A quick guide to unemployment rates, by race, in major US cities – By Michelle Cheng (Quartz) / June 3 2020
Before Covid-19, US unemployment was at a 50-year low. But even an historically tight labor market had notably more slack in it for brown and black populations, in cities across the country.
In Minneapolis, for example, the unemployment rate declined from 3.3% to 3.1% between 2000 and 2018, according to data from IPUMS, a database housed at the University of Minnesota that integrates census and survey data. Among white people, it dropped from 2.5% to 1.9%. But among black people, unemployment rose from 6.8% to 8%.
“That’s pretty alarming I have to say,” says Elise Gould, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Her recent work on how Covid-19 has affected black workers is based on national data, which she says “misses so much of the differences we see across the United States.”
The numbers are part of the undercurrent of the ongoing protests that started in Minneapolis, where protesters have amassed daily in the wake of the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed under police custody.
Now, with the backdrop of a pandemic during which one in four US workers has filed for unemployment, black people continue to face a harsher reality in the job market. In April, the unemployment rate for white Americans stood at 14.2%; for black Americans, it was 16.7%.
Continue to article: https://qz.com/1863793/a-quick-guide-to-unemployment-rates-by-race-in-major-us-cities/
