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Blacks, Latinos Take Hit On Jobs

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By JESSE WASHINGTON

The Associated Press

Published: March 26, 2009

The ax fell without sound or shadow: Tatiana Gallego was called into human resources and laid off from her job as an admissions counselor for a fashion college.

"The way people tried to explain it to me was, I was the last one hired so I was the first one out," said Gallego, 25, who had worked there for 17 months.

Last hired, first fired. The generations-old cliche rings bitterly true for millions of Latinos and blacks who are losing jobs at a faster than average rate during this punishing recession.

Much of the disparity is attributed to a concentration of Latinos and blacks in construction, blue-collar or service-industry jobs that have been hammered by the economic meltdown. Unemployment for blacks has been about double the rate for whites since the government began tracking those categories in the early 1970s.

This recession is cutting a swath through the professional classes as well, which can be devastating to people who recently reached that level.

Since the recession began in December 2007, Latino unemployment has risen 4.7 percentage points to 10.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Black unemployment has risen 4.5 points to 13.4 percent. White unemployment has risen 2.9 points to 7.3 percent.

Gallego, whose parents were born in Colombia, graduated from the University of Rhode Island. Her mother is self-employed, and her stepfather works in construction.

She was stunned when she was told to pack up and leave by the end of the day because enrollment was down at her New York City school. She said she had recently received a positive performance review and her bosses were planning to send her to a conference.

William Darity, a professor of economics and black studies at Duke University, said that "blacks and Latinos are relative latecomers to the professional world ... so they are necessarily the most vulnerable."

"We don't have those older roots to anchor us in the professional world," Darity said. "We don't have the same nexus of contacts, the same kind of seniority."

There are no recent government statistics that measure jobs lost by race and income. Darity and others, though, think professional Latinos and blacks are more likely to lose their jobs in the recession.

"Many times blacks and Latinos are the last to be hired, so naturally they are first to be fired," said Jerry Medley, who has been in the executive search business for 30 years. "If a manager or a senior executive is looking at a slate of individuals and has to let one of them go, chances are he or she will not let the person go that they spend a lot of time with at the country club or similar places."

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