Media clips
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The March on Washington had a more formal title at the time: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized labor played a notable role in the event, though it’s perhaps best recalled that the executive board of the AFL-CIO withheld formal support. At the time of the march, in 1963, the unemployment rate for black Americans was 10.9%, more than double the 5% jobless rate among white Americans, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Today, 6.6% of whites and 12.6% of blacks are unemployed.
MarketWatch August 29, 2013 -
Also on Wednesday, Heidi Shierholz, EPI economist, discussed with Bloomberg’s Trish Reagan the state of the U.S. labor market, wage growth stagnation, and income inequality.
Bloomberg August 28, 2013 -
The Economic Policy Institute has been producing regular reports under the banner of “The Unfinished March” to emphasize what it says is the unfinished economic history of the march. Demands at the march also were made for decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal full employment jobs program, a national minimum wage that would be the equivalent of more than $13 an hour in today’s dollars.
The value of today’s $7.25-an-hour minimum wage is $2 less than the minimum wage in 1968, according to the institute.
“To truly honor the march, we also have to recognize the unfinished demands,” said Algernon Austin, director of race, ethnicity and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.
AP August 27, 2013 -
This deceleration of growth effectively predates sequestration, but nonetheless coincides (contrary to popular perception) with rapid reduction in the federal budget deficit as a share of GDP — a trend that will continue to restrain growth. On this front, the inaptness of the “cliff” metaphor surely didn’t help.
As Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute and I argued (PDF), the false dichotomy implied by a cliff was a poor framing of both the problem and policy choices actually at hand. This framing helped suggest that the eventual lame duck budget deal was successful because the economy didn’t crash in January 2013. But the budget deal didn’t resolve the problem of deficits closing too quickly, which always risked an ongoing deceleration in growth before andafter January, not an immediate double-dip recession.
The Fiscal Times August 27, 2013 -
Gaping disparities between blacks and whites exist when it comes to unemployment rates (12.6 versus 6.6 percent in July, according to the Labor Department); life expectancy (75 versus 79 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention); median family wealth ($4,900 versus $97,000, according to the Economic Policy Institute); and incarceration rates (blacks are 13 percent of the population, but represent 38 percent of inmates in federal and state prisons, according to the Sentencing Project).
The Hill August 27, 2013 -
While much ground has been gained with the end of state-sanctioned segregation, blacks overall are still more likely to be undereducated, unemployed and live in substandard housing compared to whites in America, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute.
And by all measures, blacks in America still lag behind whites and other groups in overall economic wealth, said author Algernon Austin, who directs the EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, and put together the report.
“If we want to honor the march, we have to celebrate what was achieved, but also the unrealized dreams.
NY Daily News August 27, 2013 -
In 2013, it’s jarring to realize just how much of Dr. King’s dream remains unrealized. For example, take these sobering statistics, from a recent Economic Policy Institute report by Algernon Austin:
[T]oday, nearly half of poor black children live in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty; however, only a little more than a tenth of poor white children live in similar neighborhoods.
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In the late 1960s, 76.6 percent of black children attended majority black schools. In 2010, 74.1 percent of black children attended majority nonwhite schools.
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From the 1960s to today, the black unemployment rate has been about 2 to 2.5 times the white unemployment rate. In 2012, the black unemployment rate was 14.0 percent, 2.1 times the white unemployment rate (6.6 percent) and higher than the average national unemployment rate of 13.1 percent during the Great Depression, from 1929 to 1939.
Washington Monthly August 27, 2013 -
Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said blacks lagged whites for a number of reasons. They include slightly lower levels of education, weaker business networking and the U.S. failure to create good-paying jobs since the 1970s.
But discrimination also plays a role, she said. Studies have shown, for example, that on identical job applications those with white-sounding names are more likely to get callbacks than those with black-sounding names.
Such studies “show that discrimination is still alive and well,” she said.
In 1963, the jobless rate among blacks was 10.9 percent, more than twice that for whites, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Reuters August 27, 2013 -
“In the 1960s, there were a number of occupations that blacks just couldn’t get — you were categorically blocked,” said Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. “Now you can see blacks in almost every occupation — including in the White House.”
But fighting discrimination is like trying to inoculate against a mutating disease: The socially and legally sanctioned discrimination of the 1960s gave way to stealthier-but-still-dangerous forms of bias.
“It’s still the case that while there’s little categorical exclusion, we still see evidence that employers prefer white workers,” Austin said. He pointed to much-cited research that found that people with “black-sounding” names were less likely to be hired for jobs than people without them, even when their qualifications were about the same, and that a white man with a criminal record applying for a job was more likely to receive a response from an employer than a black man without one.
The march’s organizers also hoped to put a dent in the double-digit unemployment rate among blacks (10 percent). That figure hasn’t improved in the 50 years since, according to the Economic Policy Institute; indeed, the black unemployment rate over the last half-century — 11.6 percent — suggests that black America is operating in a permanent economic recession. And since 1963, the average rate of black unemployment has hovered at more than twice the unemployment for whites.
(During the recent recession, black unemployment crept up to nearly 15 percent.)
Those dismal numbers might still understate just how bad the employment situation is. “To be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively looking for work,” Austin said. ” In communities where it’s very difficult for people to find work, people drop out of the labor work because their chances are so small.” In other words, there are untold numbers of unemployed black folks we’ve just ceased to count.
NPR August 27, 2013 -
Thomas J. Sugrue reminds us, in an excellent essay about why the call for economic justice resonated so loudly in August of 1963, that the full title of the event was “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” The Economic Policy Institute examines the context for the march’s demand for a higher minimum wage.
For the marchers, an increase in the minimum wage was one way to address the high poverty rate among black Americans.
NBC News August 27, 2013