Washington - Think about those who have been left behind
in the economy, and you might picture the white working class. Much has been
said since the election about the plight of former manufacturing workers in the
Rust Belt, who can no longer find good-paying jobs.
The focus makes sense: President-elect Donald Trump was
lifted into office by white adults over 25 without a four-year degree, who favoured
him by a margin of 39 percentage points. Their economic frustration and
suffering are real, and white working-class America is a large group - 42
percent of the country.
Yet month after month, economic data show that African
Americans and Hispanics in the United States are, on average, in a worse
position.
Jobs data released last week showed that the white
unemployment rate in December was 4.3 percent, compared with 7.8 percent for
African Americans and 5.9 percent for Hispanics.
"Even just looking at one month, we can say that the
economy disproportionately has worse outcomes for workers of colour," said
Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
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While African American workers maintain the highest
unemployment rate overall, Hispanics have the dubious distinction of being the
group that is still farthest from recovering from their pre-recession
unemployment levels. Though these values can fluctuate month to month, the
Hispanic unemployment rate remains more than a full percentage point above its
pre-recession low in October 2006, a bigger difference than for whites and
African Americans.
Data on worker earnings shows a similar story about
racial inequality, says Gould.
"If you were to look at worker wage data, you'd see
that white workers make more by almost any measure than other groups,
especially black and Hispanic workers."
Recent reports have revealed troubling facts about the
wage gap. Census data analysed by the National Women's Law Centre shows that,
while women overall make only 80 cents for every dollar paid to a man, the wage
gap yawns when race and ethnicity enter into the picture. Latina women make
only 54 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man, while African
American women make 63 cents, the report says.
Another report on the wage gap authored by Valerie Wilson
and William M. Rodgers II of EPI in December showed that the black-white wage
gap has actually grown in the United States compared with what it was in 1979.
Wage gaps are increasing primarily due to discrimination,
as well as growing inequality in general, Wilson and Rodgers say. As the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer, that exacerbates the difference in earnings
between racial and ethnic groups.
Disturbingly, this wage gap is expanding even though
African Americans are attending college at higher rates, they write. Wilson and
Rodgers calculate that a black male college graduate entering the workforce in
the early 1980s had less than a 10 percent wage disadvantage relative to white
college graduate, but that by 2014 the deficit had grown to 18 percent.