Black Employment Trend Is on a Worrying Decline: Justin Fox

Amid a pretty good jobs report last week, there were some disturbing signs for Black Americans. The Black unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shot up to 6.8% in June from 6% in May (and from an all-time low of 4.8% in April 2023), while the overall unemployment rate fell to 4.1% from 4.2%. And while unemployment rates for minority groups can jump around a lot from month to month, the less-noisy employment-population ratio for Black Americans has been sliding for more than a year now, and as of June was 2 percentage points below its 2023 average.