Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination
The black woman’s experience in America provides arguably the most overwhelming evidence of the persistent and ongoing drag from gender and race discrimination on the economic fate of workers and families.
Black women’s labor market position is the result of employer practices and government policies that disadvantaged black women relative to white women and men. Negative representations of black womanhood have reinforced these discriminatory practices and policies. Since the era of slavery, the dominant view of black women has been that they should be workers, a view that contributed to their devaluation as mothers with caregiving needs at home. African-American women’s unique labor market history and current occupational status reflects these beliefs and practices.
Compared with other women in the United States, black women have always had the highest levels of labor market participation regardless of age, marital status, or presence of children at home. In 1880, 35.4 percent of married black women and 73.3 percent of single black women were in the labor force compared with only 7.3 percent of married white women and 23.8 percent of single white women. Black women’s higher participation rates extended over their lifetimes, even after marriage, while white women typically left the labor force after marriage.
Differences in black and white women’s labor participation were due not only to the societal expectation of black women’s gainful employment but also to labor market discrimination against black men which resulted in lower wages and less stable employment compared to white men. Consequently, married black women have a long history of being financial contributors—even co-breadwinners—to two-parent households because of black men’s precarious labor market position.
Black women’s main jobs historically have been in low-wage agriculture and domestic service.1 Even after migration to the north during the 20th century, most employers would only hire black women in domestic service work.2 Revealingly, although whites have devalued black women as mothers to their own children, black women have been the most likely of all women to be employed in the low-wage women’s jobs that involve cooking, cleaning, and caregiving even though this work is associated with mothering more broadly.
Trump’s national emergency declaration over the border wall is dangerous and not justified by the facts
Where, exactly, is the national emergency?
Both houses of Congress have now passed appropriations legislation to fund the government for the fiscal year, and it’s become clear they will not provide President Donald Trump with the full $5.7 billion he requested to fund construction of a wall on the southern border.
Trump has been so desperate to fund his signature campaign promise that he’s gone so far as to shut down the government over it for over a month, which caused federal employees to suffer and billions of dollars-worth of economic losses. In response to failing to get the money from Congress, Trump is declaring a national emergency to achieve the same ends by different means.
An emergency declaration, the president hopes, will allow him to access alternative streams of funding that will go towards funding the wall’s construction. Reuters reports the Trump administration expects to be able to allocate about $7 billion from two defense funds and a Treasury forfeiture fund as a result of an emergency declaration. This would be an extreme step that is unjustified by the facts because there is no ongoing national emergency at the southern border under any reasonable definition of the term.
Many on the right and left are unhappy with the legislation passed by Congress. Some conservative pundits and advocates are unhappy that it does not provide larger funding increases for immigration enforcement, going as far as saying that it will lead to “open borders.”
Some progressive legislators and advocates are opposing the legislation because it funds too much immigration enforcement and does little to rein in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), especially in light of recent internal criticisms of mismanagement, abuses of detainees, and policies that are being challenged in the courts for being inconsistent with domestic and international law. (The Democratic legislators in opposition, however, do not support another shutdown, and prefer that Congress pass a continuing resolution that would keep the government funded at current levels.) Trump expressed displeasure even before the legislation passed, noting earlier this week that the provisions included were “not doing the trick.”
Let’s not forget unions and collective action when discussing victories on workers’ rights
Too often in our public discourse about workplace issues, the crucial role of labor unions and the legal right of workers to join together in collective action to improve their working conditions is forgotten or ignored.
In a column about the importance of pay transparency in achieving pay equity published in The New York Times last month (“Want to Close the Pay Gap? Try Transparency,” Jan. 21, 2019), the author outlines possible policy measures to protect workers when they discuss pay with their co-workers. Yet in a rather stark omission, the piece ignores the reality that existing federal law—the New Deal-era National Labor Relations Act—currently protects the right of private-sector workers to discuss pay with one another. It also overlooks the millions of unionized workers who currently benefit from the pay transparency that a collective bargaining agreement provides.
