Date: Feature Week of July 27, 2003
Topic: Black Press Business/Economic
Author: William Reed
Article ID: article_ema072703a

IS THE BLACK MIDDLE-CLASS DECLINING?

Many Black Workers Are Two Weeks Away From Poverty

�That great sucking sound you hear are American jobs going South.� � Ross Perot, 1992

Are you better off now than you were five years ago?  If you are among the 49 percent of Blacks that are classified as middle-class due to job and status, things may be changing, and not for the better.

During the 1990s lots of Black people stepped up to middle-class lifestyles.  In the Go-Go 90s, the Black middle class was the fastest growing and largest segment within the Black community.  Average household income for African-American families rose 1.1 percent annually, about double the average rate of increase for white households.  Blacks were living large; earning an average $31,778 household income, and enjoying a 32.5 percent increase in their purchasing power.  In the 90s, poor Black people were shrinking, the African-American poverty rate decreased to 26.1 percent.

These days, good jobs for Blacks are becoming harder to come by.  Good-paying jobs are going outside America�s borders and unemployment among Blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the mid-1970's.  Jobs are being lost mainly in the manufacturing sector, where pay for Blacks has historically been higher than in other sectors.  Overall unemployment is at its highest rate in nine years.  Nearly 2.6 million American jobs have disappeared during the last 28 months; with 90 percent of those jobs being lost in manufacturing and, of course, Black Americans being hit disproportionately harder than whites.

 Manufacturing, once concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast, has spread across every state as companies migrated to lower-wage towns and cities.  Now, increasing numbers of these companies are migrating again, this time overseas in search of yet lower labor costs, manufacturing job loss has intensified.  During the last three years, every U.S. state has lost manufacturing jobs.  Manufacturing employment decreased by 56,000 in June, with primary metals, fabricated metal products, machinery, and plastics and rubber products each losing about 6,000 jobs.  Employment in textile mills and leather products manufacturing also declined in June, continuing their long-term downward trends.

 In 2000, there were 2 million black Americans working in factory jobs, or 10.1 percent of the nation's 20 million manufacturing workers.  Then came the March 2001 recession; since then, 300,000 factory jobs held by Blacks have disappeared. White workers lost many factory jobs too; but because they were much more numerous to begin with, proportionally their damage is less.

 Over the past three months, nearly a million more people have been added to unemployment rolls.  In June 2003, the national unemployment rate was 6.4 percent, up 0.3 percent from May, the highest rate in nine years.  The overall unemployment rate for Blacks was 11.8 percent, with African-American men leading the pack at 11.3 percent.  The rate for Black women was 9.7 percent.  Low-wage workers and women who went from welfare to work in the 1990's have largely kept their jobs; factory breadwinners have borne the pain, men and women alike.  (These estimates do not include millions of disaffected workers who�ve exhausted unemployment benefits and are no longer listed on labor rolls)

The number and types of jobs that have been lost are severely diminishing the standing of many Blacks in the middle class.  And, this seems unlike the cyclical downturns in days of old, when workers got furloughed for a few weeks and then recalled.  These jobs are gone, and that represents a potentially significant slide in Black middle-class income and living standards.

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© 2000-2003 William Reed - www.BlackPressInternational.com