As Public Sector Sheds Jobs, Blacks Are Hit Hardest
Published: November 28, 2011 - New York Times
Don Buckley lost his job driving a Chicago Transit Authority bus almost two
years ago and has been looking for work ever since, even as other municipal bus
drivers around the country are being laid off.
At 34, Mr. Buckley, his two daughters and his fiancée have moved into the
basement of his mother’s house. He has had to delay his marriage, and his entire
savings, $27,000, is gone. “I was the kind of person who put away for a rainy
day,” he said recently. “It’s flooding now.”
Mr. Buckley is one of tens of thousands of once solidly middle-class
African-American government workers — bus drivers in Chicago, police officers
and firefighters in Cleveland, nurses and doctors in Florida — who have been
laid off since the recession
ended in June 2009. Such job losses have blunted gains made in employment and
wealth during the previous decade and undermined the stability of neighborhoods
where there are now fewer black professionals who own homes or who get up every
morning to go to work.
Though the recession and continuing economic downturn has been devastating to
the American middle class as a whole, the two and a half years since the
declared end of the recession have been singularly harmful to middle-class
blacks in terms of layoffs and unemployment, according to economists and recent
government data. About one in five black workers have public-sector jobs, and
African-American workers are one-third more likely than white ones to be
employed in the public sector.
“The reliance on these jobs has provided African-Americans a path upward,”
said Robert
H. Zieger, emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida, and
the author of a book on race and labor. “But it is also a vulnerability.”
A study
by the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California
this spring concluded, “Any analysis of the impact to society of additional
layoffs in the public sector as a strategy to address the fiscal crisis should
take into account the disproportionate impact the reductions in government
employment have on the black community.”
Jobless rates among blacks have consistently been about double those of
whites. In October, the black unemployment rate was 15.1 percent, compared with
8 percent for whites. Last summer, the black unemployment rate hit 16.7 percent,
its highest level since 1984.
Economists say there are probably a variety of reasons for the racial gap,
including generally lower educational levels for African-Americans, continuing
discrimination and the fact that many live in areas that have been slow to
recover economically.
Though the precise number of African-Americans who have lost public-sector
jobs nationally since 2009 is unclear, observers say the current situation in
Chicago is typical. There, nearly two-thirds of 212 city employees facing
layoffs are black, according to the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union.
The central role played by government employment in black communities is hard
to overstate. African-Americans in the public sector earn 25 percent more than
other black workers, and the jobs have long been regarded as respectable, stable
work for college graduates, allowing many to buy homes, send children to private
colleges and achieve other markers of middle-class life that were otherwise
closed to them.
Blacks have relied on government jobs in large numbers since at least
Reconstruction, when the United States Postal Service hired freed slaves. The
relationship continued through a century during which racial discrimination
barred blacks from many private-sector jobs, and carried over into the 1960s
when government was vastly expanded to provide more services, like bus lines to
new suburbs, additional public hospitals and schools, and more.
But during the past year, while the private sector has added 1.6 million
jobs, state and local governments have shed at least 142,000 positions,
according to the Labor Department. Those losses are in addition to 200,000
public-sector jobs lost in 2010 and more than 500,000 since the start of the
recession.
The layoffs are only the latest piece of bad news for the nation’s struggling
black middle class.
A study by
the Brookings Institution in 2007 found that fewer than one-third of blacks
born to middle-class parents went on to earn incomes greater than their parents,
compared with more than two-thirds of whites from the same income bracket. The
foreclosure crisis also wiped out a large part of a generation of black
homeowners.
The layoffs are not expected to end any time soon. The United
States Postal Service, where about 25 percent of employees are black, is
considering eliminating 220,000
positions in order to stay solvent, and areas with large black populations —
from urban Detroit to rural Jefferson County, Miss. — are struggling with budget
problems that could also lead to mass layoffs.
The postal cuts alone — which would amount to more than one-third of the work
force — would be a blow both economically and psychologically, employees say.
Pamela Sparks, 49, a 25-year Postal Service veteran in Baltimore, has a
brother who is a letter carrier and a sister who is a sales associate at the
Postal Service. Her father is a retired station manager.
“With our whole family working for the Post Office, it would be hard to help
each other out because we’d all be out of work,” Ms. Sparks said. “It has
afforded us a lot of things we needed to survive really, but this is one of the
drawbacks.”
In Michigan, Valerie Kindle, 61, who was laid off in April as a state
government employee, said the loss of her $50,000-a-year job with benefits had
caused her to put off retirement. Instead, she is looking for work. Two
relatives have also lost state government jobs recently.
“There hasn’t been one family member who hasn’t been touched by a layoff,”
Ms. Kindle said. “We are losing the bulk of our middle class. I was much better
off than my parents, and I’m feeling my children will not be as well off as I
was. There’s not as much government work and not as many manufacturing jobs.
It’s just going down so wrong for us. When I think about it I get frightened, so
I try not to think about it.”
Mr. Buckley, the unemployed Chicago bus driver who now lives in his mother’s
basement, said his mother, a Postal Service employee, had grown tired of him
“eating up all her food.”
“She’s ready for me to get up out of here,” he said. In the meantime, Mr.
Buckley says his life has drifted into the tedium of looking for decent-paying
jobs that do not exist.
“I was living the American dream — my version of the American dream,” he said
of his $23.76-an-hour job. “Then it crumbled. They get you used to having things
and then they take them away, and you realize how lucky you were.”