Trump’s wording off in claim on hiring

The claim: “For the first time in history, most new hires of prime working age are minorities and women.” — President Donald Trump.

Trump made the statement during a recent “Howdy, Modi” event at NRG Stadium in Houston, appearing with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PolitiFact ruling: Half True. Trump’s re-election campaign told PolitiFact that Trump relied on reporting by the Washington Post. However, Trump imprecisely recounted the Post’s analysis. An economist said that the president’s statement and the wording in the Post article are significantly different.

Discussion: The Post found that for the first time, most new hires of prime working age (25 to 54) are people of color, and that within that segment, women are predominantly driving the trend.

The Post noted that “minority hires overtook white hires” in 2018, based on data the Department of Labor began collecting in the 1970s.

“The president’s paraphrase of the findings is incorrect as it includes non-Hispanic white women,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab who focuses on the U.S. labor market and whom the Post consulted about its data analysis.

Ernie Tedeschi, a managing director and policy economist at Evercore ISI, also said the majority of prime-age job finders over the last 24 months have been people of color. Tedeschi uses the term “job finders” to refer to people who transition from nonemployment one month to having a job the next month. What’s influencing the trend? “A lot of what’s going on here is population growth: prime-age America is much less white than it used to be,” Tedeschi said. “As a result, prime-age Americans of color, in particular women, are a growing share of the prime-age overall and nonemployed populations.”

College attainment is also rising for everyone and especially for Americans of color, which increases their chances of getting jobs, said Tedeschi, who offered the Post guidance on how to analyze the labor market data.

The Post flagged additional factors driving the trend: Latino women being encouraged to work outside the home, a need for two incomes to pay the bills, and men being deported with women needing to enter the workforce to support their families.

“This trend will likely continue if the labor market remains strong,” Bunker said. “But an economic downturn might reverse the trend, and we might not see people of color make up most of new prime-age hires again until the labor market has strengthened for quite some time.”