Although African American workers are significantly better educated than they were three decades ago, they're actually less likely to be in good jobs, according to a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

Over the weekend, young people watched or read about President Obama speaking at Morehouse College and first lady Michelle Obama addressing the graduates of Bowie State University. Hopefully they were inspired by seeing so many young and gifted people finishing the course they chose to follow. Well, here is a little known set of facts. 

In our second online discussion on how to build a stronger movement for working people, Dr. Steven Pitts, labor policy specialist at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, asked you: “Union density is higher among black workers than it is for any other racial or ethnic group of workers. How can the labor movement use this to build a stronger movement for social change?”

The question generated a thoughtful and lively discussion that will help us prepare for the 2013 AFL-CIO Convention that will focus on how the labor movement should change and what we can do together to improve the future of all working people.

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that in 1965, and African Americans still hear his quote ring.

A new report, Blacks in Unions: 2012, by the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education, finds that black workers are 19% more likely to be in unions than non-black workers. In the nation’s 10 largest metropolitan areas, African Americans are 42% more likely than non-blacks to be in unions.

What a strange turn of events.  If we are to believe the leaks on the deal being cut for the fiscal cliff, it appears that President Obama’s agenda was narrow—restore fiscal sanity by upping the tax rates on very high earners. In the process, he appears ready to concede to House Speaker John Boehner a Republican plan to alter Social Security benefits recommended by the Simpson-Bowles commission. What an odd legacy the president would be leaving. The cut in Social Security benefits that Boehner proposes would have a disparate impact on African Americans, the group that voted most vociferously against the Republican world view. One would think the president’s agenda going into the fiscal cliff negotiations would be to remind those who worked hard for his election why it mattered he won.

African American workers’ jobless rate in 2011 hovered between 9.7 percent and 22.6 percent in 19 major metropolitan areas, according to new data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Overall, the black unemployment rate was two to three times as high as that of whites. EPI also found that the 2011 unemployment rate among Latino workers was higher than 10 percent in 17 of 25 metro areas.

Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, will address scholars, labor activists and workers’ center organizers at the second annual conference of the Labor Research and Action Network (LRAN) at Georgetown University on June 12. Wilkerson is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, a magnificent rendition of the great migration of some 6 million black Americans from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West.

Just over a year ago, the 2010 midterm elections saw Republicans seize control of both branches of the legislatures in 11 states. Then, while talking up the notion of job creation, they set about cutting their state and local public workforces with a ferocity unseen in decades.  The most recent numbers, according to the Roosevelt Institute, are stark.

The 11 states are Alabama, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Together, they eliminated 87,900 state and local public jobs—more than 40 percent of the total cut.

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.