Black people more likely to be jobless in Britain than US

A paper presented on Friday at the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Leeds shows that in the last three recessions, unemployment among black British men was up to 19 percentage points higher than among those in America...

TheGrio Staff

Apr 16, 2012

A recent report on unemployment shows blacks in Britain are experiencing levels of unemployment consistently and significantly higher than African-Americans. The study looks at unemployment during the last three economic recessions — all of which resulted in higher unemployment for black Brits. British sociologists suggested the disparity is related to American affirmative action policies and other corrective measures to combat the legacy of racial inequality. The Guardian reports:

A paper presented on Friday at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in Leeds shows that in the last three recessions, unemployment among black British men was up to 19 percentage points higher than among those in America.

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Yaojun Li, professor of sociology at Manchester University, told the conference that in Britain black male unemployment reached 29% in the early 1980s recession, 36% in the early 1990s and 22% in 2011. Unemployment figures for black men in the US were 22%, 17% and 22%.

Black women in Britain were also worse off than those in the US. Unemployment for black women in Britain in the three recessions reached 25%, 26% and 17%, compared with 20%, 12% and 13% in the US. Overall, one in 12 black Britons are unemployed, compared with one in 16 in the US. Li, who examined 2.7m responses from three datasets in the UK and US, said: “There is greater ethnic inequality in Britain than in the USA for both sexes … If you are black you are more likely to be without work in the UK.”

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