t blacks pool their resources together and help other blacks strive? Don’t think it doesn’t work? Check out the Cubans in South Florida or any Asian communities across the country.
July 14th, 2003 at 12:35 pm
Typical…you rather complain about the problem instead of coming up with a solution.
Who or what is that typical of, exactly?
As for complaining, how did I complain? I posted the text of a NYT article which says that blacks are being hurt by this bad economy disproportionately. Unless you think the NYT is a black institution — which is absurd — then I fail to see who is complaining here.
And my reluctance to provide a solution means …nothing at all. These are super complex issues which do not admit of easy or glib solutions. You’re yammering about “complaining instead of solving” is just flak.
Yes, I understood the gist of your blog. All it did is re-state the fact that there is racism in the country.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, that is a disputed notion today (as always). Most of the moves to dismantle affirmative action are predicated on “the end of racism”.
Further, the point of this site is different, namely, to show that the point of racist structures is to benefit and privilege white people. (Which is an even more uniformly disputed claim than the claim about there being racist individuals and institutions still in the US.) Being less hurt by a bad economy is one such privilege, as is being able to withstand a bad economy more easily because of generational wealth disparities, which are owed in part to the historical legacy of slavery and apartheid.
Here is a solution: Why don’t blacks pool their resources together and help other blacks strive? Don’t think it doesn’t work? Check out the Cubans in South Florida or any Asian communities across the country.
Not only is that not a solution, it’s just a way to further stigmatize African Americans by contrast to “model minorities” like Asians and Cubans. First, what makes you think African Americans aren’t doing that or haven’t been doing it forever? Second, there are substantial differences in these cases, including the fact that neither Asians nor Cubans face a 300 year history of institutionalized oppression. (Which is not to say that Hispanics and Asians haven’t or don’t face discrimination at the hands of whites and white institutions.) Third, the semi-nationalist, Garveyite “solution” to which you very obliquely (and ignorantly, I suspect) refer is something African Americans have been doing and talking about for a long time, since at least the end of the Civil War, if not before. Whatever one view of that as a strategy, the mainstream liberal promise of white America’s response to civil rights was integration, the ongoing differential failure of which is precisely the problem the NYT piece highlights.
You don’t seem to have thought about or researched these issues very carefully.
August 2nd, 2003 at 9:32 pm
Go Kendall!
August 22nd, 2003 at 9:16 pm
Blacks in Britain are facing the same issues that you are facing in America. In Britain, blacks are have always been the smallest and least successful minority.
Perhaps we need to learn from the Asians instead, at the end of the day they are making all the smart moves in the UK. Let’s give and receive support with people of any race who empathise with our cause. But now allow ourselves to be drawn into race hate issues. I fear some blacks are joining the whites in some race hate stuff in England, yeah we have got a share of immigrants, freeloaders, terrorists etc. Britain signed the Genevas Convention so.
Asians in Britain are the largest and most successful minority; financially, maritally and academically, their success is envied by all and I often hear whites and even a few blacks jealously calling them “Pakis”.
I never took much notice of what Asians do but now I find myself wondering if I could adopt their “system” and enjoy some prosperity for a change. My cousins do not want to unite and are too busy pursuing personal interests that are not helping them or their offspring, however for the ones of us that can unite, let’s do it.
My local library and university is full of Asians, they study for professions like law or medicine, many are self-employed and only answer to their customers or the taxman.
I am mixed-race,having black and Portuguese roots am constantly mistaken for a whole load of races, seen as a threat etc and the joke of it is I’m not successful, compared to some blacks I’m seen as an under acheiver but some Brits won’t let up, they want to know where I’m from, how much of me is negro and how much is white; Britain is obsessed with ethnic origins, accents and class.
Race hate is growing with riots in towns where Asians and new foreigners are dominant.
I visited some Nationalist web-sites to see how some Britains view it’s ethnic folk and it was quite scary; ethnic folks are seen as degenerates who are a threat to the purity of their race and economy. The joke is that the whites who put that trash together cannot even spell properly and they are supposed to represent the whites interests in the next election.
