09-07-2025
Black Employment Is on a Worrying Decline
Amid a pretty good jobs report last week, there were some disturbing signs for Black Americans. The Black unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shot up to 6.8% in June from 6% in May (and from an all-time low of 4.8% in April 2023), while the overall unemployment rate fell to 4.1% from 4.2%. And while unemployment rates for minority groups can jump around a lot from month to month, the less-noisy employment-population ratio for Black Americans has been sliding for more than a year now, and as of June was 2 percentage points below its 2023 average.
Because the employment-population ratio is to some extent determined by the age of the population, in particular the growing share that is 65 or older, the so-called prime-age ratio for ages 25 through 54 is a better metric — probably the single best measure of the health of the labor market. But the BLS doesn't publish it in seasonally adjusted form for most demographic groups, and the seasonal swings can be quite large, so I've made do here with 12-month moving averages of the unadjusted ratios.