In late November, The Washington Post ran an op-ed about the challenges of effectively addressing sexual harassment in the workplace. The column gave credit to the American Hotel & Lodging Association—the hotel industry lobby—for providing panic buttons to hotel workers to protect them from harassment and assault by hotel guests.
In fact, the trade association was merely following the lead of UNITE-HERE, the hotel workers union, which won panic buttons and other protections for both union and nonunion hotel workers in Chicago and other cities through collective bargaining and legislative activity. (The author also omitted the fact that the hotel association was in the middle of a lawsuit seeking to strike down a Seattle ballot initiative approved by 70 percent of the voters providing panic buttons to hotel workers—yes, the very protection they group had just been credited for.)
The state of American manufacturing: The failure of Trump’s trade and economic policies
Separating fact from fiction is always tough when listening to President Trump, who lives in his own, fact-free fantasy-world. This is particularly so when it comes to trade and manufacturing. Here are a few key points on that topic to keep in mind when listening to his State of the Union address. There’s a lot that can be done to create millions of good manufacturing jobs for working Americans, but not the way this president is going about it.
- The trade deficit is growing more than twice as fast as the overall economy, because of the Trump administration’s trade and economic policies. The total U.S. goods trade deficit has increased 18.1 percent since 2016, and our trade deficit with China has grown even faster, 20.5 percent in the same period (annual estimates, based on year to date trade through October). Growing trade deficits over the past two decades are the single largest cause of the loss of roughly 5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs.
- The Trump administration has failed to end currency manipulation and dollar misalignment, despite Trump’s promise to name China a currency manipulator on day one upon taking office. Currency misalignment is the single largest cause of growing U.S. trade deficits. U.S. trade can be rebalanced, creating millions of good manufacturing jobs, by lowering the value of the dollar by about 25 percent. The failure to end currency misalignment is a major cause of GM’s recent decision to close 5 manufacturing plants and outsource production, eliminating 12,000 jobs, and Ford’s plan to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, eliminating 24,000 jobs.
- Trump’s massive tax cuts (for corporations and the wealthy) and spending increases are expanding the federal budget deficit, pushing up the value of the dollar and the U.S. trade deficit. The dollar has increased 20 percent since 2013, including 5 percent in 2018 alone. As a result, the IMF now predicts that the broadest measure of the U.S. trade deficit will nearly double between 2017 and 2022. Growing trade deficits will decimate manufacturing over the next few years, and could push the United States into a recession.
Trump’s hateful border wall fantasy would do nothing to address the real immigration crisis
For well over a month, President Donald Trump has demanded Congress pass appropriations legislation to fund the government that includes $5.7 billion for his administration to build additional miles of wall and fencing on the southern border. The president claims that the result of building a border wall will be that “CRIME WILL FALL,” and is threatening to declare a national state of emergency in order to get the funds he wants to begin construction.
When Democrats refused to give in to the president’s demands in December 2018, he caused the longest government shutdown in history before ultimately signing legislation on January 25 to reopen the government for three weeks, until February 15. This is intended to give a bipartisan committee of members of Congress time to agree to fiscal year 2019 appropriations legislation that includes new border security funds. Today the president is scheduled to give his annual State of the Union speech, and it’s been widely reported he will again threaten to declare a state of emergency to get what he wants—or even make a definitive statement about an emergency declaration.
The president’s focus on the wall and border security is misguided, and does little to address today’s realities on the border. There the U.S. immigration system certainly faces challenges, but the president isn’t proposing valid solutions. Instead, he’s trying to scare the public by muddling the issue with alarmist language and false statistics.
The reality at the border is this: The overall size of the unauthorized immigrant population has declined to its lowest level in a decade. And while a wall is mainly designed to keep out unauthorized border crossers, the number of migrants being apprehended for attempting to enter the United States without authorization is lower than it has been in decades. The numbers that are growing, however, are the share of total apprehensions by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that consist of families and unaccompanied minors, as well as the number of families who present themselves voluntarily before CBP. Many then go on to request asylum once in CBP custody.
Before the State of the Union, a fact check on black unemployment
The historically low black unemployment rate has become one of Donald Trump’s favorite statistical claims, one he is likely to tout again at the upcoming State of the Union address.
