Posted on 05/06/2020 8:07:23 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Until a few weeks ago, Melissa St. Hilaire worked the night shift taking care of a 95-year-old woman for a family in Miami.
"I help her to go to the bathroom, use the bathroom, and I watch TV with her, and I comb her hair sometimes in the night," she said.
But one day in March, the woman's daughter told her not to come back, saying she wanted to protect her mother during the coronavirus pandemic.
St. Hilaire is black and a Haitian immigrant. And her situation is an example of what early data from this crisis shows: People of color have lost work at greater rates than white workers.
The March jobs data show a number of racial and ethnic disparities in the economic impact of the coronavirus. For example: the share of white people who are employed fell by 1.1% last month. That rate fell by substantially more for black people (a 1.6% drop), Asian Americans (1.7%), and Latinos (2.1%). Economist Christian Weller highlighted this data and more at Forbes earlier this month.
In addition, a survey from the left-leaning Data for Progress found that 45% of black workers have lost jobs or had their hours cut, compared with 31% for white workers. (Samples were not large enough to break out other racial and ethnic groups.)
Losing her job landed St. Hilaire in dire straits. She was able to delay her rent payment after she talked to her landlord.
"I said to her my situation. She said, 'OK.' She understood my situation. She gave me more days," St. Hilaire said, but she added that shelter isn't her only concern. "Two weeks before [that], I was out of food. That's crazy."
She ended up getting some food supplies from a local aid group. She plans to apply for unemployment and also has a GoFundMe whose proceeds she plans to share with fellow domestic aides.
A big reason for these racial and ethnic gaps has to do with the workplaces that have been hurt most by the economic crisis.
"We know which industries are being hit the hardest," says Gbenga Ajilore, senior economist at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "So we look at leisure and hospitality, transportation, utilities, industries that are first ones were hit really hard. We also know service — think hairdressers, salons. We know which ones are getting hit hard, and we know who's in those occupations."
People of color — and in the case of domestic workers like St. Hilaire, women of color — are disproportionately in those occupations. Nearly three-quarters of domestic workers were out of work the week of April 6, according to a survey from the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Similar patterns turn up in other industries hurt most by the coronavirus slowdown. The latest jobs report showed more than 450,000 job losses in leisure and hospitality — a category that includes hotels and restaurants. Black, Asian and Latino workers are all disproportionately represented in the hotel industry, and Latino workers have heavy representation in restaurants.
That includes Erick Velasquez, who is Mexican American and who until recently was head bartender at a Greek restaurant in Houston.
"Everything just happened so quick. We're watching the news, and they talk about COVID-19, and nobody really thought much about it," he said. "And then a few days after then that's when they — the city or the county — closed down dining rooms for restaurants everywhere."
Velasquez has managed to find a temporary job — helping his fellow laid-off workers. He's a case worker now at the Southern Smoke Foundation, a nonprofit that supports people in the restaurant industry. And he sees racial and ethnic gaps among the people he's helping.
"Everybody in the restaurant industry is hurting, but more so, it's the people that you don't really see when you go into a restaurant," Velasquez said. "It's like the back of the house workers, the immigrant community, the people of color."
There's also evidence of disparities in who is able to work from home during this crisis: 30% of white people and 37% of Asian Americans could work from home in 2017 and 2018, according to the Labor Department. Meanwhile, only 20% of black people could. In addition, only 16% of Latinos could work from home, compared to nearly twice as many non-Latinos.
The March jobs report that much of this analysis is based on only captured the start of the economic crisis created by COVID-19. The April report, which will be released May 8, will show if racial gaps have persisted.
If those gaps do continue, it could make existing inequalities worse. The unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos, for example, are always higher than the broader national unemployment rate. Wages for blacks and Latinos are also lower than for other groups.
Ajilore thinks it was easier to ignore these types of gaps when the economy was humming along with record-low unemployment. Now, the economic crisis brought about by the pandemic is holding a magnifying glass to those gaps.
"Once this pandemic hit, then it's like you see the cracks in the structure," he said.
And the more coronavirus widens those cracks, the harder they will be to fill.
And it's not like this came from Breitbart: this is NPR. Similar articles are found on CNN and CBS and US News & World Report.
We don't play the race card. We treat all Americans as individuals. But I find it utterly disgusting that lily white liberals in their air-filtered cloistered studio apartments are receiving direct deposit paychecks, while telling the unemployed Americans of ALL colors etc. that they need to suck it up so the virus can be eradicated to allow them mask-free passage to Whole Foods.
