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Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an analysis of employment data compiled by the federal Labor Department that found that African-Americans and other non-Hispanic blacks in New York City were faring worse than residents of other races. More than half of the city’s black residents were unemployed.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other New York officials have been highlighting how the city has regained all the jobs lost during the long recession.  Unfortunately this has not trickled down to African Americans and other non-Hispanic blacks.  The article states:

“More than half of all of African-Americans and other non-Hispanic blacks in the city who were old enough to work had no job at all this year, according to an analysis of employment data compiled by the federal Labor Department. And when black New Yorkers lose their jobs, they spend a full year, on average, trying to find new jobs — far longer than New Yorkers of other races.

Nationally, the employment outlook for blacks has begun to brighten: there were about one million more black Americans with jobs in May than there were a year earlier, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But that is not the case in New York City, where the decline in employment since the recession began here, in 2008, has been much steeper for blacks than for white or Hispanic residents, said James Parrott, chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

One problem, said David R. Jones, the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society of New York, is that blacks were overrepresented in fields that suffered the most in the downturn, including government agencies, construction and manufacturing.

“It’s being in the wrong place in the economy, so the recovery is not trickling down to these workers,” Mr. Jones said.

Tony