Employment Has Rebounded Across Racial Groups — Except for Whites
Philip Bump, Washington Post, October 7, 2022
{snip} The country continues to add employment, despite the turbulence of the national and global economies, and to add them faster than analysts expect.
By now, the United States has regained all of the jobs lost in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. In February 2020, the high-water mark before the emergence of the coronavirus, there were 152.5 million people working. In August, the first month to pass the February 2020 level, there were 152.8 million employed. In September, the figure topped 153 million for the first time on record.
Yet digging into the numbers, we see that the recovery has not been uniform. White Americans, male and female, are still employed at lower rates than they were before the pandemic emerged.
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The group that has rebounded the most is Asian Americans, now seeing employment 5.6 percent higher than in February 2020. The group that has gained employment since that month but at the slowest rate is Black Americans, for whom employment is now 1.4 percent higher than it was then. That’s because of Black men, for whom employment is 4.5 percent higher than in February 2020.
Black women have still not recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic; employment of Black women is 1.5 percent lower than it was in February 2020.
That’s just above White women, for whom employment is 1.6 percent lower than it was that month. Overall, White employment is still 0.8 percent below February 2020 levels.
{snip} Overall, though, nearly a million fewer White people are working now than before the pandemic began.
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