As she
watched President Barack Obama lay out his jobs plan for the nation and
repeatedly challenge Congress to address the issue immediately, Madelyn Broadus
was thinking “finally, somebody is for the people.”
“It seems
like for the past 12 years, (the government) is always for corporations and big
fat cats. I really feel like he said it right for how we can begin again, the
hard-working American people,” explained Broadus, one of the 14 million
unemployed people that the president was speaking of during his speech.
A sheet
metal worker who specializes in installing heating and air conditioning in
commercial and industrial buildings, Broadus has not worked a job since
November 2009.
“I went
to a five-year apprentice program, and when I was about to come out that’s when
the construction industry went flat,” said Broadus, who has existed on
unemployment since her last job.
Broadus
is not alone as she struggles through long-term unemployment; nor is her
situation unique . . . in the Black community.
In fact,
a look at employment numbers back to when the United States Department of Labor
(DOL) first began segmenting out statistics by race (1972), yields the data
that shows the Black unemployment rate has consistently been at least double
the national average. In 1982 and
1983, for example, Black unemployment ranged from 17 to 21 percent, while the
national rate for that same period ranged from 8.6 to 10.8 percent.
And these
numbers, just as today’s 16.7 percent rate for Blacks probably understated the
number of jobless, believes sociologist Michael Hodge, Ph.D. He said the numbers do not count those
who have just stopped looking.
In fact,
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics produces a report called U6, which is a
broader measure of labor underutilization. For example, in June of last year, the DOL unemployment rate
was 15.7 percent in July of 2010 while the U6 rate (which includes the officially
unemployed, discouraged workers, the marginally attached who have fallen out of
the labor force and those working part-time because they cannot find full-time
work) was 23.6 percent.
The
historically high Black unemployment rates even prompted researchers at UC
Berkeley to develop a Black Employment and Unemployment Data Brief that is
published each month, shortly after the labor department releases its
unemployment figures.
The idea
behind the brief said Steven C. Pitts, Ph.D., a labor policy specialist with
the Center for Labor Research and Education is to make it easy for people to
access all the numbers when it comes to Black unemployment. Pitts said the
labor department puts out the basic numbers, but Berkeley’s data briefs drill
deeper to look at various segments within the Black community.
“The Data
Brief has been out 16 months now, and I think what it has done is give people a
quick way to get the numbers themselves. It has allowed people to talk with some authority about Black
unemployment. It’s also been able
to expand the conversation around Black unemployment and economic issues.”
Some of
that expanded talk has been about the impact on Blacks in public-sector
employment, where Pitts said about 20 percent of Black folk work.
The
long-term nature of African American unemployment is one of the reasons Hodge
believes there are some deeply embedded causes for the problem in the Black
community.
“There
are some structural issues that are causes of the high rate of Black
unemployment,” said the chair of the Morehouse College Department of
Sociology. “I don’t want to
discount discrimination, because (it) is still a factor in the high
unemployment of African Americans, but there are some structural factors at work
as well. One of which is
education. We have a lower rate of
high school completion and college graduation, and that is particularly true
among Black men today.”
Hodge
said the lower educational attainment is directly tied to a lower rate of
employment.
Another
structural challenge is the shifting of the U.S. economy away from a
manufacturing to a service one. He
noted that these were the types of well-paid jobs African American males could
get without a college degree.
But the
economy’s service-ward shift, combined with off-shore outsourcing,
discrimination, and inadequate education have left Blacks, especially men, in
the precarious position of not being able to find decent jobs that enable them
to support families.
And this
definitely has an impact on the entire African American community and
contributes in unexplored ways to many of the challenges and ills that are
prevalent, believe researchers.
“Black
America has always had an alternate vision of work and work opportunities . . .
and has had an informal, underground economy that’s always been a factor in
their lives,” points out Alford Young Jr., a professor of sociology and African
American Studies and chair of the sociology department of the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This
alternative work often leads to constant thoughts about how to supplement your
income, noted Young.
“This is
very much a stressor and provides an interesting spin on the long-standing
notion that Black people, particularly lower income folk only live for today .
. . and have an inability to think about the long run and are not prepared for
delayed gratification,” said Young.
In
actuality, the sociologist said these individuals are in almost continual
survivor mode.
Young
added that in this situation there is a cognitive dissonance when it comes to
understanding mainstream work.
“When,
for a good portion of your adult life, you exist on the margin, you lose our
sense of understanding of the work environment, and what social ties matter
most for work,” Young said. Consequently, if they do get a job, in order to
preserve their dignity on the job such individuals may take actions that are
antithetical to keeping the job.
Hodge, of
Morehouse, said the other long-term impacts include an increase in crime, and
with more people interacting with the criminal justice system, that means more
people accruing a record which exacerbates the problem of obtaining a job.
“You see
a decline in the value of the community . . . people are losing their homes.
Renters move in, who tend not to take care of homes like homeowners.”
But the
impact goes even deeper than that, say researchers.
“We are
still gender-oriented . . . . Males are supposed to be the breadwinners. When they can’t perform . . . stress is
created in a household,” said Morehouse’s Hodge. This can lead to high rates of divorce and domestic
violence.
