Los Angeles Times November 26 2001

THE NATION

Jobless Blacks Face Steepest Challenge

Employment: African Americans suffer effects of faltering economy more than other groups.

By LEE ROMNEY and KAREN ROBINSON-JACOBS

Jerome King is up by 5 a.m. at his mother's apartment in Watts. He was raised there and recently moved back in after he lost his job.

He listens to some jazz and meditates to shake the stress. Then he slips out of his football jersey into black dress slacks and a pressed checkered shirt and packs his leather briefcase with resumes.

The former Army infantryman is out the door by 9 a.m., stopping to talk a little hope into his neighbor, an ex-felon who can't seem to land a solid job. If s yet another day of prospecting for King, 39, who worked his last shift as a bartender at a Los Angeles International Airport pub Sept. 11, less than four months after getting hired. "It was very disappointing," King said. "I got my resume together but it has a lot of temporary positions on it. That's a drawback. There are jobs I dont qualify for, and even 24-Hour Fitness said, 'You've got a fat stomach.' All these people have the opportunity to choose from the cream of the crop."

Hunting for work is tough for many these days. But it's especially hard for African Americans.

As the economy continued to falter this fall, blacks have felt the effects more keenly than other Americans. The rate of black unemployment--at 9.7% nationally in October, up from 8.7% in September--has for decades persisted at about twice the rate of whites.

Economists and black community leaders cite a range of factors--discrimination, lower educational levels, the remoteness of job hubs from black neighborhoods and over-representation of African Americans in low-skill, part-time jobs with little security.

Even in the best of times, African Americans suffer the nation's highest unemployment rates.

In bad times, they tend to fare worse still losing jobs at disproportionate rates and remaining out of work longer than other Americans.

"It's happened in every single downturn," said Harry J. Holzer, a labor economist, minority employment expert and visiting fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington research organization. African Americans, he said, "get laid off more frequently. Once they get laid off, they have a harder time regaining employment someplace else."

Latinos as a group also suffer higher unemployment than whites, but their jobless rate is lower than blacks'.

Now, as the black unemployment rate begins to climb sharply, some worry that pared-back resources for the jobless could make this recession particularly painful for African Americans.

Many blacks are not eligible for unemployment insurance because they worked part-time or short-term jobs. And those laid off from low-wage jobs are eligible for benefits, but at meager levels.

Welfare reform, designed in a boom economy, has curtailed benefits that many low-income African Americans previously relied on as a stand-in for unemployment insurance.

William Spriggs, who directs the National Urban League's Institute of Opportunity and Equality, joined with other labor economists this month to sound an alarm about the nation's slide into recession, noting that October job losses were "especially devastating to the African American community."

"Because of the absence of the safety net, this could be the first recession where there is a much greater disproportionate impact on African Americans," Spriggs said.

The toll is already visible at the South Bay One-Stop Business and Career Center, a job counseling facility in Inglewood. Workers there estimate that about 75% of their clients today are black, compared with 50% just two months ago, and the total number of people seeking help also is up. The Los Angeles Urban League's job centers have seen a 25% increase in clients this year, a jump attributed mainly to Sept. I I -related job loss.

"The undeniable fact has been and continues to be that African Americans are discriminated against in the workplace," said John Mack, president of the league, who also pointed to educational and skill disparities as well as the tendency of employers to lay off those most recently hired.

The social service arm of West Angeles Church of God in Christ, which has a predominantly black congregation, normally caters to welfare-to-work participants seeking jobs. But lately it has seen a dramatic increase in laid-off workers looking for help, said Elder David McNeil, the community assistance director. At the same time, he said, the number ofjob listings has dropped noticeably.

Compton-based Harambee Economic and Community Development Corp., which refurbishes homes to provide affordable housing, has seen the number of African American home buyers drop sharply in recent months.

Quentin Foster, 26, laid off from his accounts receivable job last month at an entertainment ad firm in Hollywood, has been forced to move his wife and four children into his father's home. They are squeezing by on his wife's salary as an artwork coordinator.

Being an African American man is not the cause of his travails, Foster said, but it doesnt work in his favor. "People like to hire who they're comfortable with," he said with a smile, "so you have to go the extra mile to sell yourself "

Jerome King, the ex-bartender, was recently divorced from the mother of his three children. His airport job helped him make his $330 monthly child support payments, he said. But, like many other noncustodial fathers in similar circumstances, he stopped paying when he lost his job.

King says his Christian upbringing keeps him hopeful. His mother, Nora, a longtime community activist at Nickerson Gardens--the city's largest public housing project--taught him to value work and have faith. Her three other sons hold steady jobs.

King recently completed a correspondence course to become a real estate agent and is awaiting a test date. If it works out, he and two brothers plan to go into business rehabilitating and reselling homes. Until then, staying upbeat in this job market, with no car, no fax machine, no computer and few connections outside his neighborhood, is no easy task.

After a lengthy search, King landed a job in January tending the Gordon Biersch bar at LAYs Terminal 8. Because of construction delays at the new terminal, the $7-an-hour gig didnt start until May. The tips were less than King had anticipated, he said, but the night job provided a regular paycheck and he planned to start day courses in restaurant management at Los Angeles Southwest College.

The bar closed after the Sept. I I terrorist attacks and has not reopened. So King boarded a bus for the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Pasadena.

"I told them, 'I know your product,'" said King, who also left a message for the brewery's co-founder in San Jose.

