Asian American joblessness lingers
They’ve remained out of work longer than others
Last week, San Diego airport bartender Anita Burbage got the call she’d been waiting months to hear – that it was time to go back to work.
Burbage, 56, who came to the USA in 1991 from her native Philippines, didn’t mind that she’d be working as a server instead and for just two days a week. After spending most of the past year unemployed, the Chula Vista, California, resident was grateful.
She and her hospitality worker colleagues survived the year in part because of regular Zoom chats organized by their union in which they share their fears: that they won’t make rent; that they’ll get COVID-19; or, for her fellow Filipinos, that they’ll be assaulted – simply because they’re Asian.
“I’m scared for them,” Burbage said. “These are people I’ve worked with for years. I told everybody, ‘Just hang in there. We will have the vaccine soon, and we will go back to work.’ ”
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders grapple with the nation’s highest rates of long-term unemployment more than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered hotels, restaurants, shopping centers, beauty salons and other sectors of the economy.
Even as uncharacteristically high unemployment levels driven by the economic shutdown have returned to near pre-pandemic levels, many Asian Americans are unsure when they will be able to return to work.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 48% of the Asian community’s estimated 615,000 unemployed were without work for six months-plus through the first quarter of this year. The figure surpassed the portion of long-term unemployed among jobless workers in the Black population (43%), white population (39%) and Hispanic population (39%).
Experts said the community’s lingering long-term unemployment levels reflect the slow comeback of low-wage industries populated by disproportionate numbers of Asian and Pacific Islander workers with low education. The figures don’t include those who haven’t applied for unemployment benefits because of language or cultural barriers.
The situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic. In San Francisco last fall, Asians accounted for nearly 40% of COVID-19 deaths despite comprising 12% of all positive cases.
More than 7 in 10 Asians in the USA are foreign-born, and many immigrants or refugees settled in high-cost housing markets and states hard hit by the pandemic. Nearly a third of the nation’s Asian population lives in California.
“We did see that the pandemic had a profound effect on those with a high school education or less,” said Melany De La Cruz-Viesca, associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Asian American Studies Center, noting that 83% of California’s Asians in that category had filed unemployment claims as of last summer, compared with 37% of the rest of the workforce. ~z}np ~ m w ~
Asian Americans without some higher education have found it harder to regain footing, De La Cruz-Viesca said, even as Asian American unemployment has dipped from a pandemic high of nearly 15% last spring to just above 5% in February. “The more educated tier you’re in, the more likely you are to rebound,” she said. “But if you’re a nail salon worker, you have a limited social network, and you’re probably going to sit it out until they call you back.”
As the virus spread last spring, jobs driven by person-to-person contact disappeared, many of them held by Asian workers in areas such as retail, hospitality and leisure, and personal services such as salons or elderly care.
“They’re serving your food, they’re doing your nails and they’re caring for your children and your elderly,” said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, a Chicagobased nonprofit group that aims to empower women.
Within those sectors, Asians accounted for 1 in 4 employees nationwide, according to a report compiled by economics professor Donald Mar of San Francisco State University and urban planning scholar Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA. “These industries have been very slow to recover,” Mar said. “Asian Americans are also concentrated in a small number of states, and some of these states implemented shelter-inplace restrictions ahead of the rest of the nation. So Asian Americans were more likely to be unemployed sooner during the pandemic.”
More than 233,000 Asian small businesses closed from January to March 2020, Mar estimated; many were hit even before shutdowns went into effect, losing business as customers wary of Asian links to the virus shied away.
For those long unemployed, the situation has taken a toll not just financially but mentally. In Seattle, a hotline set up for unemployed workers by hospitality union Unite Here to help people find food banks and relief funds soon became much more.
“Folks have called the hotline just to talk to another human, because they’re isolated,” said Unite Here community organizer Eunice How, Seattle chapter president of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. “Some call with a mental health crisis, and they’re crying and don’t know where else to turn.”
Most of the local union’s workers remain unemployed, and the organization tries to keep spirits lifted with regular phone calls, texts and Zoom chats. About 30% of downtown Seattle hotel workers are Asians and Pacific Islanders, How estimated.
