Two weeks.
That was the longest stretch of time Michael Seals, 58, has ever looked for work. That was the longest stretch, until now.
Seals, an Atlanta native, has watched his hometown grow from charming city to thriving metropolis -- and the fortunes of many fellow African Americans grow with it. He describes himself as a man who is good with his hands, having spent nearly a decade as a supervisor at an area cabinet company. The firm specialized in outfitting kitchens and bathrooms in the high-rises that changed Atlanta's skyline, and in the subdivisions that transformed what had been the countryside into sprawling suburbia, in places as far away as North Carolina and Tennessee.
"By 2008, the housing market here, it just plain fell out," Seals said. "The owner came to me and said they had to cut back. That was the end of my job and the beginning of a very rude awakening."
Overall unemployment fell to a better-than-expected 8.8 percent in March as the economy added roughly 216,000 jobs, the Labor Department announced Friday. Those are the kind of figures that economists say indicate a strengthening recovery, though they caution that it's well below the rate of job growth the nation needs to see -- uninterrupted, for years -- if employment is ever to return to a level comparable to the years before the Great Recession.
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When the recession began in 2007, black and Latino workers lost their jobs at a faster clip, said Roderick Harrison, a Howard University sociologist and demographer who is also a fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Research, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Now, despite the recession's official end and incremental job gains for all types of workers, it's black and Latino workers who are having the hardest time finding work again. The industries that added jobs during the recession -- health care and educational services -- and those that have begun to do so now have historically employed more women then men. That's why the uptick in black unemployment in March was driven largely by black male unemployment, Harrison said.
Black workers are typically less educated than white workers. But before, during and after the recession, black college graduates have been far more likely than their white peers to be unemployed, Harrison said. And for more than a decade, the ability to get to a job in a car has become the key to work. Office jobs -- the kind this month's job report indicated are being created -- are by and large located in far-flung suburbs, not in the cities and inner-ring suburbs where most black people live, Harrison said.
"The jobs are being created in the sorts of places you can't get to without a car or without dedicating significant time and significant resources to the commute," Harrison said.
Read more at the Huffington Post.
