(NEW YORK) MintPress – Another day, another disappointment on the unemployment front.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that although new jobless claims dropped to 387,000 from 389,000 the previous week, the four-week moving average — considered a more accurate indication of the state of the jobs market — surged 3,500 to 386,250, which is a six-month high.
“This confirms the weak labor market we have,” said Wells Fargo senior economist Sam Bullard.
Especially hard hit, according to an analysis of employment data compiled by the Labor Department: African Americans in New York City. While New York officials have been touting the city as the exception to the national rule, with a rebound in jobs during the last year, the supposed recovery has not extended to blacks.
Indeed, the decline in employment since the recession began here in 2008 has been much sharper for African Americans than for white or Hispanic residents, according to James Parrot, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, who analyzed the data.
More than half of all blacks in the city who were old enough to work had no job this year, and when they do lose their jobs, they spend, on average, a full year trying to find new jobs, far longer than New Yorkers of other races.
Discrepancy in hiring
A major problem, according to the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, David Jones, is that African-Americans were overrepresented in fields that were hit the hardest, like publicly-funded government agencies, construction and manufacturing.
“It’s being in the wrong place in the economy, so the recovery is not trickling down to these workers,” he said.
He said he is also concerned about the inability of less-educated and less-skilled workers to find jobs over long periods of time. His agency has found, for example, that about half of the people working as security guards had bachelor’s degrees or had attended college. That was up from about 26 percent six years ago.
“The wage didn’t go up,” noted Jones. “This is a low-wage job. It pays $10 an hour with no health insurance.”
Frank Braconi, chief economist for the city comptroller’s office, agreed, pointing out that a lot of the jobs added here were in professional and business services such as law and accounting, fields in which blacks tend to be underrepresented.
“African-Americans in New York City basically inhabit the middle market in the labor force in terms of wages and education,” he explained. “And the middle market has been weak.”
Then there is the issue of discrimination. Thirty-three-year-old Latoya Ingram, who lives in the predominantly black neighborhood of Harlem and received a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Syracuse University in 2001, believes her race is a factor in her inability to find a job.
“I could be wrong, but I’ve had (telephone) interviews and they seem really, really interested,” she claimed. “Then they see me in person and they’re not that interested. I think it’s a combination of being black and overweight. They think you are lazy.”
Giving up
The number of African-Americans in New York City who are characterized by the Labor Department as “discouraged workers” – those who have stopped looking for jobs after long-term unemployment – has tripled since the downturn began.
Four years ago, there was an equal amount of discouraged blacks and whites in the city, but since then the number of discouraged black workers has surged from about 13,000 to nearly 40,000, while the number of discouraged white workers has increased from about 12,000 to roughly 22,000.
According to the Labor Department data, just under half – 49.2 percent – of all African-American men and women of working age in New York City had jobs in the year that ended in May. That number is down from 55 percent in the year that ended in May 2008, when the economy was still strong.
Nationally, about 53 percent of all blacks and 60 percent of whites are working.
For now, the prospects remain dim. The Federal Reserve this week lowered its projections for economic growth in 2012. At a press conference on Wednesday, Chairman Ben Bernanke said there had been a great deal of new developments since the Fed last met in April and that a lot of the incoming data were “disappointing.”
Meanwhile, 45-year-old Wayne Nesmith, an African-American resident of the Bronx, is trying not to lose his job as a clinical associate at the Lander Center for Educational Research at Touro College when the financing runs out.
Even though he earned a degree in economics from the City University of New York as well as two master’s degrees, he said he is worried about finding new work.
“I definitely believe it is more adverse for African-Americans,” he said. “But you don’t give up, and you don’t give in.”
It is a disparity that both candidates in the race for the White House might do well to address.