The jobs numbers were hailed as good news on Friday, with employers adding more than 200,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate ticking down to 8.8 percent. Less attention was given to the downside of these numbers. Black unemployment remains about twice as great as the national unemployment average -- and is going up, not down.
What is going on here? To some extent, this reflects the old patterns: Minorities are the last hired and the first fired, and the last to be brought in and the first to go.
But it is more than that. The stepladders that hard-working minorities could climb into the middle class are being dismantled. With the migration to the North after World War II, African Americans flooded into cities and eagerly sought jobs in the growing manufacturing sector. But manufacturing has been in decline since the 1980s, as companies began shipping more good jobs than goods abroad.
Then African Americans with growing educational achievement sought employment in the public sector, particularly at the state and local level. As more equal opportunity opened up, they found work as teachers, managers, sanitation workers, cops and firefighters. But now, layoffs of public employees are spreading, and minorities often are those with the least seniority and the first to go. Latinos and blacks also flocked to the residential, often non-union, construction industries, but these were devastated when the housing bubble burst.
This Great Recession has been a Great Depression for young people. Hit with trillions in losses in retirement accounts and housing values, older workers struggle to hold onto their jobs longer. With jobs growth slow, openings for the young are scarce.
Here again, there is a racial divide. Over 40 percent of all African Americans between ages 16 and 19 are unemployed, compared with 21 percent of all whites of that age. This is, without question, a social catastrophe. Young people are graduating from high school or college into the worst jobs situation since the 1930s. Without jobs, they lose skills, discipline, dignity and hope. Economists tell us that those who lose months to unemployment often take years to catch up with their peers, if they ever do.
Beneath this is the continued legacy of discrimination in America. Young African Americans still suffer the disadvantage of unequal opportunity from the start. Too many are born into poverty, raised in broken homes, suffer the savage inequality that comes from the absence of affordable pre-K programs in underfunded public schools trying to cope with the absence of good teachers who flee to affluent suburbs. Urban residents also suffer from the rising cost of and decreasing access to mass transit, making it more and more difficult to get to jobs that might be available in the suburbs.
In Washington, the focus has turned to cutting deficits, not to creating jobs. With interest rates near zero, and businesses sitting on trillions waiting for customers, even conservatives have a hard time arguing that "cut and grow" works. They suggest that businesses aren't hiring because they are worried about potential future tax increases or befuddled by regulations, or lack confidence in the future. More likely, they simply lack customers, as 25 million are still in need of full-time work, wages are not keeping up with rising costs of food and gas, home values are continuing to sink, and Americans continue to tighten their belts.
This is a national emergency. We cannot allow mass unemployment to be the new normal. We cannot write off an entire generation. At the current rate of jobs generation, it will take six years to make up the jobs lost in the Great Recession. Young people can't wait six years to get to work. The long-term unemployed can't wait six years for jobs to come back.
We need a National Commission on Jobs and the Young. We need to focus on the depression that is devastating the newly emerging black middle class and snuffing out hope among the young. And if Washington can't hear this yet, we've got to raise our voices and demand that they listen.
Follow Rev. Jesse Jackson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/revjjackson
To return livable wages to the USA requires that a tariff be placed on any product or service on a country when the amount in dollars of their exports into the USA exceed the amount of dollars that the USA products and services export back into that country. In other words balance the flow of free trade to match import and export dollars. The USA worker cannot compete with a worker that makes $2.00 a day.
The average savings Americans presently incur by buying foreign products is $2300 a year. That is a bad deal for workers who lost a manufactur¬¬ing job, or their service job outsourced¬, that paid $40,000 a year and now works in a service job in the USA for minimum wages
.
Free Trade is also a bad deal for the US government because the displaced worker no longer makes enough in a minimum wage service job to pay taxes. All American workers must now subsidize the displaced worker with unemployme¬¬nt, medical, food stamps, rent subsidies, and in many cases prison costs..
Free trade has been a total disaster for our youths opportunity and hope. Even the WTO states in the charter that unbalanced trade between members is harmful, yet our Congress is oblivious to the root cause of unemployment in the USA..
