Minority Males Suffer Job Losses In The Recession - Pride In Obama Tides Them Over

Young, minority men who didn't earn much to begin with are hit hardest by unemployment.

A more honest discussion of the links between unemployment, race and gender would force a rethinking of the economic models that draw connections between unemployment and systemic consequences.

As I ate at an airport yesterday I noticed something at the fast food joint as I cured my hunger pains for breakfast - the correlation between advance skills, ie: VALUE ADD and the ability to command a salary.

From the person who's job was to assist confused travelers about how to use the touchscreen menu system and insert their money.  To the cook.  To the sandwich wrapper-er in the kitchen.  To the sandwich bagger behind the counter.  To the guy who put the hashbrowns into the bag and called out the orders.  

Each of their jobs were subject to technological replacement if management so choosed to do so.  

There are two interests invovled here:

• The worker - The need for salary but with a certain skill set to "sell" to the marketplace along with the question of the quantity of others with these same skills
• The employer/owner - The purchaser of labor.   Has a certain business process that needs to be executed and needs to balance the skills with the payment in order to remain a viable business

An airport is effectively an employment center, a number of workers doing a variety of tasks.  I saw a place for high school graduates to perform certain tasks in support of the traveling public.  While their jobs may be slightly more stable in this entity - their prospects for creating an abundant life in these particular jobs are limited.  Clearly the need for advanced skills and education is a mandate for their advancement into other areas - at the airport and beyond.

The MSNBC story below talks about the "distinctions in employment" and its impact based on RACE.   It fails to document the key facts within these same communities that serve to channel minorities toward these jobs, often lacking the necessary skills to do otherwise.

Amazingly - incremental improvements in the foundation constructed in our public education system would have a tremendous impact in these results.

More than 4 million Americans have been fired since last fall, and the job losses are far from over. April began with yet another stunningly bad report—663,000 jobs lost. The unemployment rate, now 8.5 percent, is likely to hit double digits over the coming months. Some economists say that even if the economy begins to recover later this year, it may not pick up enough steam to bring down unemployment until well into 2010. Few regions of the county have been spared, and the headlines have been dire. IN EPIDEMIC OF LAYOFFS, NO ONE IS IMMUNE, blared The Philadelphia Inquirer. SILICON VALLEY UNEMPLOYMENT RATE JUMPS TO A FRIGHTENING 9.4 PERCENT, wrote the San Jose Mercury News. Nearly everyone seems to know a horror story—the Wall Street banker abruptly escorted from his office; the small-business owner forced to close her shop on Main Street; the auto worker who spent decades on the same factory floor where his father once worked.

But there is a dirty secret about unemployment. We may feel united by a common anxiety about losing our jobs, but we are not all in this together. Unemployment is not a scythe that cuts equally through different sectors of society, felling white collar and blue collar, African-American and Hispanic, male and female, in equal measure. Young, minority men working in jobs that didn't pay much to begin with are suffering more than their white-collar counterparts. The unemployment rate for those over 25 with a college degree was 4.3 percent—half the national rate, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. For those college-educated and white, the number was 2.3 percent at the end of 2008, the most recent available for that demographic. On the other end of the spectrum, the unemployment rate for African-Americans over the age of 16 was 13.3 percent, and for Hispanics, 11.4 percent. For anyone without a high-school diploma, the rate was 13.3 percent. Minorities and the less educated have always suffered more during downturns, but the disparity has become more stark.

The job ax is falling hard on men in general. For men over 20, the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent; for women, it is 7 percent. In the mid-1970s, by way of comparison, the figures were nearly opposite. In today's market, the sectors that are shedding employees—construction, manufacturing, industry—have a higher proportion of male workers, many of whom do not need advanced degrees for their jobs. These industries are being hit not simply by the current crisis but by the combined effects of technology and globalization.