Labor & Employment Law

Create New Jobs Now to Save African American Communities

By Arlene Holt Baker

The job crisis has hurt everyone. But for African American communities, which were suffering before the crisis hit, it has been a disaster. Unless the nation takes immediate steps to create jobs now, the damage will become more entrenched and we will all pay the price.

Unemployment among African Americans is more than 16 percent, and that’s not counting those who can find only part-time jobs or who have just given up looking for work altogether. African Americans also stay unemployed longer.

The strides made by African American workers in the 1990s are being wiped out in this current job crisis, and millions of people of color are no longer making middle-class incomes. As unemployment has grown, local tax bases have shrunk, eroding education and destroying public jobs, public services and public safety.

In the metropolitan areas with the nation’s highest unemployment rates, most of the residents are black. African American communities have been disproportionately slammed by foreclosures and bankruptcies. Communities suffering these multiple economic blows are less able to support minority-owned small businesses at the same time as banks choked off their credit.

This is no ordinary recession. The fabric of whole communities has been unraveled. The economic scarring of African Americans may endure for generations. The child who is hungry today and can’t concentrate in her overcrowded classroom starts with the deck stacked against her. Maybe her state has cut teachers, guidance counselors, police staff and funding for higher education. Twenty or 30 percent of the adults around her may be unemployed. Her pain is not hers alone?with so little opportunity, her pain will also be her children’s.   

Speaking to the Illinois State AFL-CIO in 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said:

It is a constitutional right for a man to be able to vote, but the human right to a decent house is as categorically imperative and morally absolute as was that constitutional right. It is not a constitutional right that men have jobs, but it is a human right. 

The AFL-CIO has laid out a five-point plan to save and create millions of jobs in the next year. Nowhere is immediate action more needed than among African Americans, who have been hit especially hard by the crisis. That’s why our plan calls for the government to create additional jobs in distressed areas for people who desperately need them.

The plan also includes job-creating measures, such as rebuilding the nation’s roads, schools and infrastructure, and lending Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds directly to small and medium-sized businesses via community banks. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs.

Saving and creating jobs alone won’t solve the ingrained economic problems of African Americans in devastated communities. But it’s the start we need?right now?as we continue rebuilding an economy that works for our streets, not just Wall Street.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 15, 2010 (boomark / email).