Building Bridges Radio-Unemployment Crisis:Portrait of Inequality

by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash Friday, Aug. 22, 2003 at 11:05 AM
knash@igc.org

Building Bridges Radio presents this 28 min radio program:A Portrait of Inequality –Today’s Unemployment Crisis - TO LISTEN CLICK ON INDYMEDIA LINK


http://la.indymedia.org/uploads/2003/08/jobs.mp3

Radio WBAI’s Building Bridges:

Your Community & Labor Report –National Edition

Produced by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash

PRESENTS

A Portrait of Inequality – Today’s Unemployment Crisis - with

Marc H. Morial, President and CEO, National Urban League

Andrew Stettner, Policy Analyst, Ntl Employment Law Project

Mark Levitan, Senior Policy Analyst,Community Service Society

The unemployment rate fell from 6.4 percent in June to 6.2 percent in July. But the decline stemmed from the fact that nearly half a million jobless

workers who had been looking for work stopped their search entirely, and so, weren’t counted as being in the labor force at all. That destroys whatever

good one might have found in the unemployment rate for blacks dropping to 11.1 percent in July, from June’s 11.8 percent; and to 8.2 percent for Latinos, from June’s 8.4 percent. The unemployment rate for both

months for whites remained stable at 5.5 percent. The unemployment rate for N.Y.C is 8.1% with the same disparity for Blacks & Latinos .


There’s little question that the statistics on the unemployment situation indicate a long term crisis especially for African-Americans and Latinos. These figures have been analyzed in depth by recent studies by the National Employment Law Service and for N.Y.C. by the Community Service Society.

More than 9 million Americans are out of work. Nearly 1.6 million have been jobless so long they’ve exhausted their 26-week unemployment benefits; and another million or so are close to that economic precipice. Moreover, economists and other observers of the labor market say the immediate prospects for getting some significant number of these Americans back to work are bleak. The National Urban

League will soon convene a “Commission on Jobs and the Urban Economy” to develop a new economic plan for the nation’s cities, where the large

majority of African Americans live.





TO LISTEN TO THIS 28 MIN RADIO PROGRAM CLIKC ON INDYMEDIA LINK

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Building Bridges is regularly broadcast over WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC area on Mondays from 4-5pm PT.

It is streamed live over

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Original: Building Bridges Radio-Unemployment Crisis:Portrait of Inequality