The fallacy of touting this as a genuine accomplishment of the Trump administration rather than fortuitous timing has been noted by me and others on multiple occasions. Still, at the start of Black History Month, it’s useful to provide some facts about the African American labor force that you will probably not hear during the presidential address to Congress.
To begin with, it is true that the 2018 black unemployment rate was the lowest it has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began reporting it in 1972. But little, if any, credit for that belongs to the Trump administration. As the graph below clearly shows, the black unemployment rate had been steadily falling since 2011, well before Trump was sworn into office, and the rate of decline has not gained momentum since. Arguably, the decline of the black unemployment rate to its current level has more to do with the Fed’s decision to keep interest rates at or near zero for an extended period of time—decisions led by the two previous Federal Reserve chairpersons.
Unemployment rate of workers age 16 and older by race, 1995–2018
| Year | White | Black |
|---|---|---|
| 1994 | 4.84% | 11.54% |
| 1995 | 4.46% | 10.53% |
| 1996 | 4.22% | 10.59% |
| 1997 | 3.82% | 10.13% |
| 1998 | 3.45% | 8.95% |
| 1999 | 3.30% | 7.98% |
| 2000 | 3.14% | 7.59% |
| 2001 | 3.79% | 8.65% |
| 2002 | 4.73% | 10.23% |
| 2003 | 4.85% | 10.77% |
| 2004 | 4.49% | 10.39% |
| 2005 | 4.11% | 10.03% |
| 2006 | 3.84% | 8.97% |
| 2007 | 3.85% | 8.29% |
| 2008 | 4.75% | 10.11% |
| 2009 | 7.80% | 14.79% |
| 2010 | 8.01% | 15.92% |
| 2011 | 7.25% | 15.84% |
| 2012 | 6.58% | 13.95% |
| 2013 | 5.99% | 13.16% |
| 2014 | 4.88% | 11.51% |
| 2015 | 4.16% | 9.66% |
| 2016 | 3.96% | 8.50% |
| 2017 | 3.53% | 7.57% |
| 2018 | 3.19% | 6.57% |
Source: EPI analysis of BLS Current Population Survey microdata
However, even at an annual rate of 6.6 percent, the black unemployment rate was still more than double the white unemployment rate of 3.2 percent in 2018. In fact, the graph also shows that the last time the white unemployment rate was 6.6 percent was six years earlier in 2012, when the black unemployment rate was 14 percent. If you’re starting to see a pattern emerge, then the shortsightedness of Trump’s boasting about the black unemployment rate should also be apparent. The black unemployment rate has been about double the white unemployment rate for more than four decades, making this relationship more historically significant than any single unemployment rate. And, it is the durability of this gap that allows blind celebration of an unemployment rate that is higher than that of any other race or ethnicity reported by BLS, when the more appropriate response would be to focus on solutions for closing the gap.
The Fed shouldn’t give up on restoring labor’s share of income—and measure it correctly
U.S. workers’ wages have climbed modestly but noticeably over the past year. EPI’s nominal wage tracker shows that in 2015 and 2016, this growth averaged 2.4 percent, in 2017 it averaged 2.5 percent, but in 2018 it accelerated to 2.85 percent—and it surpassed 3 percent growth in the last quarter of the year. This uptick has been long-coming and it took a longer spell of low unemployment to spur it than most would have thought.
Three percent growth for a quarter, however, should not constitute “mission accomplished” in the minds of macroeconomic policymakers like the Federal Reserve. In the long run, nominal wage growth should run at a rate equal to the Fed’s inflation target (2 percent) plus the long-trend growth in potential productivity (let’s call this 1.5 percent).1 This indicates that even the recent accelerations in wage growth leave us failing to meet these long-run goals.
Even more importantly, wage growth should run substantially above these long-run targets for a spell of time after long periods of labor market slack. The arithmetic reasoning for this is straightforward: any time wage growth runs slower than current rates of inflation plus productivity, the result will be labor compensation shrinking as a share of the economy. The economic intuition is simply that extended periods of labor market slack sap workers’ ability to secure wage increases from employers.
