A job crisis for young black men
By Ron Marlow and Andrew Sum | April 22, 2009
OF THE nearly 5.5 million workers who have lost their jobs in this recession, a disproportionate share of the losses has been borne by younger workers, men, those without college degrees, and blue-collar employees. But black males, who were already shut out of the job market in disproportionate numbers, have fared the worst, and their labor-market fate has not received the attention it deserves.
According to the 2007 American Community Survey, the black male unemployment rate in Massachusetts was already 12.7 percent before the recession, compared with the overall unemployment rate of only 6.1 percent for the state as a whole. However, between November 2007 and March 2009, the national decline in the number of black men with jobs was 660,000, accounting for 82 percent of the job losses among all black workers. Nearly 9 percent of black men lost jobs over this period, the highest rate of job loss by far among any gender or race-ethnic group.
The relative size of this loss in employment among black men was the highest in any of the 11 post-World War II recessions in the United States. It is ironic that at the same time that the nation was electing its first African-American president, it was displacing record numbers of black men from the ranks of the employed.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
