Job applicants line up to meet potential employers at a job fair on June 11, 2012 in New York City. Some 400 arrived early for the event held by National Career Fairs, and up to 1,000 people were expected by the end of the day. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
The New York Times reports that blacks in New York City are finding it harder to get jobs than their white peers. This report does not refer only to blue collar workers, but also to blacks with some college and even multiple degrees. As the unemployment rate seems to be lowering in other states, New York City’s unemployment rate is still at 9.7 percent and some unemployed African-Americans believe that their race is a factor into why they haven’t yet landed a job.
For months now, New York officials have been highlighting how the city has regained all the jobs lost during the long recession and then some. But by several measures, the city’s recovery has left black New Yorkers behind.
More than half of all of African-Americans and other non-Hispanic blacks in the city who were old enough to work had no job at all this year, according to an analysis of employment data compiled by the federal Labor Department. And when black New Yorkers lose their jobs, they spend a full year, on average, trying to find new jobs – far longer than New Yorkers of other races.
Nationally, the employment outlook for blacks has begun to brighten: there were about one million more black Americans with jobs in May than there were a year earlier, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But that is not the case in New York City, where the decline in employment since the recession began here, in 2008, has been much steeper for blacks than for white or Hispanic residents, said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
One problem, said David R. Jones, the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, is that blacks were overrepresented in fields that suffered the most in the downturn, including government agencies, construction and manufacturing.
“It’s being in the wrong place in the economy, so the recovery is not trickling down to these workers,” Mr. Jones said.
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