Call me a softie but I would prefer to see sme harmony here, life is too short for all of us so let us use what we have instead of spreading some destructive hate, Let’s try and follow some positive and friendly ways to improve our lot without getting into issues with some ignorant haters, otherwise you afro-americans are going to see an influx of British whites and blacks to your shores trying to pursue the American dream instead of knuckling down in Britain and trying something good here.
I know whites who have almost given up with England and want to live abroad to get away from foreigners. Race hate talks are abound on some web-sites I am sad to see this waste of time. “Divide and Rule and the “colour of intelligence issues”.
I prefer to take the stance of compassion and positive focus.
This is at least one approach to adopt when the job scene gets tough. British jobs are unstable right now with loads of redundancies around. In Britain I’ve had to change jobs loads of times, even completely switch careers, suffer major drops in income and move countries to survive, what the heck, maybe that will help to make us stronger.
Some afro-caribbeans have a sound education and are encouraging other blacks to strive for an education and I love that, I don’t see that in the British Blacks though, they are so divided and when I say to my cousins, “let’s try and pool our money and do something” they say no. They settle for low paid jobs and life infront of the Playstation with their KFC.
Since I returned home to England I have been displaced to a degree by new foreigners and even school leavers, I am having to rethink my moves and am having to operate closer with my Mum and brother to support each other in these tough times. Let us unite and support each other to build more secure futures if we can.
I hope you find your solutions, keep the door open let the ideas flood in.
August 23rd, 2003 at 2:21 am
About the Asians being sucessful. Asians are inherently successful primarily because of where they come from (a manufacturing powerhouse) and the preconception that all Asians are smart, which leads to better oppurtunities. It’s a social conception/problem and has nothing to do with how they do it. Primarily because they don’t do it any differently than anyone else does. Hard work pays off, especially when the opportunity presents itself.
Covering blacks and unification; I believe that’s something that has been tried many a time and generally black people will unite for a good cause. However, history will show that everytime unification takes place simply put, someone is murdered. Again; at the hands of another race. At this point I believe the community as a collective is tired of dealing with racism and simply don’t care. It’s really interesting to observe from a social perspective because by not caring I’ve noticed that it’s made the majority stronger and not only stronger but indepedent of any other community. If this current trend keeps up however I forsee segregation and not on part of the white community but the black community. It’s really easy to have extreme fundamentals when a community supports your ideals and fear this is happenning in my own community. During the Civil Rights Movement there were a large number of blacks that were peaceful, sadly, it won’t be that next time around. Really, i’m not sure if I can blame them.
March 23rd, 2004 at 10:41 am
Racism, is, like many other negative-ism’s, is part and parcel of the modern world we live in, the modern societies that in some way, shape or form, affects most of the planet’s population, to some degree or other.
It seems to me, as a person who grew up in a multi-racial, very poor and very working class environment in Britain, Liverpool to be precise, that there are quite a lot of complex reasons for racism, class-prejudice and so on, and economic, social, racial, religious prejudices and disparities of all kinds. Some people are rich, so it stands that some people will be poor. And those who can, exploit, and those who can’t, are either exploited or choose to stay unemployed and drift into a vacuum of either drinking, drug abuse, drifting etc etc. The average white person, and the average black person, in both the US and Britain, have far more in common socially, politically, economically and even ethnically than probably any other two groups of communities. If the poor whites and blacks pulled together, and put away their differences, the political and social power they would wield would be irrestible, and would eventually be a force to be reckoned with.
Most white people are sickened, saddened, and even slightly amused, by the so-called white power groups, who, more often than not, are fronted by people who cannot even spell properly or articulate a simple argument; and these are supposed to be a ‘master race’?! No, we are all equal in the eyes of God, and though the world is racist, classist, divided in a million and one ways, the word to the wise is that those who are interested in being just, will treat others as they would wish to be treated themselves.
Finally, there may be many white people who are privileged etc, but there are many white people who are one or two steps away from many black and disadvantaged communities and individuals. Part of the action must be community-led, and part must be as individuals, who in their own space and time, challenge very personal problems in their lives. Simplistic, but it works for me. Have a goal, have a vision, and every mountain crumbles and every crooked road is straightened.
Timbo