According
to Professor Barbara Carter, Ph.D., at Spelman College, economically unstable
Black men are less likely to enter into formal marriages and create stable
families.
“The
pattern of high male unemployment helps to promote single-female-headed houses
with fewer economic resources. (Women earn less than men in part because the ‘gendered’ jobs they
occupy typically pay less.)
“Many
Black women simply don’t assume that Black men will be able to support them
(even if that is still their ideal), and families often socialize their girls
to expect to be economically independent. Other women choose to raise their children alone rather than have an
official/legal marriage with an economically unstable man,” noted Carter, who
is in the Anthropology and Sociology Department at Spelman.
All three
researchers also talk about the impact on the psyche of unemployed Blacks,
particularly males.
“What you
see around you, impacts how you think, and impacts your way of thinking about
the world. It creates this cycle
that can perpetuate itself; that can be generational and that can be
problematic,” said Hodge. “Cornel
West, I think, talked about this sense of community hopelessness. And when he talked about that, he
talked about how unemployment, no jobs, a low graduation rate and all types of
things like this perpetuate this sense of learned hopelessness. And so once
that happens, it’s very difficult to pull a community out of that downward
cycle.”
And
because Black America has not escaped the ethos of work concept that permeates
the national psyche, Hodge adds, lack of employment impacts one’s emotional
state.
“I’m not
going to say that people have less respect, but we react how we are reacted
to. When larger society does not
treat you well, there is an attitude not so much of lack of respect but of
‘I’ll get mine the only way I can get mine.’”
Young
believes the impact is different at the various economic levels.
Many in
the lower socioeconomic levels, who live and operate in communities where
joblessness is abundant, are often wholly divorced from work and work
opportunities.
“For
those in the stable working class, they are in a precarious category,” Young
said. “There is a lack of comfort
and security at work. At one point
you focused on how to have your children advance beyond your status, but now
the Black middle class has abandoned that notion. Instead now they are struggling to figure out how to
retire.”
According
to the Los Angeles UCLA Black Worker Center, the demographic of the working
class is probably the most invisible in the African American community, and
that creates problems when it comes to looking at issues of work and jobs.
For the
Black professional class, there is a gender imbalance, which is particularly
troubling for women who are interested in connecting in marriage with someone
of their same race.
Young
also noted that for the professional class, there is a sense of isolation, and
that for the lower income there is an emerging concern about how to make sense
of a work world that is increasingly more technology-based.
The
University of Michigan professor also noted another future impact that is
beginning to manifest itself—the “monitoring” of a growing mass of older
African Americans who have never been connected to stable employment and now
must be incorporated into the conversation about social security, Medicaid and
healthcare.
While the
state of unemployment in the African American community is extremely
challenging, researchers retain their optimism for the future in part because
of the past resiliency and creativity of the African American community. That includes “hustling” (whether
legitimately or illicitly) to bring in money. They are also optimistic because of actions that new
generations of Blacks are taking.
One of
those sets of actions is what Hodge sees among the young college students he
observes.
“The Black
male students I see have a hustle they are trying to create while they are in
school. They set up entrepreneurship opportunities for themselves and their
colleagues. They do things to
promote themselves.”
And they
are doing this in large part by harnessing the power of technology, adds
Hodge. Their goals, like those of
Black entrepreneurs of the past are to give back to the community, partially in
the guise of jobs.
On the
other end of the spectrum—the mass worker side—are organizations like the Los
Angeles UCLA Black Workers Center, which Pitts said are doing much like the
legendary A. Phillip Randolph: helping to empower Black workers as a group.
“A.
Philip Randolph and the movement of sleeping car porters not only built
power—meaning developing leaders such as Ed Nixon who could stand up to
employers and make the demands of workers and who knew their individual fate
were linked to the collective—but Randolph also was a strategist and used
research and analysis to understand the political landscape and the dynamics of
the power that he was up against. He made sure that the porters understood the railroad industry and how
it worked; that they understood the boss, his values and motivation; he
explored what political tools he had to fight with and those that were needed;
he knew the political landscape of the Black community and the labor movement
and where they were willing to go. All of that led to their success,” said Lola Smallwood-Cuevas of the
UCLA Black Worker Center.
“Today
Black workers are on their own and in the dark, like so many American workers,
and they are struggling in a complex economy overlaid with enormous systems of
oppression and greed,” continued Smallwood-Cuevas. “At the Black Worker Center,
we believe the organization and development of worker/leaders, community
strategic alliances, and smart analysis, strategies as well as an agenda out of
the grassroots is what is needed.”
Researchers
also believe that what is needed is to take the conversation about Black
unemployment well beyond job training and creation and deep into an
understanding of the future world of work as well as how to meaningfully
connect youth and adults (including the formerly incarcerated) to this new and
ever-changing employment landscape.
The Black
Worker Center, also believes the discussion needs to include looking at the
labor market and repairing the structural policies and procedures that
facilitate creation of “bad” jobs and employment inequities.
