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.

Black teens, age 16-19, fared even worse with an unemployment rate of 40.7 percent last month, down from a record high of 49.2 percent in September 2010. Not only has the unemployment rate remained high, but a large number of black teens are no longer in the labor force — either working or looking for work.

Some good news, according to the report, is that the reduction in black teens in the labor force may be because more are in school. Among 16-19 year olds, 81.5 percent were enrolled in school in October 2010, compared to 80.7 percent in 2007, the year the recession began.

Another reason for the high black jobless rate is that the attacks on public employees hurt African American workers most because they make up a disproportionate share of public-sector workers. Nearly one in five employed blacks worked for the government compared to 14.6 percent of whites and 11 percent of Hispanics, the report says.  

In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, pointed out that the public sector is  the leading employer of black men and the second leading employer of black women.

The Labor Department report proposes several solutions to the issue of black unemployment, including:

• Ensuring that training and employment services are serving blacks.
• Providing training opportunities for black workers to be involved in the clean energy economy.
• Helping more black youth to gain employment through programs targeting individuals affected by high poverty and high unemployment.
• Increasing college attendance and graduation rates among black youth and encourage more black students to pursue careers in science, engineering and technology.
• Funding grant programs for targeted worker populations, including ex-offenders.
• Assisting workers interested in starting their own businesses.
• Supporting family-friendly workplace policies.
• Protecting workers through enhancing the Department’s Wage and Hour Division and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs enforcement

The report is one in a series on the situation of the nation’s most vulnerable workers. You can download it here.