As U.S. unemployment improved, it worsened for Hispanics and black women.

Ricky Claus, CNN

The US unemployment rate returned to a historic low of 3.5% in December. Not everyone is celebrating, though: unemployment rates among black women and Hispanic men have still not fully recovered from the pandemic.

The unemployment rate for black women aged 20 and over rose to 5.5% in December from 5.2% in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It stood at 4.8% in February 2020, a month before Covid restrictions rocked the US economy.

Among Hispanic men, unemployment rose 0.4 percentage points to 4% last month, up from the 3.1% unemployment rate in February 2020.

But for many other demographics, unemployment is now lower or the same as it was before the pandemic. For white women 20 and older, the rate was 2.8% in December. The unemployment rate was about 2.5% for Asians, 3% for whites, and 4% for Hispanics, according to the BLS.

There are several reasons for the rise in unemployment among black women and Hispanics, said Kate Ban, chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a nonprofit research and grant organization.

Chief among them are the lingering effects of the pandemic, occupational segregation pushing people of color into low-paying jobs, and women’s caregiving responsibilities???

“We’ve had a really remarkable recovery, but it looks like black women … we know that they initially lost the most for various reasons … have not yet recovered in the same way as other groups of workers,” Bang told CNN.

“What we’ve seen is that black women have been placed in a truly impossible position to be the primary caregivers of families while also working in the jobs that have been hit the hardest (some of them) during the pandemic,” Ban said. noting that the retail, hospitality and healthcare sectors have been affected. disproportionately affected by job loss and occupational risk.

The leisure and hospitality industry lost more than 8.2 million jobs at the start of the pandemic, nearly half of the sector’s total employment in February 2020. Over the past two years, those jobs have returned, but the sector is still almost 5.5% lower than before the pandemic. Employment rate during the pandemic, according to BLS data.

Fed effect

The government’s current response to inflation could also play a role in rising unemployment among Hispanic men and black women, Ban said.

“Cooling the economy — what the Fed is deliberately doing to dampen inflation — will initially lose out to those marginalized or least powerful workers,” she said. “So that could be part of what we’re seeing there.”

Latin American workers are still struggling to recover from the onset of the pandemic when they faced the highest unemployment rate on record. Hispanic unemployment rate jumped to 18.1% in April 2020, after hovering around 4% before the pandemic, according to BLS data.

Hispanics and black workers also oppose structural racism and implicit bias, Ban added, noting that “even people who may not hold racist beliefs will end up reproducing racist results.”

Ban said employers are less likely to make job offers to blacks. And when they do, the money on the table is often lower. In addition, she said, when there is a downsizing, black employees are more likely to be fired.

“All these things kind of intersect with each other and just lead to, generally speaking, higher barriers to economic security for black workers,” she said.

The-CNN-Wire
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