U.S. employers added 481,000 new jobs in January and 678,000 new jobs in February—an impressive feat given that many economists projected record-high job losses based on leading indicators such as the three-month high in initial jobless claims. Unemployment receded for the second consecutive month, inching down from 4% in January to a pandemic low of 3.8% in February. And last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that as of the end of January, there were 11.3 million job openings.
But these blockbuster economic headlines are disguising considerable weakness in certain segments of the labor market. Native Americans have the highest unemployment rate among all race groups (11.1% in January and 7.4% in February) owing in part to their overrepresentation in frontline service sectors. Meanwhile, the rosy Asian American unemployment outlook (3.7% in January and 2.9% in February) obscures a steady slide in the labor force participation rate for Asian American workers, which dropped from a peak of 65.2% in November to 62.9% in February.
The disconnect between the official unemployment rate and the true health of the labor market is not a new debate. Failing to draw on more comprehensive jobless measures promotes false optimism about the recovery and detracts from the fact that vulnerable groups are still deeply mired in recession. For instance, the Black unemployment rate slipped to 6.6% in February, but applying a different comparative yardstick to Black employment...
Amid a swirl of public speculation and growing concern, the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) has firmly rejected claims that it spent a staggering GH9 million on a turkey berry production project, de...