Black job seekers in Twin Cities face worst unemployment gap in nation

http://www.workdayminnesota.org/index.php?news_6_4507

8 June 2010

ST. PAUL - Black workers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metro area live with an unemployment rate more than three times that of whites, according to a new report. The disparity is greater here than in any other large metro area in the nation.

In metropolitan areas across the United States, the unemployment rate for African Americans and Hispanics approached Great Depression-like levels in 2009, an Economic Policy Institute analysis finds. Issued Tuesday, the report, Uneven Pain: Unemployment by Metro Area and Race by EPI researcher Algernon Austin, examines unemployment by race in the 50 largest metro areas in the United States.



The national average unemployment rate in 2009 was 9.3 percent, while in Detroit and Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington the black unemployment rates were 20.9 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively. The unemployment rate for whites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metro was 6.6 percent – well below the national average.

The report found that the unemployment gap holds even where black and white populations both are high school educated. In 2008 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metro, African Americans with a high school diploma or GED were three times as likely to be unemployed as whites with the same level of education.

"It’s generally assumed that the more educated a population, the lower their unemployment rate. But the disparity we are seeing here cannot be explained by the so-called achievement gap," said Kris Jacobs, Executive Director of JOBS NOW Coalition, a St. Paul based, statewide workforce policy coalition.

FULL story at link.

The latest figures I can find are for 2008. Then, the white unemployment rate was 3.2%. The black unemployment rate was 17%. Inequities are pretty common, it seems. And you have about a 4% black population, the stats say.

Stats are interesting...

Are they included in the stats as African Americans?