Hiring crisis for U.S. black youth

Hiring crisis for U.S. black youth

August 9, 2005
Seth Sandronsky


U.S. employers added 207,000 new jobs in July, while the national unemployment rate remained at 5.0 percent, the Labor Department reported on August 5. Yet for one group of workers in America, there is little to cheer about when it comes to being hired by employers.
The July jobless rate for America's black teens was 33.1 percent, up by 0.7 percentage points from June. In other words, black teens are out of a job at nearly seven times the overall national rate!
Skin colour matters in the U.S. labour market, which is promoted as the global model for other nations to follow. Under American capitalism, employment opportunity is supposed to grow when the private sector is freed from government regulation.
That is one theory. Social reality is another matter entirely for black teens living in the U.S. Their employment plight was apparently hardly deemed newsworthy in mass media reporting on the July jobs report – another failure of mainstream American journalism.
Black teens across the U.S. are experiencing joblessness at rates comparable to those experienced by the overall adult labour force during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As my father told me, folks then had greetings that fit the hard times they lived. One common example was, "Are you working?"
Seven decades ago, he was one of the lucky folks who gained employment that paid him wages, labouring in rural areas for FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps. People’s organized resistance to the hardships they faced forced the federal government to respond when the private sector failed to create jobs.
Currently, the U.S. economy is growing. New jobs are being created in many sectors of the economy, including construction, real estate, restaurant and retail. At the same time, there is a festering jobs crisis for America’s black youth. They are living in depression-like times concerning employment opportunities, with their absence from payrolls failing to make front-page news.
Where is the outrage?
Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and a co-editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper.