UC-Berkeley Study: Half of Black Employees in Low-Wage Jobs

UC-Berkeley Study: Half of Black Employees in Low-Wage Jobs: The unemployment crisis in the Black community has been well documented. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in July that the Black unemployment rate was 8 percent, nearly twice the rate for Whites. The crisis though, is much larger than unemployment, a new study finds. More than half of Blacks that have jobs are paid a low salary with no retirement and health benefits, according to a report by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education released just before Labor Day. “Typically when people examine the African-American jobs issue, people focus on the question of unemployment,” said Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the center and author of the report. “While we recognize that serious problem, we found there is a secondary important problem that involves low-wage work. There are a lot of Black folk who do have jobs, and there are very high levels of them, who work with very low wages. This is a very serious problem. The study, “Job Quality and Black Workers: An Examination of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York,” used data from the 2000 U.S. Census to analyze low-paying jobs among Blacks. Even though it used seven-year- old statistics, Pitts contends that the reports findings are still applicable to 2007.