Unemployment

If all the measures of how the economy is doing, unemployment is the one that hits home the most for Main Street.  The data shows that more Blacks and Latinos lost their jobs during this recession than other groups.

The federal government reports official unemployment figures that include only those persons who are in the workforce but are out of a job and report that they are searching for alternate employment.  Greenlining believes that this number provides an insufficient picture of the unemployed, and so we include a few more figures, taking into account the number of unemployed people who are:

• Officially unemployed
• Discouraged (not actively seeking work)
• Conditionally looking
• Part-time workers seeking full-time work

The following are the unemployment rates by race/ethnicity for December 2009, the latest time period for which data are available:

Additionally, the current recession has caused the unemployment gap between Latinos, Blacks, and Whites to grow significantly:

It has been widely publicized that many of the job gains in recent months have been due to companies hiring part-time temp workers to fill positions once held by full-time employees.  Greenlining's unemployment measure takes into account workers who are usually full-time workers, but who took on part time work in order to make ends meet.  The data show that "Part time workers for economic reasons, usually full-time" are a fast-growing segment of the unemployed, most dramatically among Latinos: