Black unemployment in May was at 13.6 percent, an increase of six-tenths of a percent from the month before. The national unemployment rate is only 8.2 percent.
But while we’ve known for a long time that Black unemployment significantly outpaces the national unemployment rates, new data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows just how bad things have gotten in some of America’s most diverse and important cities.
BET.com
July 6, 2012
Young job-seekers may find themselves sweating it this summer.
Unemployment for Americans under 25 remains high at 16.4 percent — twice the national average — and underemployment is also a concern, especially for college grads, according to a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute.
WYNC News
July 6, 2012
A new study shows Minneapolis-St. Paul leading the nation in a category no one is celebrating: of 19 major metropolitan areas, the Twin Cities metro area has the widest gap in unemployment rate between blacks and whites.
During 2011, the jobless rate for African Americans in the Twin Cities averaged nearly 18 percent, more than three-times that of white residents. That’s by far the biggest disparity of all the metropolitan areas covered in a study from the Economic Policy Institute.
Minnesota Public Radio
July 5, 2012
According to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), African Americans and Hispanics are still at a disadvantage when it comes to employment in some metro areas.
The EPI scanned 19 metro areas with large African American populations and 25 metros with large Hispanic populations. Both studies found that unemployment in 2011 was higher than the national rate for African Americans and Hispanics in several metro areas.
Marketplace
July 5, 2012
The Twin Cities have the highest level of racial disparity in unemployment in the country, according to a study released on Monday. The Economic Policy Institute found that African-Americans in the Twin Cities metropolitan area were 3.3 times as likely to be unemployed as whites in 2011 – the highest level of disparity among 19 major metropolitan areas in the nation.
Unfortunately, this high level of unemployment disparity between blacks and whites in our area is not new. Two years ago we blogged on an EPI study finding that back then the Twin Cities also had the highest level of unemployment disparity among 18 major metropolitan areas.
Twin Cities Daily Planet
July 5, 2012
Unemployment among blacks stood at 17.7 percent in 2011, which was 3.1 times the jobless rate of whites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. That disparity rate is unchanged from a similar report issued two years ago by the same organization, the Economic Policy Institute. Then the metro area also ranked the worst in the country among selected cities.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
July 3, 2012
Metro Orlando had the second-highest rate of Hispanic unemployment in the nation last year, according to a report issued Monday by the Economic Policy Institute.
The jobless rate was 16.6 percent among Hispanics, researchers found, more than twice the unemployment rate of white residents. The Orlando area was second only to Providence, R.I., where the Hispanic unemployment rate was 23.3 percent.
Orlando Sentinel
July 3, 2012
Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that that’s just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.
“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.
AlterNet
July 2, 2012
If we got rid of standardized tests to rate public schools, what would we have instead? The most likely alternative is the inspectorate used in England. Scholars like Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute say school visits by well-trained inspectors would reveal more about what needs fixing than test score averages.
The Washington Post
July 2, 2012
If premiums go up, so does the cost to taxpayers of insuring each individual. That’s why overturning the mandate might not mean the law spends less money: Even though we’re insuring fewer people, each one is costing us much more. Moreover, the people we’re insuring are, on average, quite a bit sicker, as healthier folks are hanging back from the market. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that “the cost per newly insured person under health reform without the mandate is 93.3 percent higher than under health reform with the mandate.”
July 2, 2012