Attack on Public Employees Deals a Sharp Blow to Black Workers

[Hannah Bell]

Even though the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, the subsequent jobless recovery continues to inflict great pain on working families. This is especially true in the black community, where the unemployment rate of 15.7 percent in January was higher than at the end of the recession (14.9 percent).

Conservatives ignore this misery and call for fiscal austerity. And as events in Wisconsin and across the country are showing, the demand for austerity is a subterfuge for a frontal assault on public employees and their freedom to bargain for a middle class life.

This attack casts a particularly sharp blow to the black community. Before the recession, 18 percent of black men and 23.3 percent of black women were public employees, making this sector the leading employer of black men and the second leading employer of black women. In contrast, 14.2 percent of white men, 19.8 percent of white women, 7.5 percent of Latinos and 14.9 percent of Latinas were public employees. It is important to note that these are national figures. In urban areas with large black populations, the role of the public sector in providing good jobs and creating a middle class for the black community is undoubtedly greater...

Advocates for racial justice cannot limit their economic demands to calls for job creation and anti-discrimination enforcement in the workplace. Without the collective power that unions can exert in the labor markets and at the ballot box, employers will drive wages to the lowest possible levels and subject workers to arbitrary whims. They also will discriminate against people of color and sow divisiveness among workers.

Steven Pitts is a labor policy specialist at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2011/02/ending-lifo-will-make-teaching-staff.html

[denem]

1. +1

[rpannier]

2. K&R

[old mark]

3. K&R- I knew several black people who were employed at the same state hospital where I worked

who were military veterans and used the bonus point system to help them get decent paying and steady jobs...just as I did. We had a lot of vets in civil service in PA, and I am sure everywhere else in the US.

It is kind of galling to have served during the Vietnam war and for years in the state civil service and now to be called names by politicians who have never bothreed to serve their country...other than to enrich themselves in Congress.

mark

[BlueIris]

4. 15.7%. Ouch. nt

[Hannah Bell]

5. amazing statistic.

[Blue_Tires]

6. ttt

[starroute]

7. For the GOP, undermining minorities is the icing on the cake

I'm pretty sure that the top GOP priority is destroying the Democratic Party and that making life miserable for minorities is just a means to that end -- but it isn't always easy to tell the difference.

Part of the problem is that the Republicans figure they can win over working-class voters with cultural issues or appeals to conservatism, but since the New Deal, the black vote has been as locked in for Democrats as it gets. They know they'll never be able to touch it -- and that it stands in the way of their dreams of unrestrained power.

You can see this resentment at work when they start fantasizing about what overwhelming majorities they'd have in most of the country if it weren't for minority voters. On some level of their consciousness, the only real Americans are white, Christian men and they don't believe that anybody else should even have a say.

I don't even know it you could call this racism. It's more like a kind of tribalism. It isn't that they hate black people so much as that they simply see them as getting in the way.

But the outcome -- where they feel completely justified in disenfranchising and disempowering minorities for purely political game-playing reasons -- couldn't be worse if it were based on old fashioned Nazi-style ideas about racial purity.

[Starry Messenger]

8. k&r

[Dappleganger]

9. Attacks on the public employees, as well as removing/reducing funding for public transportation.

In our area, more than 30% unemployment is prevalent on the Northside where most of the black community is located. Our city has each year for the past several years reduced it's public transit, directly affecting those minorities who were lucky enough to have jobs (many of them had public service jobs too). If you don't have reliable transportation somewhere, you can't work. Period. It can take over two hours to just get across the city on a GOOD day.

The system is set up against them from the very beginning. :(