The statistics also show that one of the reasons for the rise in joblessness among African-Americans—now at 11.8 percent, compared to the overall nationwide rate of 6.4 percent—is that many Blacks have refused to be driven out of the workforce and continue to look for jobs. If they had stopped trying, the government would have stopped including them in their calculations. At the end of the 1990s the percentage of Blacks who held jobs or were looking for work rose by two percentage points to 68 percent, the highest level on record. That high percentage has held in the current downturn.

Low-wage workers, including hundreds of thousands—mostly women— who were thrown off welfare and went to work in the 1990s as a result of “welfare reform” under the Clinton administration, have largely kept their jobs. Relatively better-paid factory workers have borne the brunt of the layoffs.

In this way, the bosses are also driving down the overall pay Blacks earn, as hundreds of thousands have been forced to take jobs at minimum wage.

Unemployment among Blacks is rising more rapidly than for other workers, and more sharply than in any downturn since the recession of the mid-1970s. In 2000 Blacks constituted 10.1 percent of the 20 million factory workers in the United States. During the recession that started in March 2001 an estimated 300,000, or 15 percent, of factory workers who are Black lost their jobs. This compares with 10 percent of factory workers who are white.

In a poll of 850 Blacks taken by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in 2000, some 45 percent of respondents said they were better off than the year before. Ten percent said they were worse off and 44 percent said their condition remained the same. A similar poll taken two years later showed a dramatic shift: only 19 percent said they were better off, 37 percent said they were worse off, and 43 percent felt their situation had not changed.

In Indianapolis, for example, some 350 workers—75 percent of them Black, mostly young—will be laid off when the Swedish seat belt manufacturer Autoliv closes. Many of these workers, hired right out of high school in the 1990s when the unemployment rate in the city was only two percent, are earning $12 to $13 per hour.

But it is not only the newly hired who are taking a hit. Tens of thousands of mostly unionized textile workers in the southeast have been laid off with virtually no chance of returning to work. Some 3,500 workers lost their jobs as the textile bosses closed mills in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina; Columbus, Georgia; and Martinsville, Virginia, according to the president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textiles Employees (UNITE). These workers, in their majority Black men and women with many years in the mills, earn as much as $11 per hour along with benefits.

“This is not like the cyclical downturns in the old days,” noted Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. “These jobs are gone.”

The unemployment rate among Blacks ages 20 and older has been driven up the sharpest. At the end of 1999, joblessness for these workers fell to less than five percent. It has since doubled to 10.5 percent today. For Blacks the figures in this age group rose 3.5 percent since the onset of the recession, as compared to 1.7 percent for whites.

The spike in Black unemployment comes in the context of an overall contraction in manufacturing. In the last 28 months the bosses have cut 2.6 million industrial jobs—56,000 of these in June, the 35th consecutive monthly decline, representing the longest string of layoffs in industry since World War II. “Most of these basic and low-skill factory jobs aren’t liable to come back when the economy recovers or when excess capacity around the world dissolves,” said Clare Ansberry in a July 21 Wall Street Journal article headlined, “Laid-Off Factory Workers Find Jobs Are Drying Up for Good.”

Driven by sharpening competition, large and profitable corporations are also taking tougher stances in demanding concessions from workers. “It’s the worst pricing pressures we’ve ever experienced,” stated Patrick Cleary, a senior executive at the National Association of Manufacturers.. “Our guys can’t push these costs along. That’s why they’re seeking to reduce labor costs.”  
 
 
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