This undermining of labor’s leverage shows up clearly in the data. EPI’s nominal wage tracker, besides charting wage growth over time, also tracks a measure of labor’s share of income, precisely to highlight the accumulated shortfall of labor income that policymakers should aim to restore.
What to Watch on Jobs Day: Furloughs and month-to-month volatility
The government shutdown adds several layers of complexity to interpreting January employment figures set for release on Friday. While I still plan to look at wage growth and the prime-age employment-to-population ratio to measure the slack that remains in the labor market, the effect of the extended partial government shutdown on the top-line employment numbers will get a lot of attention too. In this post, I will explore how the shutdown likely will and will not affect the numbers, along with a reminder about typical month-to-month volatility.
The reference period for the upcoming Current Employment Statistics (CES) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) is the pay period or week, respectively, including January 12, 2019. The 12th of January marks roughly the middle of the 35-day partial government shutdown. The shutdown directly affected three types of workers and their paychecks: government employees working without pay, government employees not working, and government contractors not working. Indirectly, the shutdown also affected workers who typically service government employees who were not working, but who are not directly paid for by government contracts—think restaurants, taxi cabs, and other services purchased by the government workforce.
Let’s start with the CES. Government workers, furloughed or not, will be counted as employed in the CES. As soon as the Government Fair Treatment Act of 2019 was signed into law, those furloughed workers were guaranteed their back pay and therefore count as employed workers. In other words, the effects of the furlough will not affect the count of federal jobs in the CES. The loss of private sector work, on the other hand, either as direct federal contractors or indirect employment that services government work, could register as a fall in private-sector employment or private-sector hours, or both.
The number of unionized U.S. workers edged lower to 16.4 million in 2018
The number of American workers represented by a labor union ticked down last year, extending a decades-long trend.
New data on union membership from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday showed 16.38 million unionized workers in 2018, down from 16.44 million in 2017. However, because employment of wage and salary workers grew by 1.6 percent between 2017 and 2018, the share of workers represented by a union declined by a more significant amount, from 11.9 percent to 11.7 percent.
In the private sector, the number of workers represented by a union ticked up slightly (+18,000). But due to the 1.7 percent increase in employment in the private sector, the share of private sector workers represented by a union declined, from 7.3 percent to 7.2 percent.
The losses were greater in the public sector. The number of public sector workers represented by a union declined by 83,000, while the share of public sector workers represented by a union declined by seven-tenths of a percentage point, from 37.9 percent to 37.2 percent. The drop was largest at the state government level, with the share of state government workers represented by a union dropping from 33.4 percent to 31.8 percent.
Reliable data is one of the many victims of the government shutdown
One of the many things we rely on the federal government for is timely, accurate, independent, and publicly available data that is used by households, businesses, and policymakers to make informed economic decisions. Of the many negative effects of the government shutdown, there have been some “data casualties,” including the release of Current Population Survey (CPS) public microdata files. These files are the source data for monthly reports on the unemployment and labor force participation rates, key timely barometers of the nation’s economic health. This microdata also forms the basis of much of the research that EPI and other research organizations and academics conduct. EPI urges the president to end the government shutdown so that federal employees and contractors can receive their paychecks again, researchers at EPI and elsewhere can continue to provide current economic analysis, businesses and households can make economic plans with fuller information, and the new Congress can make well-researched policy choices.
The Current Population Survey (aka the Household Survey), which is used to measure the nation’s unemployment rate (along with many other measures of labor market health), is collected and analyzed through a partnership between the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau. Every month, a few weeks after BLS releases the monthly jobs report with CPS-derived estimates of unemployment and labor force participation, Census releases a version of the CPS microdata for public use. These public-use extracts allow for analysis beyond what’s available in tables published by BLS. For example, the jobs report includes an enormous amount of information on employment status by race/ethnicity, gender, age, education, and a variety of other demographic characteristics. However, to look at how the employment status of young people with a high school degree differs by race, you need to use the CPS microdata to run your own analysis. The CPS microdata is also a key source for assessing trends in wage growth for workers at different points in the wage distribution—an assessment we make annually at EPI and which will be delayed by this week’s announcement.