This article originally appeared in Dollars & Sense: The Magazine
of
Economic Justice.
In July 2003, Mary Clark saw a notice posted by the time clock at
the Pillowtex plant where she worked: the plant was closing down at
the end of the month. The company would be laying off 4,000 workers. "They
acted like we was nobody," she said; Pillowtex even canceled the
workers’ accrued vacation days. Clark had worked at the textile plant
in Eden, North Carolina, for 11 years, inspecting, tagging, and bagging
comforters. By 2003, she was earning more than $10 an hour.
Clark’s unemployment benefits don’t cover her bills. Because Pillowtex
had sent her and her coworkers home frequently for lack of work in
the final year, her unemployment checks are low, based on that last
year’s reduced earnings. She lost her health coverage, and now she
needs dental work that she cannot afford.
It’s happening again.
In the 1970s, a wave of plant closings hit African Americans hard.
Two generations after the "Great Migration," when millions
of black people had left the South to take factory jobs in Northern
and Midwestern cities, the U.S. economy began to deindustrialize and
many of those jobs disappeared – in some cases shifted to the low-wage,
nonunion South.
The recession of 2001 – and the historically inadequate "recovery" since – has
again brought about a catastrophic loss of jobs, especially in manufacturing,
and once again African Americans have lost out disproportionately.
Jobs that moved to the South during the earlier era of deindustrialization
are now leaving the country entirely or simply disappearing in the
wake of technological change
and rising productivity.
Media coverage of today’s unemployment crisis often showcases white
men who have lost high-paying industrial or information-technology
jobs. But Mary Clark is actually a more typical victim. Recent job
losses have hit black workers harder than white workers: black unemployment
rose twice as fast as white unemployment in the last recession. Once
again, African Americans are getting harder hit, and once again, they
face a downturn with fewer of the resources and assets that tide families
over during hard times.
Last Hired, First Fired
The tight labor market of the late 1990s was very beneficial for African
Americans. The black unemployment rate fell from 18% in the 1981-82
recession, to around 13% in the early 1990s, to below 7% in 1999 and
2000, the lowest black unemployment rate on record. But the 2001 recession
(and the job-loss recovery since then) has robbed African Americans
of much of those gains.
"The last recession has had a severe and disproportionate impact
on African Americans and minority communities," according to
Marc
H. Morial, president of the National Urban League. In its January
2004 report on black unemployment, the Urban League found that the
double-digit unemployment rates in the 14 months from late 2002 through
2003 were the worst labor market for African Americans
in 20 years.
The 2001 recession was hard on African American workers both in relation
to earlier recessions and in relation to white workers. Unemployment
for adult black workers rose by 2.9 percentage points in the recession
of the early 1980s, but by 3.5 in the 2001 recession. White unemployment,
in contrast,
rose by only 1.4 percentage points in the early-1980s recession and
by 1.7 in the recent downturn. The median income of black families
fell 3% from 2001 to 2003, while white families lost just 1.7%. Today,
black unemployment has remained above 10% for over three years.
Official unemployment figures, of course, greatly understate the actual
number of adults without jobs. The definition doesn’t include discouraged
people who have stopped looking for work, underemployed part-timers,
students, or those in prison or other institutions. In New York City, scarcely
half of African-American
men between 16 and 65 had jobs in 2003, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics’ employment-to-population ratios for the city. The
BLS ratios, which include discouraged workers and others the official
unemployment statistics leave out, were 51.8% for black men, 57.1%
for black women, 75.7% for white men, and 65.7% for Latino men. The
figure for black men was the lowest on record (since 1979).
Manufacturing job losses in particular have hit black workers harder
than white workers. In 2000, there were 2 million African Americans
working in factory jobs. Blacks comprised 10.1% of all manufacturing
workers, about the same as the black share of the overall workforce.
Then 300,000 of those jobs, or 15%, disappeared. White workers lost
1.7 million factory jobs, but that was just 10% of the number they
held before the recession. By the end of 2003, the share of all factory
jobs held by African Americans had fallen to 9.6%. "Half a percentage
point may not sound like much, but to lose that much in such an important
sector over a relatively short period, that is going to be hard to
recover," said Jared Bernstein of the Economic
Policy Institute,
a progressive economics think tank. Latino workers increased their
share of manufacturing jobs in 2002 and 2003 slightly, though their
unemployment rate overall rose.
Some of the largest layoffs have occurred in areas with large African-American
populations – just this April, for example, 1,000 jobs were cut at
a Ford plant in St. Louis and 300 at a Boeing plant in San Antonio.
Textile plants with mostly black employees have closed in Roanoke Rapids,
N.C., Columbus,
Ga., and Martinsville, Va. The states with the greatest number of layoffs
of 50 workers or more are black strongholds New York and Georgia.
When Autoliv closed its seat belt plant in Indianapolis in 2003, more
than 75% of the laid-off workers were African Americans. Many of these
workers are young adults who got their jobs during the labor shortage
of the late 1990s even without a high school diploma; now they have
few options. "They were taken from the street into decent-paying
jobs; they were making $12 to $13 an hour. These young men started
families, dug in, took apartments, purchased vehicles. It was an up-from-the-street
experience for them, and now they are being returned to their old environment," said
Michael
Barnes, director of an Indiana AFL-CIO training program
for laid-off workers.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive vice president Bruce
Josten isn’t too worried about layoffs: "We’re talking about transformational
evolution – successful companies remaking their own operations so they’re
able to better focus on what their core mission is. It’s not a deal
where everyone gains instantly. At a micro level, there’s always going
to be a community that’s hurt." The
communities that are hurt come in all colors, but several factors make
the micro level pain more severe in communities of color.
