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Black unemployment at 11.6%: US Report

03 May 2014 21:47 (UTC +04:00)

The African-American jobless rate was also more than twice the white jobless rate of 5.3 percent, according to not-seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hispanic or Latino unemployment was 7.3 percent.

There has been a persistent gap between African-American and white workers since 1954, when the BLS started keeping track, according to the Huffington Post. But the gap has widened since the end of the Great Recession.

For black workers, the median duration of unemployment was 23.3 weeks in April, compared with 17.1 weeks for white workers.

The longer workers stay unemployed, the more their skills erode, further hurting their chances of getting a job in the future, the post said.

Black workers are also paid less than white worker. The BLS report shows the median weekly income for black workers in 2013 was $629, compared with $802 for white workers.

That means the annual income of black workers is $32,708, while white worker receive an annual income of $41,704.

The underemployment rate was 20.5 percent for black workers, compared with 11.8 percent for white workers, according to the National Urban League's latest annual report on the State of Black America.

The US economy plunged into the Great Recession in December of 2007. Nearly 9 million people lost their jobs over the next two years. The recovery over the past five years has been weak and the country’s job growth erratic and uneven.