Black workers have made tremendous headway in closing an age-old racial disparity, but it remains to be seen whether the progress will outlast the current hot labor market.
This spring, something happened in the job market: For the first time in history, Black people were just as likely as White people to have jobs, relative to the population, finally closing a gap that had persisted at least since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track of the employment-population ratio for Black workers in 1972. As of May, 59.6% of Black people were employed, barely less than 60.2% of White ones. Just the month before, that was reversed with Black employment slightly ahead.
Black workers have especially benefited from a job market where employers in many industries are still eager to hire and are having difficulty finding enough workers.
“When there's a lot of demand for workers from employers, they are less likely to engage in racial discrimination,” said Aaron Sojourner, a senior researcher at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “They're more likely to give a chance to applicants they might have overlooked before.”
By some measures, Black workers are still behind their White counterparts. The unemployment rate—which measures how many people have jobs out of people who want them, not just the entire population—still shows White workers far ahead, with an unemployment rate of 3.3% as of May compared with 5.6% for Black workers.
The closing gap may reflect more than just a decrease in hiring discrimination. The White employment-population ratio has yet to recover from the pandemic—likely because many older workers, who are disproportionately White, retired early in recent years, Sojourner said.
However, there are reasons to believe the trend is more than just a quirk of the pandemic economy. The employment-population ratio gap had been closing since the end of the Great Recession, suggesting a more enduring phenomenon.
The true test will come if and when employers shift from hiring workers to laying them off in a weakening economy. Historically, Black workers have been more likely to be marginally attached to the labor force, that is, more frequently in and out of jobs and the first to be let go in downturns.
“It could be a more lasting change,” Sojourner said. “It could be that the correlation with race is weakened these days and that if we do see a softening economy, the pain will be shared more equally. Time will tell. I wouldn't bet on it, but it's possible.”