By Peter Lawrence Kane
The U.S. economy has been on a tear lately, consistently adding more jobs than economists expect. California’s unemployment rate is better than the national average, and San Francisco has more jobs than ever before.
However, the unemployment rate for African Americans in the city remains stubbornly high, according to the Examiner. In fact, it’s a startling 19 percent, versus 3.8 percent for the city overall. Statewide, the disparity isn’t quite as shocking, with 14 percent of black Californians currently looking for work versus 6.1 percent for whites, 8.5 percent for Latinos, and 5.9 percent for Asian Americans. (Anything below four percent is often regarded as “full employment” by mainstream economists, however willfully callous that number may sound).
To put it another way, African Americans in California are almost twice as likely to be jobless, but in San Francisco their unemployment rate is five times the average. The Examiner quotes a 36-year-old African American woman who has both a nursing license and an Associate’s degree who can’t afford her $1,800 rent: “The recovery is based on white America alone,” she says.
It’s tempting to point out that many prominent tech companies have done a lackluster job of diversifying beyond an overwhelmingly white-and-Asian-male workforce, and further infer that because tech is so dominant, that must be the source of SF’s disparity. Tech’s stranglehold on the city, however, is inflated: the 75 largest tech companies employ only about 38,000 people in San Francisco, which is fewer than one job out of every ten.
So the causes run deeper, and include the de facto discrimination of credit and background checks, as well as overt racial bias. It’s also useful to remember that unemployment statistics count only those people who are looking for work. Many millions of people have simply given up since the start of the Great Recession. Doubtless a significant proportion of them are African American, even here in Boomtown USA.
[via SF Examiner; photo courtesy of ThinkStock]
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