The March jobs report showed unemployment rates near pre-Covid levels across racial lines, with sharp improvements for Black workers.
Black workers saw the greatest percentage-point drop in unemployment rates, falling from 6.6% in February to 6.2% in March.
"Those series tend to be volatile, so you have to kind of look at it over a longer period of time. In the last three months, there has been a consistent decline in the Black unemployment rate, and the labor force participation rate has been fairly stable," said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute's program on race, ethnicity and the economy.When broken down by gender for workers 20 and older, the Black male unemployment rate fell from 6.4% to 5.
That suggests the unemployment rate for Black Americans above 20 years of age could be better than the headline number, according to Wilson. The unemployment rate for Black workers between 16 to 19 years old was 22.9% in March. Notably, jobs growth continued in March in the retail trade industry, said Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. The sector added 49,000 jobs last month. Retail trade employment is 278,000 payrolls above its level in February 2020. Women are heavily concentrated in the retail industry, Mason pointed out.
"Even though the unemployment rate for Black women and Latino women and people of color are still higher than the national average, it's half the rate that it was at the beginning of the pandemic. So that's good news," she said.
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