Aug 7, 2009
African-American unemployment rate 14.5% in July, down for 3rd straight month
Categories: African-American, Economy, Justice/Law Enforcement
Written By: Shawn Williams
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the U.S. unemployment rate was virtually unchanged for the second straight month, down .1% from June to July. The 9.4% unemployment rate fir July is identical to May, but another 247,000 jobs were lost during this period.
The African-American unemployment rate declined for the third time in as many months, dropping to 14.5% from 14.7% in June. The unemployment rate for African-Americans reached 15% in April. Black males saw a .6% drop in unemployment to 15.8% and down from 17.2% in April.
Click here for the employment situation summary by the Labor Statistics Bureau.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Follow the link and look at table A-2. the rate is going down because they are moving people from “Unemployed” to “Not in labor force”. People aren’t getting jobs; they are just not counting them as looking anymore.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
August 13th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I heard basically the same thing Phelps is describing. People are still out of work, but many have stopped looking because they have lost hope of finding anything. Paul Krugman described the (overall) decrease of .1% as a statistical fluke.