National

Black Unemployment Rises

Published

10 years ago

June 9, 2015

By Freddie Allen
NNPA Senior Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – After falling into the single digits in April, the Black unemployment rate increased to 10.2 percent in May, according to the latest jobs report from the Labor Department.

The national unemployment rate also increased from 5.4 percent in April to 5.5 percent in May. Most economists attribute the slight uptick in the jobless rate to the fact that more workers, nearly 400,000 by Labor Department estimates, entered the labor market last month. The national labor force participation rate, the share of the population that either has a job or is currently looking for one, crept up to 62.9 percent from 62.8 percent the previous month. The number of Blacks in the labor force also increased, but the participation rate was steady at 62 percent, compared to the White labor force participation rate, which rose from 62.8 percent in April to 63 percent in May.

The White unemployment rate hasn’t budged since February 2015 and in May it was still 4.7 percent. And while the share of the Black population that held a job, also known as the E-POP ratio, fell from 56 percent to 55.7 percent, the E-POP ratio showed a thin increase among Whites (59.9 percent in April vs. 60 percent in May).

The jobless rate for Black men over 20 years-old leaped a full percentage point from 9.2 percent in April to 10.2 percent in May and the participation rate for Black men decreased from 68.7 percent in April to 68.5 percent in May During the same period, the unemployment rate for White men fell from 4.4 percent to 4.2 percent in May. The labor force rate for White men was steady month over month at 72.2 percent.

The jobless rate and the labor force participation rate for Black women over 20 years-old didn’t budge in May and were 8.8 percent 61.9 percent, respectively. Meanwhile the unemployment rate for White women ticked up to 4.3 percent in May from 4.2 percent in April and the participation rate dipped to 57.3 percent from 57.6 percent in April.

Although economists often caution against drawing long-term conclusions based on one months jobs report, the Black jobless rate is still nearly double the national rate a trend that has continued for decades.

As the recovery continues, economists also continue to search for reasons why hourly wages haven’t improved more as the labor market tightens and the national unemployment rate falls toward pre-recession levels.

A recent report by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a national group that advocates for social, racial and economic justice, pointed to Federal Reserve policies that seem to favor Wall Street over Main Street.

“The Federal Reserve’s focus over the past 35 years has been on price stability, or tamping down inflation,” said the CPD report. “While this focus is good for Wall Street, it has resulted in wage stagnation for most workers on Main Street.”

The report also said that wages have been stagnant or falling for the vast majority of workers since 2000.

The report continued: “While at the median, wages for white workers have risen only 2.5 percent in 14 years, African-American workers have seen a wage cut of 3.1 percent over the same period.”

The CPD report recommended that the Federal Reserve support policies that build a “full employment economy,” keep interest rates low for cities and states to encourage investments in infrastructure, and focus on policies that can help to grow a stronger middle class.

In a recent blog post on job growth and wages, Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said that if the economy added 280,000 jobs a month, the jobs gap would be closed by August 2016, but if the economy only added 207,000 jobs per month, the most recent three month average, “at that pace, we wouldn’t return to pre-recession labor market health until April 2017.”

In a statement about the Labor Department’s jobs report, Chad Stone, the chief economist for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank that studies how budget decisions affect low-income families, that even though many of the labor market indicators have recovered since the Great Recession, it’s still too early for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.

“By testing whether it can push unemployment lower — rather than play it safe to avoid any risk of inflation — the Fed could bring more workers back into the labor force, help more long-term unemployed find work, and begin to generate solid wage gains for most workers,” Stone said in the statement.

The Federal Reserve shouldn’t even think about raising interest rates until 2016, Gould said because the recovery is still lukewarm and wages are mostly flat.

Connie Razza, the director of strategic research for the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a national group that advocates for social, racial and economic justice, echoed those concerns.

In a press release about the jobs report, Razza said that unemployment among women and people of color is disproportionately high and that “many of those who have found work remain underemployed, underpaid, and unfairly scheduled.”

Razza continued: “Against this backdrop, the next steps for the Federal Reserve are clear. The Fed should keep interest rates low to let the economy continue its recovery, which will lead to more jobs and higher wages. This is the only monetary policy option that supports an inclusive recovery.”

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

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December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

5 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.