Black Unemployment: Highest in 27 Years
Annalyn Censky, CNN Money, September 2, 2011
The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.
Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.
{snip}
Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.
{snip}
“Even when you compare black and white workers, same age range, same education, you still see pretty significant gaps in unemployment rates,” said Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute. “So I do think the fact of racial discrimination in the labor market continues to play a role.”
About 155,000 blacks got jobs in August, but the group’s unemployment rate still went up because those jobs weren’t enough to make up for all the people who started looking for work during the month.
However, the gain for whites of 211,000 jobs was enough to bring their unemployment rate down.
Overall, black men have it the worst, with joblessness at a staggeringly high 19.1%, compared to 14.5% for black women.
{snip}
