Black Americans are also feeling the success of the labor market. While the national unemployment rate is at 3.7 percent, Black unemployment is at a record low 4.8%, the lowest it’s been since Black unemployment has been tracked.
“We’ve not seen an unemployment rate for African Americans this low since the data has been collected, so this is certainly something to be very happy about, but having said that, the work is not done,” said Jackson. “There’s still a lot of work that we’re doing to try to bring that number even lower and in the idea there’d be no difference between the unemployment rate for White Americans and Black Americans so we’re doing a lot to invest in African-American communities which has been a key part of this administration’s transition to clean energy.”
Jackson added that more than two-thirds of new energy jobs are in minority-majority areas, and it’s part of a concerted effort to diversify the labor market and new positions. The Biden Administration is also working on diversifying the number of individuals who receive small business loans from the Small Business Administration and government contracts.
“So this is a concerted effort to build wealth and create opportunities in communities of color the numbers, and we’re seeing this in the extraordinarily low unemployment numbers that we’ve seen in the past few years,” Jackson told Black Enterprise.
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Source: Black Enterprise
