July 17, 2003

The unemployment rate for African-Americans surged to 11.8 percent last month. This increase is a full percentage point higher than the previous month -- one of the biggest jumps in the last two decades.

That sharp rise was part of the jump in U.S. unemployment that took the overall rate to a nine-year high. The official jobless rate went up by 0.3 percentage points in June to hit 6.4 percent.

The increase was much higher that the one anticipated by most mainstream analysts, who predicted a moderate rise from 6.1 percent to 6.2 percent. The black unemployment rate is rising twice as fast as the rate for whites, which climbed to 5.5 percent in June from 5.4 percent in May.

What's more, the economy's tepid performance is fueling skepticism about prospects for an economic upturn. The average number of weeks a worker remained unemployed reached 19.8 in June -- the highest number in 20 years, according to Labor Department statistics.

An even more chilling statistic, writes Barry Bluestone in the online edition of The American Prospect, is that for 24 straight months, so far, employment is lower than it was one year before. "The results has been the longest private sector employment slump since the Great Depression," argues Bluestone, professor of political economy at Boston's Northeastern University.

As the quip goes, when America catches a cold, African-Americans get the flu.

Nearly 90 percent of the 2.6 million jobs lost so far in the economic downtown were in manufacturing, the sector most responsible for the rise in the black middle class. In June alone, manufacturing lost 56,000 jobs. Since the beginning of the recession in March 2001, 300,000 factory jobs held by blacks, or 15 percent, have disappeared.

Since the Bush administration took office in January 2001, an estimated 2.7 million jobs have been lost, nearly 400,000 of them since the beginning of 2003. The administration's package of tax cuts, the latest of which was signed May 28 by President Bush, has done little to improve the economy. In fact, as Senate Democrats said, the Bush administration's job-creation record is worse than any president since Herbert Hoover.

Tax cuts for the wealthy will do little to generate consumer demand sufficient to jump-start the languishing economy.

What is needed instead is an increase in revenue sharing to the states, a larger package of emergency unemployment benefits, a single-year tax cut aimed at working families and a renewed commitment to affirmative action.

Salim Muwakkil is senior editor of In These Times magazine (www.inthesetimes.com), a Chicago-based publication, and a contributing writer to the Chicago Tribune. He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.