53% of Milwaukees Black Men are Unemployed

More than half of Milwaukee’s black men were out of work in 2009, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
At 53.3 percent, black male joblessness in 2009 was nearly two-and-a-half times the rate of joblessness for white Milwaukee-area males (22.3 percent) between the ages of 16 and 64, according to UWM’s Center for Economic Development.

Milwaukee’s jobless rate for black men is second only two Detroit, and the Milwaukee metro area ranks first in the racial disparity of jobless rates among the nation’s top 40 urban areas.
“Not only does joblessness among black men in 2009 show a substantial increase — 13.4 percent from just the previous year — but since 1970, the black male jobless rate in Milwaukee has more than doubled,” said UWM history professor Marc Levine, who authored the report.
The recent recession is not the only factor to blame, says Levine. Milwaukee’s black men already were plagued by unusually high unemployment.

Census data backs up the report, showing that Milwaukee was the fourth-most impoverished big city in America last year, behind Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo. Levine, who has been tracking unemployment in this group for the last decade, adds that other factors account for the shrinking number of black men actively seeking work — the rise of mass incarceration since 1970 and changes in disability laws that enable men who had been counted as unemployed to be shifted to disability rolls.

In the report he outlines ideas that could help alleviate the ever-worsening unemployment situation for African-American men. Those include:
• Public job creation, including using federal funds for developing “green” jobs.
• Drug policy reform. About 10 percent of Milwaukee’s African-American men not in the work force are in prison, mostly on drug offenses.
• Enhanced job training and placement programs that include an adequately funded prisoner re-entry program.
• Public procurement rules that encourage purchasing from inner-city enterprises that hire African-American men.
• Strategies that give inner city workers better access to suburban jobs.

The Business JournalDate: Monday, October 25, 2010