To Be EQUAL

One Step Forward; Two Steps Back   

by Marc H. Morial

President and CEO, National Urban League

Marc H. Morial, President of the National Urban League, is the former two-term Mayor of New Orleans, former President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and author of the weekly column in MaximsNews.com,  TO BE EQUAL

             NEW YORK - 4 March 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -  Because news about the gradual recovery of the economy at its broad scale seems recently to have submerged the news about unemployment, you might think we can begin to worry less about joblessness.

You’d be wrong.

The hard statistics about the lack of jobs for former workers mean that at its “micro-economic” levels—at the levels of individuals and families—the jobs are not there to be had and jobless workers and their families are still hurting badly.

Among the facts the current unemployment rate of 5.6 percent masks is that there are still 8.3 million people unemployed, and that at the end of February a total of 760,000 jobless workers had exhausted their regular unemployment benefits.  

The latter can’t get emergency federal unemployment aid because Congress has thus far refused to extend the temporary program, which expired in December.

That means that since then three-quarters of a million jobless Americans—think of a “city” that would be the nation’s twelfth largest; more populous than Indianapolis, San Francisco, or Baltimore—have had to make do without government aid.

By June, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget Policy and Priorities, nearly 2 million more of the jobless will face the same fate.  

These numbers are among the most startling setting records for how alarming the unemployment situation is.

But there are several others that offer serious competition.  As a recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, another Washington think tank, stated, “the current slump is setting records for severity in terms of sustained loss of jobs, the increase in the labor market slack, and the decline in [workers’] aggregate wage and salary income.”  

That is the overall situation.  But numerous statistics make it clear that the situation is even worse for African Americans and Latino Americans.  

The recession’s beginning in spring 2001 drove the Latino unemployment back above 7 percent, and the black unemployment rate, which had fallen to a record-low 7 percent in early 2000, back to its “traditional” postwar place in the double digits—it’s now 10.7 percent. 

A recent study by the National Urban League’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality documents some of the harrowing impact the return to double-digit unemployment is having on Black America.   

African Americans are more likely than whites to endure long-term unemployment; more college-educated and highly-skilled African-American workers are unemployed than their white counterparts; and African-Americans have suffered disproportionate job losses in manufacturing, a job area where their gains since the 1960s were critical to the expansion of the black middle class.  

 The IOE report concluded that the job reversals blacks have endured since 2001 is the worst turnabout in the labor market they’ve faced in more than twenty-five years. 

A striking local-level confirmation of that assessment was illuminated this past week by a study released by the Community Service Society, a nonprofit New York City social services agency. 

Analyzing federal statistics, it determined that because of the national recession and the particular economic difficulties the tragedy of September 11^th brought on New York City, nearly half of black males, aged 16 to 64, are out of work.  

Only 51.8 percent of the city’s black males had jobs, compared with 75.7 percent of its white males.  

Just 57.1 percent of black women had jobs, compared to 61.4 percent of white women.  

Overall New York City’s black unemployment rate is now 12.9 percent, compared to 9.6 percent for Latinos, and 6.2 percent for whites.

One of the important facts about Black New York’s current employment crisis is that in 2000 the black unemployment rate, mirroring the national picture, was at a record low—7.5 percent.   

That African Americans in New York as elsewhere have been so badly hurt by the recession and its aftermath underscore the point economist Samuel L. Myers, Jr. makes in his incisive essay in the National Urban League’s annual volume, The State of Black America 2004, that will be released later this month: 

The combination of historical and contemporary anti-black discrimination across all areas of economic activity has meant that African Americans “were less prepared to weather the bad times of the recession and have had greater difficulty taking advantage of the recovery and its associated benefits.” 

Myers shows in keen detail that the so-called Long Boom of the 1990s benefited Black America in significant ways—but because their economic foundation was so thin to begin with, “The lesson to be learned from the long period of expansion is that African Americans are still perched precariously between a significant narrowing of income gaps and a persistent inequality in wealth.”

Myers’ insight about the complex nature of the economic progress African Americans forged in the last decade applies to every facet of their experience in America, as our volume will illuminate in a variety of ways.  

It calls to mind a saying common among black elders, who lived long enough to experience it too many times over:  One step forward, two steps back.