We don't need no affermative action....just fire em later after we get credit for hiring them!
Blacks Lose Better Jobs Faster as Middle-Class Work Drops
July 12, 2003
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
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."
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