Join us Wednesday at 1 p.m. EDT for this week’s live online discussion with with Dr. Steven Pitts, labor policy specialist at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. He is hosting our second online conversation on how we build a better future for working people and a bigger and stronger movement.

Unemployment for African American workers has remained virtually unchanged, hovering between 15 percent to 16 percent throughout 2011, while unemployment for the rest of the workforce dropped below 9 percent, according to a new report by the University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center.

While the economic recovery is moving slowly for everyone, African Americans, especially teens, are trailing far behind other workers, according to a new report.  

“The Black Labor Force in the American Recovery,” released today by the U.S. Department of Labor, shows that last month the unemployment rate for blacks was 16.2 percent; down only 0.3 percentage points from the peak of 16.5 percent in March and April of last year. The national jobless rate in May was 9.1 percent.

The improved jobs figures out last Friday obscured the ongoing decline in public-sector jobs. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics noted when releasing the March unemployment data:

Employment in local government continued to trend down over the month. Local government has lost 416,000 jobs since an employment peak in September 2008.

Assaults on public employees’ right to bargain for a better life hurt all working people. But blacks are being hit especially hard. Black unemployment was 15.7 percent in January, compared with a national rate of 9 percent. Calls to slash the freedom of public employees could hit black job seekers especially hard because so many blacks are public employees.