Titled “A Crisis of Black Male Employment: Unemployment and Joblessness in New York City, 2003,” the report was issued in February by the Community Service Society (CSS), a privately funded group that carries out research into “social welfare” issues.

In the year since the U.S. economy came out of an official recession, overall unemployment has never fallen below 5 percent nationwide. For Blacks the figure is 10 percent across the country.

These figures are higher in New York, where unemployment was 8.5 percent citywide in 2003. Joblessness there was 12.9 percent for Blacks, 9.6 percent for Latinos, and 28.7 percent for teenagers last year.

In the three-year period between 2000 and 2003, unemployment rose 2.8 percent citywide, while it increased 5.4 percent for Blacks and 9.8 percent for teenagers.

Those without jobs also stay out of work for much longer periods—especially “blue collar” workers.

These figures, drawn from the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), do not include “discouraged workers”—those who have stopped looking for a job—and those who have not entered the “job market,” including women dropped from welfare rolls.  
 
Liberals use survey to score points
Democratic Party politicians and the liberal media in New York have sought to use the CSS survey to score points against their Republican opponents, especially the administration of U.S. president George Bush.

Responding to the report’s statement—based on a particular method of analyzing and presenting data—that only 51 percent of Black men in the city hold paying jobs, Democratic City Councilman William Perkins said, “For the Black community, that’s a depression.” According to a recent Daily News article headlined, “Council urges more help for blacks amid job crisis,” Lawrence Seabrook, another Democrat on the city council, “likened the plight of unemployed black men to an endangered species.”

Councilwoman Letitia James of the Working Families Party, a formally independent group that supports Democratic Party candidates and policies, said, “We should declare a state of emergency in the City of New York as a result of the high unemployment rate within the black community.”

The approach of these politicians was consistent with that of Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry, who claims in his campaign ads that “three million jobs were lost under Bush”—pinning blame on Republican politicians for the impact of recession and then nil job growth, rather than on the normal functioning of capitalism in a period of long-term crisis. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are proposing any measures to redress the disproportionate impact of the long-term downward economic spiral upon Blacks and other oppressed groups, or upon industrial and other workers.

The New York Times headlined its February 28 article on the CSS document, “Nearly Half of Black Men Found Jobless.” It stated, “Mark Levitan, the report’s author, found that just 51.8 percent of black men ages 16 to 64 held jobs in New York city in 2003. The rate for white men was 75.7 percent; for Hispanic men, 65.7; and for black women, 57.1. The employment-population ratio for black men was the lowest for the period Mr. Levitan has studied, which goes back to 1979.”

The figures are a result of household surveys of the number of working-age people who hold official, paid employment on which they pay taxes.

In a telephone interview with the Militant, Levitan, a senior analyst with the CSS, cautioned that this measure of employment doesn’t give an accurate picture of joblessness.

The employment-population ratio does not include members of the armed forces, prisoners, and those in other institutions in its count. Moreover, those forced by bosses to accept payment under the table are not counted as working.

The official unemployment rate, which is based on the number of people without work and who are “actively seeking” it, “is an important measure of economic conditions,” Levitan said, “but it is also important to look at employment-to-population ratios because they give another view and more rounded picture.” Neither method accounts for the entire population, Levitan stressed. “There is a lack of data about many groups of people who are doing something and are not captured in the official surveys,” he said. If they were included, the number of employed in the employment-to-population ratio would be greater than CSS reports.

Likewise, counting so-called discouraged workers, unemployed workers who may have given up looking for a job for a time and therefore are not listed as officially “unemployed,” would raise the official joblessness level.  
 
Heavier burden of unemployment
The trends cited in the report using both measures indicate, albeit fuzzily, how joblessness in New York is rising faster among Blacks and youth. Between 2000 and 2003, it says, employment for Black males in the city fell 12.2 percent, compared with 2.1 percent for their white counterparts. Almost 29 percent of teenagers in the New York labor force were unemployed, while among young adults between the ages of 20 to 24 the jobless rate was 13.1 percent. Blacks make up 27 percent and Latinos 35 percent of males in that age group—or an overall percentage of 62 percent of young men.

Capitalist politicians and the media have tried to pin this picture nationwide, and in New York City in particular, on the impact of the September 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. But statistics in the CSS report show that the job market in the city had been contracting since December 2000 and had shed 81,000 jobs in the nine months leading up to September 2001.

The CSS report also showed that unemployment among “blue collar” workers—those with factory and related service jobs—was 10.1 percent. For those classified as “managers” and “professionals” the rates were under 6 percent.

In 2003 workers stayed out of work for longer, on average. In 2000, 60 percent were able to find work within 14 weeks of being laid off, while 25 percent still did not have a job after 27 months or more.

Three years later fewer than half of all unemployed workers were able to find jobs within 14 weeks, and 40 percent went without jobs for 27 weeks or more. One quarter had been out of work for 40 weeks or more.

Nationwide, BLS statistics show that the official number of jobless remained largely unchanged in March, at an estimated 8.4 million. This represented 5.7 percent of the workforce, down from 6.3 percent in June 2003.

Some 4.7 million workers were employed part-time in March. Respondents to the Labor Department survey said they were working part-time because their hours had been cut or they were unable to find full-time jobs.  
 
 
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