An absurdly high unemployment rate in NYC Black communities

No witticisms for this one. Sorry.


Freedom Rider at The Black Commentator

Black New York: Out of Work and Off the Radar Screen

It is rare for every publication in New York City to give equal attention to the same news story. A report issued recently by the Community Service Society of New York accomplished that rare feat. The think tank and social service agency issued a report, "A Crisis of Black Male Employment: Unemployment and Joblessness in New York City, 2003." The data generated headlines in the New York Times and the New York Amsterdam News because it revealed the sobering information that only 51.8 percent of black males in New York City between the ages of 16 and 64 are working.

The realization that the recession had such a terrible impact on one group was stunning news. The data confirmed what black New Yorkers see in their neighborhoods: large numbers of men who are obviously not working. Report author Mark Levitan says that the response reflected a grim satisfaction that there is data to back up what so many see every day. Over and over Mr. Levitan was told, "Finally somebody put a number on something we've known all along."

Behind those figures are devastated lives and devastated neighborhoods. The negative impact of a nearly 50% rate of joblessness cannot be over emphasized.

Posted by Prometheus 6 on March 31, 2004 - 6:47pm :: News
 
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Presumably the jobless rate would be even worse if we weren't putting so many black men in prison, where they don't count as unemployed.

Posted by  Al-Muhajabah (not verified) on April 1, 2004 - 12:39am.

This is the sort of problem, IMO, that outsourcing is distracting us from: for decades we've allowed huge regions of the nation to fester so that it's virtually impossible to locate new businesses there. Most African American communities suffer from a famine of public services, making it necessary for determined job seekers to commute vast distances and hide where they're from.

But for a long time the telecommunications / information technology (TCIT) sector was flourishing, so many conservative economists argued that globalizaton was merely restructuring the American economy to export services in TCIT while importing manufactured items. The loss of TCIT jobs is inducing panic because the American public perceives--correctly, IMO--that for SOME reason, nothing is going to replace those lost TCIT jobs.

What neither understood was that the reason America was losing its ability to compete in more and more fields was the inadequate public goods.

Posted by  James R MacLean (not verified) on April 3, 2004 - 7:56pm.