“Our union has been really devastated by the pandemic,” she said. “And we will be one of the last industries to recover, because our industry relies on folks gathering and traveling. It can’t be remote; you have to go in physically and work, so there’s no work-from-home.”
Burbage said her older colleagues feel especially vulnerable, afraid their jobs will disappear, that they’re too old to find other work. “They’re worried they’re going to be thrown out of their apartments,” said Burbage, who considers herself lucky because she has an employed spouse. Most of them room together, she said, because they can’t afford to live by themselves.
On top of that, they’re worried about getting the virus, as well as confronting violence. San Francisco-based Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, tallied nearly 3,800 anti-Asian incident reports from March 2020 through February.
Because many of her older colleagues don’t drive and must get around by bus, Burbage and several others volunteered to deliver union-procured food donations in San Diego. “A lot of my Filipino co-workers are so depressed, and they’re scared to go out,” Burbage said.
Alexandra Suh, executive director of the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance in Los Angeles, said Asian women in low-income jobs feel the brunt of joblessness. “The recovery we’ve seen in Asian communities has been on par with other groups among the highly educated and those with higher wages,” Suh said. “Where we see a huge discrepancy is among the lower-income and lower-educated, who only have access to the lowest wage jobs and have seen the least job recovery. So it’s an even worse situation than the statistics suggest – and especially for Asian American women.”
In December 2020, the economy lost 140,000 women’s jobs, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
“Many times Asian women have an especially high burden of domestic work and child care responsibilities in families, and with all the children at home, it’s just been harder,” Suh said. “They also have more involvement with elder care. There’s so many pressures with the pandemic.”
What has made the Asian community so vulnerable to unemployment, she said, is the manner in which Asians in the USA have been racialized, steered toward jobs and industries whose tasks are historically seen as “women’s work” – cooking, laundries and domestic work, nursing and personal care. Those jobs are devalued and underpaid, she said. “When we have a pandemic that has put incredible pressure on society,” Suh said, “who gets it the hardest? It’s women, people of color and people in low-wage jobs.”
That pressure can have reverberations even beyond those who are laid off. Choimorrow said she knows a young woman in Chicago who had just earned her bachelor’s degree when the pandemic hit and was thrust into a breadwinner role when her undocumented parents lost their food service industry jobs in the ensuing shutdown.
“Suddenly, she was responsible for the family’s mortgage,” Choimorrow said. “That’s a huge responsibility for a 22-year-old just out of college.”
It’s not just those with limited education who are jobless. Yan Pang, 31, a Chinese-born university music instructor and nonprofit organization employee in St. Paul, Minnesota, was laid off from both jobs as school enrollment plummeted and the organization’s funds dried up.
Pang, who came to the USA in 2012 and earned her doctorate in music at the University of Minnesota, said it’s hard not to get discouraged. “People keep telling me, ‘Your time will come,’ and I tell myself to stay hopeful,” Pang said. “But you need to live – to buy food and drink, to have respect in the industry, and part of that is income. Without that, how long can I keep confident?”
For the past 10 months, she’s been out of regular work, either passed over for job opportunities or locked out by university hiring freezes. She worries she may be a casualty of the racist “model minority” stereotype that infers that Asian Americans are successful and don’t need a break.
“I feel like I’m not vulnerable enough to get the extra help but not privileged enough to not worry about it,” Pang said. “So I’m ‘invisibilized.’ ”
Pang said she’s experienced antiAsian taunts and has been told, “Go back to China.” An uncharacteristically unfriendly customs officer, she said, told her, “You’re lucky we don’t have enough money to deport you.”
Pang said she was ridiculed for wearing a mask early in the pandemic and for urging others to do the same. The pressure was so great that she often removed her mask in public places to avoid being bullied, she said.
The money she gets from unemployment is just enough to get by. Sometimes, she finds donated canned food in the lobby of the artists’ loft where she lives.
“I spent nine years in America to get a doctorate education,” she said. “And here’s what I get.”