When Illinois shut down businesses to slow the spread of the coronavirus in March and the state’s unemployment system jammed from the overload, Bridget Altenburg, chief executive of a Chicago-based nonprofit group, visited one of the organization’s workforce centers. Two things stood out: the sheer number of people lined up to apply for unemployment benefits, and how few faces were white.
“The thing that struck me was how undiverse it was,” Altenburg said. “All people of color. Latino, African American, and the stories I heard were just gut-wrenching. People went to work Monday morning and the doors were closed and they were told to go get unemployment.”
Black Americans have always had a more difficult time in the job market. The latest evidence arrived Friday when the government reported that 21 million Americans were unemployed in May. Although the jobless rate for whites dipped, to 12.4%, the rate for African Americans inched up to 16.8%, meaning that nearly 1.4 million black men and nearly 1.7 million black women were part of the labor force but without work. The Hispanic jobless rate improved from April but was 17.6%.
Hiring prospects for African American and Latino workers have long been hobbled by factors that stretch from poorer educational options and lopsided incarceration rates to outright discrimination by employers.
Even last year, as the national jobless rate fell below 4% to its lowest level in half a century, the rate for black men in Illinois was nearly 10%. African Americans also earn less, are quicker to be laid off, are slower to be rehired and are less likely to be promoted. Historically, the black unemployment rate is twice that of whites.
Even before the pandemic, most clients at Altenburg’s group, the National Able Network, were black or Latino. “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said of the disparities she witnessed during a recent visit to another workforce center, in Omaha, Nebraska. “But it makes me angry, and it makes me tired.”
As Jerome Powell, chairman of the Federal Reserve, explained at a news conference in April, “Unemployment has tended to go up much faster for minorities and for others who tend to be at the low end of the income spectrum.” The coronavirus pandemic has only amplified the problem.
“Everyone is suffering here,” Powell added. “But I think those who are least able to bear it are the ones who are losing their jobs and losing their incomes and have little cushion to protect them in times like that.”
The current economic crisis has struck black and Latino families particularly hard in several ways. They are more likely to work in the service industries that were the first to be hit by layoffs and less likely to work in white-collar jobs that can be done safely from home. They have, on average, significantly less in savings to help them weather a period of unemployment and are less likely to have families with the resources to help out.
Since the pandemic, fewer than half the blacks who are 16 and older have a job. Latino unemployment rates are higher than for any other racial or ethnic group.
Minorities also had a harder time taking advantage of government support efforts. They were less likely to have computers to file for unemployment benefits and less likely to have bank accounts, slowing the time it took to receive government stimulus checks or making it harder for small-business owners to apply for emergency loans.
“Stark inequalities that existed and were exacerbated by the Great Recession have been further exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Ray Boshara, director of the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “The level of financial fragility is much higher.”
Different challenges face those who have hung on to their jobs as part of the nation’s essential workforce or in front-line occupations in health care and social services, at grocery and drugstores, in public transit and trucking, and in warehouses and cleaning services.
Minority women are more likely than any other group to be part of the large underpaid workforce that has been deemed necessary to keep the country cared for and fed.
Still, the lives of these workers are insufficiently valued and appreciated, said Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, an economist and the president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race in Mechanicsville, Virginia. “It’s not the workers who are essential — it’s the jobs that are essential,” she said, pointing to the long delays in getting proper protective equipment and taking other lifesaving measures.
“It suggests that the workers are expendable,” Sharpe said. “What we’re more concerned about is that the job is getting done.”
That partly explains why black Americans have suffered a disproportionate share of coronavirus deaths.
“One of the reasons that African Americans and Latinos are more affected is we are in those jobs,” said Stephanie James, who had been taking care of a woman with dementia. “We are the bus drivers, we are the people who pick up your groceries, we are the people who work in the stores, we are all of those folks.”
James, who lives in a suburb of Washington, is now out of a job. So are two of her three siblings and many of her neighbors. She has underlying health issues, and nearly all of the available jobs seem too risky.
“I am scared to death of coming back to work,” she said. “I don’t think I should have to make the choice between having a livelihood and having a life.”
James knows that a spate of joblessness, especially during an economic downturn, can have a lifelong impact. She spent 13 years working for a government contractor, rising up the ranks, before losing her job in 2010. James was unemployed for six months before she took a job at a grocery store to get by. She eventually got back into her field but has not found the kind of steady work she enjoyed before the last recession.
The pattern is familiar — blacks tend to be out of a job longer than whites.
“What we saw with the Great Recession was that it took much longer for black and Latino workers and black and Latino households to recover from that recession,” said Valerie Wilson, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute who was a co-author of a recent report on the impact of the virus on black workers. “And in fact some would argue that we didn’t see a recovery for those communities until the last three years.”
Owning a business or being self-employed has not insulated African Americans from the pandemic’s economic fallout, because they are often concentrated in personal service activities such as running barbershops and beauty shops that have had to close so as not to become sources of infection.
The next wave of the crisis could hit one of the underpinnings of the black middle class: state and local government jobs. Even as other sectors recorded some gains last month, an additional 571,000 state and local government employees, many of them teachers, lost their jobs.
In April, there were nearly 1 million job losses, and economists say many more are expected as the collapse in tax revenue ripples through statehouses and city halls.
African Americans — particularly women — are disproportionately employed in those positions, said Christian Weller, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who wrote a report on the systemic obstacles facing black job seekers for the Center for American Progress.
“You don’t get rich, but these are stable jobs with good benefits,” he said, “and there isn’t anything comparable.”