Inside the US jobs report: Record-low Black unemployment

Dan Burns and Howard Schneider, Yahoo! Finance

The Black unemployment rate hit a record low in March, a milestone for a U.S. labor market that most policymakers and economists expect to begin cooling in the face of higher interest rates, jeopardizing those historic gains.

For years, the Black unemployment rate has been double the white unemployment rate in the US. It’s a piece of economic data that has illustrated both the long oppressive arm of hundreds of years of racial injustice and the US’s resistance to reparations and other efforts to close the racial income inequality gap.

[…]

The 1963 March on Washington was originally called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Civil rights leaders had many demands for economic welfare in addition to equal rights for Black Americans.

Civil rights leaders and Black economists have also pushed the US Federal Reserve to take its maximum employment mandate more seriously. This is in part why the Fed allowed the labor market to grow in the wake of the pandemic and didn’t start to tighten financial conditions at the first sign of inflation.

The new data is a step in the right direction, but also shows there’s a long way to go with a 1.8 percentage point difference between the unemployment rates for white Americans and Black Americans. The unemployment rate for Latino Americans also sat at 4.6% in the March report, far above the white unemployment rate.

Link to article.

Black Unemployment Hits Historic Low

Link to breaking news.