AMERICA:Hardship among jobless is hitting blacks hardest, but is being felt across ethnic backgrounds, writes LARA MARLOWE
AT THE White House, President Barack Obama was about to open a “jobs summit” of 130 corporate executives, economists, small-business owners and union leaders to address the country’s top worry: a 10 per cent jobless rate. Taking account of those who cannot work enough hours to break even, “underemployment” in the US is at 17.5 per cent.
A few miles away, at the Franklin Street One-Stop Career Centre, demand for benefits and/or job placement has risen 45 per cent this year.
Rena Davis (25) and her boyfriend Hampton Murphy (30) had just submitted his application for a free 10-month paramedic training programme. Davis lost her job as a clerk at the department of agriculture in May 2008. Murphy lost his job as a furniture mover more recently. She wears an engagement ring, but the couple can’t afford to live together; both live with their mothers.
“I have a high school diploma. I studied accounting, real estate, building maintenance, painting, roofing. I was a teacher’s aide,” says Murphy. “People study half their life and can’t do what they studied for. I can’t get in. They’ll hire someone Hispanic quicker than a black person.”
“A lot of people can’t get jobs because they have a [prison] record or bad credit rating,” says Davis. “They do background checks,” she explains.
“No one has a good credit rating. Not in America,” her boyfriend chimes in.
Murphy confirms my hunch that he has a prison record. “I had to sell drugs,” he says, trying to justify himself. “I was forced. I’m not a criminal. You’re chasing your tail. If I don’t sell drugs, how am I gonna survive if I can’t get employment?”
Rebecca Baker (56) has been waiting for over an hour in her wheelchair. Like millions of white, middle-class Americans, she now endures the hardship that was previously reserved for the black underclass. Baker closed her interior design business after a stroke paralysed the right side of her body. But she enjoyed her job as a telephone fundraiser for the Republican National Committee (RNC). “I was one of their top producers,” she says proudly. “I’m a dedicated conservative.” At the RNC, Baker earned up to $75,000 a year. Then, as the presidential campaign was gearing up in 2007, the Republicans fired all 64 telephone fundraisers. “They were going to outsource it, to be more cost-effective,” she explains.
Her benefits total less than one-third of her former salary. “I’ve just gone through my 401 K [retirement fund]. I’m working with the mortgage loan officer to get my home refinanced.”
President Obama is under pressure to create public works programmes, but he’s reluctant to add to America’s $12 trillion deficit. Judging from his closing statement at the “jobs summit” on Thursday, it was if he’d heard Rebecca Baker say: “I’d focus on small businesses. I think that’s where the jobs are.” After two years of fruitless job applications, with perhaps irrational optimism, Baker is thinking of restarting a design business. Melvin Gross (54), the unemployed carpenter sitting a few chairs away from her in the job centre, says he’s thinking of using his van to start a moving business. “I was making over $60,000 a year in construction,” Gross says. He completed his last project, the conversion of a former cinema into a senior citizens’ centre, in 2007.
“Right now, the whole [construction] industry is Spanish,” says Gross, referring to the influx of workers from Mexico and Central America. “I’ve been pushed into the funnel, down the drain . . . I talk to a lot of folks and they want to work. They’re not deadbeats.”
Gross says prospective employers often sound enthusiastic on the telephone, then change when they see the colour of his skin. “America’s not healed,” he says. “As a black man, I have to be 10 times better.” Unemployment is 15.7 per cent among African-Americans, 13.1 per cent among Hispanics and 9.5 per cent among whites. The US economy is increasingly bilingual, and several applicants at the job centre complained that undocumented Hispanics are working for substandard wages.
Dorie Minor (25) was a bookkeeper in a nursing home until July. “There were 400 staff. They started laying off in October 2007, 20 employees every quarter,” she says. “It’s no one’s fault if there’s no old people coming in to fill the beds and they can’t pay nurses.” Because families can’t afford expenses not covered by Medicare, they are keeping elderly relatives at home.
Minor’s husband was a foreman with a firm that installed fire-protection sprinklers. He too lost his job in July. Their lease is up, and they can’t find an apartment “because no one considers unemployment insurance as income”. Yet Minor smiles cheerfully. “We have each other,” she explains.
Minor, who is black, says: “It’s hardest for the African-American males, because people have put a name on them and it can’t be removed.” What name is that? I ask. “That they’re lazy,” she replies.