Our Kate Bahn Reminds us: Kate Bahn: "This needs to be screamed from the rooftops.... We cannot have a substantive conversation about how tight the labor market is without examining demographic disparities..." ands sends us to Equitable Growth alumnus John Schmitt quoting Janelle Jones at: Laura Maggi: Despite Drop in Black Unemployment, Significant Disparities Remain: "The African-American unemployment rate... low—compared to historic numbers. In July, it was 6.6 percent...
...Still, the rate of black workers out of jobs is almost double that of white workers. The white unemployment rate in July was 3.4 percent. And even with a strong job market, significant disparities remain across the country, with some states and the District of Columbia showing very different employment pictures when the race of workers is taken into account. The differences are most stark in Washington, D.C., where a new report by the Economic Policy Institute analyzing employment numbers from the second quarter of 2018 found that the unemployment rate for African Americans was 12.4 percent, while the white unemployment rate was 1.5 percent.... “These data tell a familiar story. While the national unemployment rate was less than 4 percent throughout the second quarter of the year, unemployment rates for African American and Hispanic workers were, in some states, double that,” Janelle Jones, the EPI economic analyst who wrote the report, said in a news release. “It is crucial that policymakers work to drive the unemployment rate even lower if black and Hispanic workers in every state are going to share in our country’s economic prosperity”...
#shouldread
#race
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#labormarket