I have a family member that is a teacher in a high risk school in one of our big cities. After a few years as a teacher, she is frustrated and sad, yes Jesse, she is sad, that the minority children she is teaching don't want to learn. They have little parental help at home. This teacher goes to their home to see the parents because they won't come to see her. It does NO good. The minorities, the less educated parents, often feel that school is a waste of time and that message isn't lost on their children. No amount of youth, energy as a new teacher can combat what is going on within the inner cities of America. Those kids are getting lost and lost really quick. It is so painful to watch.
Even in my town that is financially fairly stable, it is obvious by the school ratings that those in the affluent sections are highly rated schools, while those in poorer neighborhoods are rated at the bottom. Look at Milwaukee school system in WI. They are at the bottom.
Where is Arnie Duncan? Where are all these creative ideas that should be front and center and honestly talked about until solutions are found? Maybe you see Arnie, Jesse, but I never do.
I went to school with poor kids. You know, kids that had no indoor plumbing. Kids that were already missing teeth due to decay. Kids that worked before school milking cows and then again when they got home. My best friend, immigrants from Italy, lived in a home the size of a large closet with 5 other siblings. I have seen poor. However all these kids graduated high school with many going on to college regardless of the fact that they were dirt poor.
We have a structural failure of gigantic proportion looming over this country that nobody from either party is willing to address. That structural failure starts with our public school system that is not inspiring learning, but instead loading up on busy work.
Dead on.
Any energy wasted on supporting a particular racial distinction within the disenfranchised community will, however incorrectly in some cases, serve to divide the disenfranchised against themselves. We have only so much time/energy to give, and the oligarchs know this.
If the top-paid CEOs in this country would take a one percent cut, how many people could their companies hire? If GE used even one percent of its $5B profit - on which it paid no taxes - to create summer jobs, they could put over ten thousand kids to work.
Over 1/3 of young people looking for summer jobs will fail to find those jobs. Sad to say, but our government does not seem to worry about the young people, many of whom were so hopeful after the 2008 elections.
http://www.lsu.edu/ur/ocur/lsunews/MediaCenter/News/2010/04/item12940.html
Subsitute commission for committee and you have it!
TBTF, corporate monopolies, like McDonalds, GE Finance, GM, are all part of the past.
If the United States were to simply raise tarrifs, dismantle 'globalization' and 'free trade', then new entrepreneurs will take over or create the next generation GE, GM and have no need for derivatives.
That can happen by restoring Glass-Steagall IMMEDIATELY.
Why is 50% of America buying this ? Answer: we no longer have a free press.
Keep it simple Mr. Reverend.
Rebuild the black american family and you will see marked improvement in their children's future
Tell me Rev. Jackson how has the combination of Free Trade coupled with the EPA and OSHA regulations been any less harmful for minority employment than Separate but Equal? I ask you because you were of a generation that had to deal with Separate But Equal!
I ask you how is it the number of jobs of corrections officer over the last 10 years keeps growing faster than most other jobs? How is it the Department of Labor says it will grow another 9% even with most states having budget problems?!?!?!
Don't think for a second I want to give up safety and clean air and clean water.
So let's look at Free Trade! What are we getting out of Free Trade other than full employment of correction officers?
Please correct me but it seems to me that Free Trade gives a huge advantage to the nation/corporation that can get away with treating its citizens/workers and environment the worse!
2nd point after 170 years where we became the strongest nation on the planet we are going to reverse course and say the Senator Daniel Webster was wrong and the SLAVE owning plantation owning Senator John C. Calhoun was right about Free Trade!
Rev. Jackson isn't Free Trade really as big a Civil Rights issue as it was in John C. Calhoun's and Daniel Webster's day? Slavery or incarceration!
Think about it!
What you aren't explaining is how "free trade = increased incarceration rates" - not saying you're wrong; just want to know how you came to this conclusion.
Give them hope about the future. Once a young man joins a gang the path leads to prison. They know that but they truly believe they have no choice.