Hard Times Hit Blacks Harder
Prolonged unemployment is scary for most families, but it puts the
typical African-American family in deeper peril, and faster. The median
white family has more than $120,000 in net worth (assets minus debts).
The median black family has less
than $20,000, a far smaller
cushion in tough times.
Laid-off workers often turn to family members for help, but with almost
a quarter of black families under the poverty line, and one in nine
black workers unemployed, it’s less likely that unemployed African
Americans have family members with anything to spare. Black per capita
income was only 57 cents for
every white dollar in 2001.
When homeowners face prolonged unemployment, they can take out a home
equity loan or second mortgage to tide them over. But while three-quarters
of white families are homeowners, less than half of black families
own their own homes.
And thanks to continuing segregation and discrimination in housing,
it’s more difficult for black families to relocate to find work. New
jobs are concentrated in mostly white suburbs with little public transportation.
History Repeats Itself
The term "deindustrialization" came into everyday use in
the 1970s, when a wave of plant closings changed the employment landscape.
From 1966 to 1973, corporations moved over a million American jobs
to other countries. Even more jobs moved from the Northeast and Midwest
to the South, where unions were scarce and wages lower. New York City
alone lost 600,000 manufacturing jobs in the 1960s.
As today, the workers laid off in the 1960s and 70s were disproportionately
African-American. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that during
the recession of 1973 to 1974, 60% to 70% of laid-off workers were
African-American in areas where they were only 10% to 12% of the workforce.
In five cities in the Great Lakes region, the majority of black men
employed in manufacturing lost their jobs between 1979 and 1984.
A major reason was seniority: white workers had been in their jobs
longer, and so were more likely to keep them during cutbacks.
Another reason was geography. The Northern cities that lost the most
jobs were some of those with the largest populations of people of color,
and those inner-city areas sank deep into poverty and chronically high
unemployment as few heavily white areas did.
The race and class politics of deindustrialization are also part of
the story. The pro-business loyalties of the federal government dictated
policies that encouraged plant closings and did very little to mitigate
their effects. Tax credits for foreign investment and for foreign tax
payments encouraged companies to move plants overseas. While Northern
cities were suffering from deindustrialization, the federal government
spent more in the Southern states than in the affected areas: Northeast
and Midwest states averaged 81 cents in federal spending for each tax
dollar they sent to Washington in the 1970s, while Southern states
averaged $1.25. Laid-off black factory workers had no clout, so politicians
faced little pressure to address their needs.
As dramatic as the movement of jobs from the North to the South and
overseas was the shift from city to suburb. The majority of new manufacturing
jobs in the 1970s were located in suburban areas, while manufacturing
employment fell almost 10% in center cities. In the Los Angeles area,
for example, older plants were closing in the city while new ones opened
in the San Fernando Valley and Orange
County.
The new suburban jobs were usually inaccessible for African Americans
and other people of color because of housing costs, job and housing
discrimination, lack of public transportation, and lack of informal
social networks with suburban employers. In a study of Illinois firms
that moved to the suburbs from the central cities between 1975 and
1978, black employment in the affected areas fell 24%, while white
employment fell less than 10%. In another study, some employers admitted
to locating facilities in part so as to avoid black workers. One study
of the causes of black unemployment in 45 urban areas found that 25%
to 50% resulted from jobs shifting to the suburbs. Even the federal
government shifted jobs to the suburbs: although the number of federal
civilian jobs grew by 26,558 from 1966 to 1973, federal jobs in central
cities fell by 41,419. Over time, suburban white people gained a greater
and greater geographic edge in job hunting.
Looking Forward
Mary Clark has been looking for work for nine months now without success.
Stores get applications from hundreds of other laid-off workers; there
aren’t enough jobs for even a fraction of the nemployed. "It
used to be that if one plant shut down, there’d be another one hiring.
Now they’re all laying off or closing," she says.
For years Clark had helped her grown daughter support her two small
children. "Now the roles are reversed, and they help me." She
has turned to charities to make ends meet, but some give aid only once
a year, and others won’t help a single woman without children at home. "It breaks your self-esteem to have to ask for help," Clark
says.
Some of her former coworkers are in more desperate straits than he
is. Some have lost their homes or gone into bankruptcy. Some people
have found jobs far from home and commute for hours a day. Clark sees
crime, divorce, and family violence all rising in the area.
What job growth there’s been has been concentrated in the low-wage
service sector, which pays less than the shrinking manufacturing sector.
There’s no law of nature that says service jobs are inevitably low
paid and without benefits. Or that manufacturing can’t revive in the
United States. The recent wave of union organizing victories in heavily
black industries such as ealth care represent one source of hope for
creating more decent jobs for African Americans.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1968, "When there is massive
unemployment in the black community, it is called a social problem.
But when there is massive unemployment in the white community, it is
called a depression." The New Deal response to the Great Depression
included public works jobs and a strengthened safety net, most of which
excluded people of color. Mary Clark clearly recognizes
what happens when there is no New Deal for unemployed African Americans: "North
Carolina has people who want to work, but we don’t have anyone pushing
work our way. We need the mills back. We’re people used to working,
and when you take the work away, what do you have left?"
Betsy Leondar-Wright is the Communications Director at United
for a Fair Economy and co-author of UFE’s 2004 report, "The
State of the Dream: Enduring Disparities in Black and White." |