For Wall Street, Friday’s release of disappointing March employment data was grist for more speculation about where interest rates may be heading. But for the nation’s most disadvantaged workers, the report offered a grimmer message: “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Last month, unemployment among whites held steady at a very low 3.7 percent rate, the U.S. Labor Department reported Friday. But black unemployment surged 1.1 percentage points, from 7.5 percent to 8.6 percent.
That’s still low by historic standards, but the trend is heading the wrong way for a demographic sector that historically has endured a jobless rate twice that of whites.
Why is black joblessness moving back up? Ask 52-year-old Mike Moran, who lost his job as an airline customer-service representative in January. “The old adage is that blacks are the last hired and the first fired,” said Moran, who was at the state unemployment center on 47th Street on Monday, faxing his resume to prospective employers.
While Moran may see racism at work, others cite what they call race-neutral factors. The downturn is hitting black employment levels harder because of a larger representation in manufacturing and other hard-hit sectors, said Robert Topel, a professor of urban and labor economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
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The superheated economy of the 1999-2000 boom created the strongest U.S. job market in more than a generation. With the pool of available workers increasingly tapped out, understaffed employers hired candidates they previously would have ignored.
Companies sought out retired workers, high school students and the disabled. As part of the same push, they reached out to low-income workers whose ability to find a job has been hampered by inadequate education, transportation problems and similar woes. By September of last year, black unemployment had dropped to 7.2 percent, its lowest point ever.
But when the economy started to cool in recent months, manufacturers, fast-food restaurants and retail chains began trimming payrolls–and workers with the least seniority tended to get the pink slips.
Such slowdowns, have “a disproportionate effect on those at the end of the hiring queue,” noted Margaret Simms, vice president for research at the Joint Center for Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on black issues.
While there’s some statistical evidence that employers may tend to favor white workers, Simms said, “It’s also the case that for a variety of reasons, African-Americans tend to come to the labor market with fewer of the skills that are in demand today.”
For those receiving pink slips, fairness is an issue. “Every time we go into a recession, black people are the first people to lose their jobs,” said 62-year-old Wilford Brown, who has been working temporary jobs since being laid off from Republic Steel six years ago. “There’s no doubt about that.”
To date, the recent upward trend in black unemployment is modest, said Jared Bernstein, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “The sky isn’t falling, but it’s clearly darkening quite considerably from the perspective of less-advantaged workers.”
The remarkably strong employment levels of last year were as close to full employment as the nation has ever come, Bernstein said. “It was a historic experiment and a very beneficial one,” he added. “The tight labor market pulled in some of the most disadvantaged, least-experienced workers and gave them extremely valuable [experience] in the labor force.”
But such workers will become increasingly vulnerable if the economy continues to wobble, Bernstein added. “The rule of last hired, first fired hasn’t been revoked, even in the new economy,” he said.