Business
Black unemployment rate reducing as U.S. economy adds more jobs
Bernard Anderson, a nationally-recognized economist and professor emeritus at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, agreed.
“Despite the fact that Black people have a higher rate of unemployment and lower income, they remain far more committed to the labor market than White workers on average,” said Anderson.
According to Anderson, employment is growing more rapidly now than at any time since the recovery began in 2009. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 5 percent in the third quarter of 2014, yet wages have not increased significantly.
“We have an anomalous situation in the U.S. labor market where employment is beginning to rise, but earnings are still relatively flat,” explained Anderson. In fact, average hourly earnings for all employees shed a nickel in December.
Anderson observed that wages increased more rapidly during previous recoveries as the unemployment rate fell.
Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a blog post at EPI.org that stagnant wages hurt more than the workers at bottom. “Since the late 1970s, wages for the bottom 70 percent of earners have been essentially stagnant, and between 2009 and 2013, real wages fell for the entire bottom 90 percent of the wage distribution,” Mishel wrote. “Even wages for the bottom 70 percent of four-year college graduates have been flat since 2000, and wages in most STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) occupations have grown anemically over the past decade.”
Unionization also plays a critical role in raising the wages of low- and middle-income earners. Mishel said that unionization leads to higher wages without harming economic efficiency.
“Collective bargaining also leads to a larger share of corporate income going to wages rather than profits; the fact that corporate profits are at historic highs is a reflection, in part, of the current weakness of collective bargaining and the heightened power of corporate owners and managers,” Mishel wrote at EPI.org.
Even though overall union membership has fallen to record lows, according to a 2012 report on unionization by the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley, Black workers were union members at higher rates than non-Black workers in the United States.
“In 2012, 13.1 percent of all Black workers in the United States were union members; 11.0 percent of non-Black workers in the United States were union members,” the report said. “Among workers in the largest metropolitan areas, Blacks were 42 percent more likely to belong to unions compared to non-Blacks.”
Wilson said that if workers do not feel empowered on the job, it is difficult to go in to negotiate and demand the pay that they deserve.
She said, “As long as workers feel disenfranchised, barring a sudden boom in the economy that drives wages up, I don’t know that it’s going to happen organically.”
