Unemployment gets worse for Black men
22nd June 2015 · 0 Comments
By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer
(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNewsToday.com) — Lester Nute didn’t have to wait for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell him Black men have a hard time finding work.
Nute, a 57 year-old Vietnam-era Army veteran, has not held a full-time job in 12 years. That doesn’t mean he’s discouraged and stopped looking.
He was standing with 10 other African-American men, across the street from a U-Haul truck rental facility, on Chicago’s North Side, hoping to find work for a couple of hours or even a day.
When a customer loaded his or her car with boxes in the U-Haul parking lot, Nute and the other men raised their arms and yelled, “We can help you move.”
I interviewed him on Saturday, and it was a slow. “People don’t have money so they use their friends so it’s been slow for a while,” Nute said. “I try to find work here because I need money to eat.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its monthly jobs report on June 12, and it’s not clear if Nute was even counted because he has been out of work so long.
BLS said the jobless rate for Black men 20 years old and older was 10.2 percent in May, up from 9.2 percent in April, and this occurred even though U.S. companies added 280,000 jobs last month. BLS noted that 8.7 million remain unemployed.
As the economy has improved, finding work has actually gotten more difficult for Black men to find. There could be many reasons for this situation. Companies don’t like to hire Black men. At the U-Haul, the day I went there, only Hispanics and whites were working.
It is not known what job skills Nute and the others have. He also said he suffers from mental illness.
LoyDell Roberson was standing next to Nute. Roberson, who is 61, said he spent 18 years in Statesville Prison after being convicted of rape.
After getting out of prison, Roberson said he loaded newspapers for The Chicago Sun-Times, a major Chicago newspaper, and sold Streetwise, a newspaper sold by Chicago’s homeless. Now he is standing across the street from U-Haul hoping to find work.
“I stand here and wait for work. Not every Saturday. I am by myself so it is tough,” he said.
The unemployment rate for Black men 20 years old and older is always the highest compared to other racial, ethnic and groups.
The jobless rate for Black women 20 and over in May was 8.8 percent, the same as April. The jobless rate for Hispanic men 20 years older and was 6.0 percent in May, the same as April. For Hispanic women, the jobless rate in May was 6.5 percent, down from 6.9 percent.
The unemployment rate for white men was 4.2 percent in May, down from 4.4 percent in April. The jobless rate for white women was 4.3 percent in May, actually up from 4.2 percent in April.
Asians reported the lowest unemployment rate of 4.1 percent in May, down from 4.4 percent in April.
As I slowly drove by U-Haul, some of the men approached the car to learn how many men I needed and when. I stopped the car, and I told them I didn’t have any work today but I would check back with them later to hire them. I hire white and Hispanic workers. I told my wife we need to hire Black men for jobs around the house we can’t do without help.
This article originally published in the June 22, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