A hostess added his application to a pile.

As he launches a day of job-hunting last Monday, King stops in at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee One Stop Career Center on Imperial Highway and asked to see the military veterans' counselor for some one-on-one help. But the man isn't in and won't be back until "possibly next week," a colleague says.

King sits at the computer to search the Employment Development Department's job database. There are more than 2,000 listings for "professional, paraprofessional and technical jobs" in Los Angeles County. He sees one for a pharmaceutical sales rep that requires a college degree and lists a salary of $250,000. The jobs within his reach are less appealing: night crew shelf stocker at K-Mart, $6.25 an hour, part time. With a job like that, King couldn't come close to paying his monthly child support and having anything left over to live on.

There's one listing for a job tending bar at the Hilton at Long Beach's World Trade Center. The posting date is Nov. 7--almost two weeks earlier-but this is the first King's seen of it in the system, which he checks daily. "Report in Person," the listing says. He prints it and heads out.

Boom Helped Blacks, Others

The economic boom did much to alleviate black unemployment. In late 1994 the national jobless rate dipped below 10% for the first time in 20 years, then fell further to an all-time seasonally adjusted low of 7.2% in September 2000.

The news was even better for other groups. Latinos posted a 5.6% unemployment rate that month, and the white rate was just 3.5%, once again less than half that of blacks.

In a tight labor market, employers "were forced to hire unskilled workers, many of whom were African Americans, single mothers and immigrants," said George Mason University economics professor Willem Thorbecke.

Some of those gains could be permanent, since the previously unemployed gained useful skills, he said. But dynamics shift in downturns, when employers have a broader pool to pluck from.

Nationally, as black unemployment jumped from its lowest point this year of 7.5% in February to 9.7% in October, the rate for whites rose from its low of 3.6% in January to 4.8% in October. Statewide, black unemployment climbed from a low of 7.3% in February to 8.2% in October, while the white rate remained virtually unchanged, fluctuating from 4.7% to 4.8%.

Some steep barriers keep a segment of the young black male population out of the labor force altogether, or relegate them to dead-end short-term jobs.

Those barriers include high child-support obligations, poor skills, a shortage of blue-collar jobs and discrimination. The result: Young black men are less likely to be working today than they were 20 years ago, even as young black women have seen their overall participation in the work force increase, most notably during the boom of the '90s, said Holzer of the Urban Institute.

Many black men simply stop looking, joining the ranks of so-called discouraged workers who don't show up in monthly unemployment statistics.

But others, like Kings neighbor Eddie Williams, keep on trying. Williams, 30, who goes by "Smurf," has held only spotty jobs since his release from prison nine years ago, although he's participated in training programs for carpentry, cement masonry and other trades.

Two weeks ago, he applied for a city street-maintenance job but was told his limited schooling--he was arrested before he completed high school--might be a problem. "If if s not the schooling, they hit me with the felony thing. If its not that, if s not enough years' experience," he said.

For black women, who have recently worked themselves off the welfare rolls in significant numbers, there also could be trouble ahead. Many landed in vulnerable service sector jobs and are facing layoffs.

Recent research by Holzer and Michael Stoll, an assistant public policy professor at UCLA, showed that among welfare recipients seeking to enter the job market, blacks have the hardest time getting hired.

King is neither a felon nor a former aid recipient, but he faces other challenges that hold back many African American men. While he worked a relatively long stint as a corrections officer and was in the Army, his job history is dotted with short-term, relatively low-skill jobs in food service, warehouse work and security--not the most attractive resume at a time when employers have lots of applicants to choose from.

Some community development leaders also note that African Americans will sometimes shun low-wage jobs, which often go to immigrants.

Still, none of those trends adequately explain the persistent employment lag of African Americans. What does, Spriggs and others contend, is discrimination.

Other root causes of disparity--such as differences in high school graduation rates--have changed significantly over time, Spriggs said, but the higher unemployment rate for blacks has remained stubbornly persistent.

Discrimination in hiring, however, is difficult to detect or prove. Although the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission polices employment discrimination, it tends to focus on existing employees, not prospective hires.

Spriggs and others would like to see more of a focus on discrimination in hiring. They also offer a range of policy suggestions that they say could better protect African Americans by strengthening the safety net in this recession.

Among those are unemployment insurance reform so more unemployed workers would qualify for benefits, and a proposal to stop the clock on welfare time limits until the economy improves.

But deep-rooted problems must also be addressed, Holzer said. That means developing better job-training programs and improving transportation to carry residents from minority neighborhoods to job hubs.

Long Lines, Stiff Competition

King walks toward Wilmington Avenue, passing a freeway construction site busy with Latino workmen. He boards the Blue Line train at the Rosa Parks station and gets off in Long Beach, blocks from the gleaming rose-colored courtyard of the World Trade Center on Ocean Boulevard.

A Hilton employee sends him to a windowless hallway off the parking lot, where he joins a stream of other applicants. They're directed to a handful of laminated job listings and told to pick the ones they want. King finds the bartender posting and fills out his application, tediously copying from his resume.

When he gets through the line to take a seat with the human resource representative, she tells him the job was filled a week ago. She sends him out to examine another listing for "cocktail server." When he comes back, she asks him what kinds of wines go with what kinds of meats, then thanks him and tells him he is among at least 100 applicants for the job.

King retraces his steps and is home by 3:30 p.m. Another day gone.