Nationwide — “African American unemployment is the lowest ever recorded in our country,” President Donald Trump tweeted last Monday. It is true, according to the new report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment fell to 6.8% late 2017 — the lowest ever in 45 years that such data has been recorded. But does the Trump administration deserve all the credit for this improvement?
However, experts agree that the decline in the U.S. unemployment rate is not caused nor triggered by any of Trump’s policies. Instead, it is a collective result of many factors. One is the decision made by an Obama appointee, retiring Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, to suppress interest rates. Another factor is the mass hiring of U.S. employers under the Obama administration that gave jobs to over 2 million workers in 7 consecutive years. In 2014 and 2015 alone, the economy also gained a whopping 5.7 million jobs.
“The data and the evidence clearly show that the recovery of employment was well underway before President Trump took office,” Valerie Wilson, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, told in an interview.
The decline in Black unemployment rate is also considered to be caused by several factors that date decades ago. This includes the growth of college-educated African Americans and years of steady hiring and economic growth. Another factor is the U.S. employers tending to hire a more diverse pool of candidates in a tight labor market.
Despite this development, African American unemployment rate is still around twice the rate for whites, which is 3.7%. And it is still significantly higher than the overall unemployment rate. It just goes to show that the historical discrimination and disadvantages are yet indisputable in the labor industry.