This is a winning issue: opening up businesses helps everyone. Calling out the racism of liberals' demands for sustained business closures is a home run.
Alinsky has changed teams; all your base are belong to us.
There is one big reason for the liberal states refusing to allow businesses to open and for people to get back to work.
The reason being that, there is plenty of time left between now and the election, meaning that, there is plenty of time for the economy to recover enough, which would allow Trump to take credit for a big resounding comeback in the economy, even if it doesn’t get back to the level it was at before corona-virus crippled the economy.
Democrats will not allow any kind of recovery to take place, even if they have to sacrifice jobs and businesses and keep people in misery.
After all, to them, it’s a lot more important to get rid of Trump (as a result of a bad economy), than to get the country back into a healthy economy.
Virus is just plain racist!
/S
Doesn’t matter. Red States,Trump and White Nationalist People are being blamed. Facts do not matter anymore. I feel sickened what is happening to Americans, ALL AMERICANS. It seems one side is cheer-leading death while blaming us for ALL of it. I HATE the left and I will never reconcile or forgive them. Don’t believe me? Listen to the liberal news all day and go to their social sites and read what they think and say. It will make you physically ill and rather scared for the future of the country.
It’s annoying that they keep using the words, “disproportionately represented” when it comes to the type of work being done, as if their presence in certain industries is inherently negative. I know many whites working as home health aides and in salons, not to mention in restaurants. Many of those jobs are entry-level, and meant for teenagers, not adults with families to support.
That aside, it’s sad that those populations don’t recognize that the Left is what’s making their lives hard and taking money from their wallets, especially now, when they need it most.
Trump brought more blacks into the workforce than any other President. And it wasn’t ‘make work projects’ - they were real jobs.
The problem?
Last hired - first fired. Most of those hires happened within the last two years - so they’re the people let go first. It’s not racism - it’s fairness...
Democrats are racist.
Of course this helps all unemployed people; that's what our side wants, to help ALL people.
But it's the left that is saying it is only Big Business and Evil Capitalists that want to open businesses.
Well, by proxy it is only racist Blue Governors that want to keep businesses closed.
Re “the type of jobs they have .. restaurants and hospitality industry got hit hard”. Yes. Many of their workers are not very educated nor multi-skilled so they have to do something akin to “manual labor” such as waiters, short order cooks, clean up work, etc. but they had jobs.
Also the inability of many Hispanics to speak fluent enough English to fit into a major organization’s operations is their fault, not ours. There are plenty of places to go to for night school or ESL classes. God knows my county has more for illegal immigrants than it does for citizens.
What the NPR writer DID NOT mention is that most of these “people of color” live in Democrat run and ruined cities -NYC, Phila., Baltimore, DC, possibly Richmond, Va, Chicago, Detroit (until recently), Houston, SF, LA, and possibly Seattle, Cleveland, and Minneapolis, among others.
Look at cities run by Republicans or the few conservative Democrats who got elected. Their employment situation should be head and shoulders above those re the cities I mentioned.
The Democrats kept their black city populations in/on the “urban plantations”, only giving them crumbs as a whole, while the black political machines made a fortune on government grants and funding systems.
The blacks and Hispanics voted for their Democrat Party masters and now they are suffering a new kind of discrimination, Democrat Marxism. Here the Democrat elite have extremely well paying jobs while their voters often have lower echelon jobs or no jobs at all (right now - How do they like the “Stay Home, Don’t Go to Work” orders the Dem mayors and governors have imposed? Don’t think you’ll see that question asked by CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR/CPB, Vox, Axios, Yahoo, Bloomturd, etc.
[there is a yuge case to be made that the unemployment caused by state-forced businesses shutdowns disproportionately hit the poor and minorities. The corollary is that CONTINUED shutdowns are like a boot on their throats.]
[Job Losses Higher Among People Of Color During Coronavirus Pandemic]
Darn it! The virus is helping Whitey!!
[Doesn’t matter. Red States,Trump and White Nationalist People are being blamed. Facts do not matter anymore.]
Obviously, the virus was caused by a Confederate Statue. /Liberal Logic and Reasoning
Minorities could start off by voting OUT lockdowns Czars like Whitmer and Cuomo when they are up next for election.
Will they do that?
Not a chance.
In the meantime, they could join the protests against lockdowns.
Will they do that either?
Nope.
WORLD TO END TOMORROW!
Women and Minorities Hardest Hit
Weren’t these at home care workers recently unionized?
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