unemployment of the US Blacks Labor Force in 2011
All Americans saw significant job losses during the Great Recession and comparatively high unemployment rates persist for all population groups—none more so than African Americans.
While the overall U.S. employment situation is dismal, t oday's jobs report shows the crisis is much worse for minorities.
Black workers are more likely to be employed in the public sector than are either their white or Hispanic counterparts. In 2011, nearly 20 percent of employed Blacks worked for state, local, or federal government compared to 14.2 percent of Whites and 10.4 percent of Hispanics. Blacks are less likely than Hispanics and nearly as likely as Whites to work in the private sector, not including the self-employed. Few Blacks are self-employed — only 3.8 percent reported being self-employed in 2011 — making them almost half as likely to be self-employed as Whites (7.2 percent).
Even with a shaky recovery following the Great Recession of 2007–2009, yet for the millions of Americans still out of work, the recovery is largely meaningless.
With one in four teens in search of work not landing a job, some corporate interests are blaming the bleak employment picture on the 2007-2009 increases in the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 over three years—the first increase after a decade of inaction. But this attempt to blame the minimum wage for high teen unemployment is simply not supported by the facts. Careful analysis shows that, like the high adult unemployment that plagues the US economy, teen unemployment has been driven by the aftermath of the Great Recession and macroeconomic trends shaping the labor market—not by long-overdue increases in the minimum wage, which still has not caught up with inflation over past decades.
The unemployment rate for black males rose a whole percentage point to 18%. Even more staggeringly, the black youth unemployment rate in August was 46.5%, up from 39.2% in July. The unemployment rate among Hispanics was also considerably higher than the national average, at 11.3%.
The unemployment rates for African Americans by gender, education, and age are much higher today than those of whites, and these unemployment rates for African Americans rose much faster than those for comparable groups of whites during and after the Great Recession. The unemployment rates for many black groups in fact continued to rise during the economic recovery while they started to drop for whites. The first few months of 2011 saw substantial employment gains for African Americans but job growth stalled yet again in the past few months.
Sources:
Business Insider
Business Insider
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