In May, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for [six months or more]) increased by 361,000 to 6.2 million; their share of unemployment increased to 45.1 percent.
Bureau of Labor Statistics - Employment situation summary, June 3 2011
For African Americans, the last 50 years have been marked by extremely high unemployment occasionally interrupted by periods of merely high unemployment.
In fact, income inequality has gotten so extreme here that the US now ranks 93rd in the world in “income equality.” China’s ahead of us. So is India. So is Iran.
Here’s what the Wall Street protesters are so angry about (many more graphs at the link)
Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.
10-year real wage gains worse than during the Great Depression
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe that there are no jobs available for them. The number of discouraged workers in the U.S. increased sharply during the current recession, rising to 717,000 in the first quarter of 2009, a 70-percent increase from the first quarter of 2008. Relative to their share of the labor force, young people, blacks, and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics and men were over-represented among discouraged workers.
“Bad jobs” are typically considered those that pay low wages and do not include access to health insurance and pension benefits. As shown here, about 10% of full-time workers are in low-wage jobs, about 30% don’t have health insurance, and about 40% don’t have pensions. The graph also shows that the likelihood of being in a bad job is much worse for part-time workers, for on-call and day laborers, and for those working for temporary help agencies.
Women and men tend to work in very different occupations. And overall “men’s jobs” are better paid than “women’s jobs.”
An African-American child raised in a lower-class family is 37% less likely to become a professional basketball player than is an African-American child raised in a middle- or upper-class family.
Dubrow, J. & Adams, J. (2010). Hoop inequalities: Race, class and family structure background and the odds of playing in the National Basketball Association. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, November 2010.
(Source: web.hbr.org)
The proportion of women in OECD countries who are employed peaked in 2008, at around 58%.
Only 20% of full professors in the US are women. In other countries, the proportion is even lower.
Although the position of young black men in the city’s labor force was already tenuous before the recession, it was significantly impacted during the recession; this demographic group’s unemployment rate increased by 11 percentage points, reaching nearly 34 percent during the period January 2009 through June 2010—the highest of all demographic groups.
In addition, the employment-population ratio for young black men decreased to 25 percent in 2009–2010, meaning that only one in four young black men had a job in the city during the period January 2009 through June 2010.
On average, black men and women were unemployed for 36 weeks, almost two months longer than the mean duration of unemployment for all New Yorkers.
← Older entries
Page 1 of 2
