The Black unemployment rate reached a historic low of 5% in March, breaking the previous record of 5.3% set in August 2019, according to data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics dating to 1972. During the pandemic, the Black unemployment rate rose to 16.8% compared to the record white unemployment rate of 14.1%.
“The unemployment rate is close to the lowest it has been in more than 50 years and a record low for African Americans,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “Thanks to the policies we have put in place, the recovery is creating good jobs that you can raise a family on.”
However, William Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and chief economist to the AFL-CIO, says the fed’s push to tighten the country’s strings could impact Black and Hispanic workers the most. Historically, the unemployment rate for Black workers has remained above the national average — roughly double that of white workers. Hispanic or Latino workers last month was 4.6%. For Asian workers, it was 2.8%
“If the Fed continues to use unemployment as its measure of labor force slack and thinks they want a 4.5% unemployment rate — to make that happen, the Fed would have to induce net job loss in the labor market,” Spriggs told CNN. “If we go through two months of negative job growth, all bets are off. The Black unemployment rate will easily get to 9% in that scenario.”
Black Americans are typically the last to be hired and the first to be fired. The Federal Reserve released projections for the year ahead indicating that unemployment could increase to 4.5%, resulting in a whopping 1.5 million job losses.
