COVID-19 making black jobs crisis worse

After weeks of catastrophic job loss across the country, May’s labor report held out a glimmer of hope: the nation’s overall unemployment rate ticked down to 13.3%, from 14.2% in April.

But for black Americans it was more bad news: a staggering 16.8% of the African American labor force was out of work, up a notch from 16.7% in April.

In California and nationwide, the coronavirus is widening the racial divide between haves and have-nots. And the pandemic-driven economic meltdown has helped to inflame the black community’s deep sense of injustice as uprisings over police brutality spread across the country.

Minneapolis may be some 1,500 miles from Los Angeles, but protests across California over the killing of yet another unarmed black man erupted with equal ferocity. Beneath the fury over George Floyd’s death lie longstanding economic inequities that have plagued the 2.6 million African Americans who account for 6.5% of California’s population.

“Nearly half the black community has had either no job or a poverty, dead-end job that doesn’t pay basic needs of housing and food,” said Lola Smallwood Cuevas, the founder of the Black Worker Center in South Los Angeles.

“The financial instability has been tearing at the social fabric of black communities,” she said. “It is fueling a lot of what we are seeing in this recent uprising. Many black residents have to stitch together two or three jobs to survive.”

Three years ago, Cuevas helped research a UCLA Labor Center study on conditions in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods. Black workers with a high school degree or less were twice as likely to be unemployed as whites with the same education, the report found.

It highlighted the decline of stable, well-paid blue-collar jobs in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods as industries moved to the suburbs, to Southern states with lower wages and fewer unions or to foreign nations. Between 1980 and 2014, the percentage of L.A. County’s black workers in manufacturing jobs shrank from 19% to 5%.

“As a result of widening inequality, rising housing costs, and a glaring lack of economic opportunities, Los Angeles is in the throes of a black jobs crisis,” the researchers wrote. The remaining jobs “declined in quality, and as black employment cratered, these communities _ especially their men _ were increasingly criminalized and ensnared in California’s historic expansion of incarceration.”

And now the coronavirus is disproportionately affecting California’s African Americans.

Since COVID-19 began claiming lives, black Americans have died at twice the rate of white residents. In Los Angeles County, African Americans have suffered 26 deaths per 100,000 residents, as compared with 22 for Latinos, 16 for Asian Americans and 13 for whites.