The job market has been declining for a while due to multiple factors affecting various industries and groups of people. Since the pandemic, the job market has yet to recover from the massive closure of small businesses and corporate jobs, resulting in budget cuts that have led to many people losing their jobs. While many pivot to becoming entrepreneurs, starting new careers, or going back to school, the majority are unemployed with no hope in sight.
Currently, nearly 300,000 Black women have left the U.S. labor force. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor data, 106,000 Black women working for federal agencies were fired. Their labor force participation rate has now dropped below that of Latinas for the first time in over a year. And more than 518,000 Black women still haven’t returned to the labor force since the pandemic began, leaving their real unemployment rate just above 10 percent.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website, unemployment skyrocketed to 15 percent in 2020. Now, while it has steadily decreased over time (currently at 4 percent), many people, especially those from minority groups, are still disproportionately affected, as the rollback of DEI policies have affected Black women the hardest.
Everything started when President Trump and his wing man, Elon Musk, laid off thousands of federal employees. Dante DeAntonio, labor economist for Moody’s Analytics, told FOX Business that the firings will be high. “We estimate that about 100,000 federal workers have already been laid off or have accepted the deferred buyout offered by the Trump administration,” DeAntonio explained. “The approximately 75,000 workers who agreed to the deferred buyout are supposed to be paid through September, so their impact on the labor market will be delayed. About 25,000 federal workers have been laid off or put on administrative leave, with a layoff likely to follow.”
DeAntonio added, “These numbers are almost certain to grow in the coming weeks and months, and we will start to see the impact of these layoffs, first in unemployment insurance claims data, and later, they will result in slower payroll employment growth.” This has resulted in 300,000 federal employees losing their jobs.
“Total employment in the United States is 160 million, with 7 million unemployed. Also, about 5 million people change jobs every month. In that context, 300,000 federal jobs lost is not much,” Torsten Slok, a partner and chief economist at Apollo Global Management, explained. “However, studies show that for every federal employee, there are two contractors. As a result, layoffs could potentially be closer to 1 million.”
According to a New York Times tracker of federal job cuts, the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services (HHS) have experienced some of the largest cuts. The Department of Education has been reduced by 46 percent, while HHS has decreased by 24 percent.
During these mass layoffs, Trump aimed to eliminate DEI in its entirety, which also aided the mass layoffs of federal agents, resulting in a 46 percent decrease in staff, with 40 percent belonging to minority communities.
According to the Pew Research Center, Black people account for about 18.6 percent of the federal workforce—well above their 12.8 percent share of the overall U.S. labor force. In states such as Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland, Louisiana, and the District of Columbia, African Americans represent more than 30 percent of the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The current administration appears to be doing everything in its power to cripple women, especially Black women. Historically the federal government appeared to have made strides for Black people as a whole. “The federal government has been crucial to stepping up for a segment of Black America,” said Marcus Casey, an economist at the University of Illinois Chicago. “It offered a pathway to white-collar work, skill-building, and future opportunities that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.” In modern times, since Trump has taken office, data suggests otherwise.
The impact of Trump’s D.E.I. purge continues to reverberate through families, careers, and communities once buoyed by stable government employment. “We did what we were supposed to do,” Sherrell Pyatt, who worked across five federal agencies over more than a decade and was dismissed from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in March, along with nearly 150 others, said in a ProPublica article.
While the current national average unemployment rate stands at 4.1 percent, the rate for Black women hovers nearly two percentage points higher. It’s also three percentage points higher than that of White women. The unemployment rate for Black women was 5.1 percent in March, 6.1 percent in April, 6.2 percent in May, and 5.8 percent in June.
“If we look at the various industries, we know that Black women are overrepresented; considering their proportion of the U.S. population, they’re overrepresented in health care jobs, and we see this increase between May and June of jobs involved in health care and particularly in caretaking of elderly people,” said Kristen Broady, senior economist, advisor, and director of the Economic Mobility Project at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57 percent white men compared with 4.4 percent Black women.
Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers’ case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, “harm the American people.”
“It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, and the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,” he said. “This is a lose-lose.”
For the last 20 years, the unemployment rate for Black women has remained 2.2 percentage points higher than the national average.
“I think a good question is who is making the decisions in terms of terminations, and how are those decisions being made, and what is the criteria for those decisions?” Brian Thompson, clinical professor of economics at DePaul University. Said. “If those decisions are made based on objective information, performance data, and so forth, I think it becomes much easier to kind of digest the information. But if it’s more subjective, they’re not necessarily accountable for how those decisions are made. I think that’s where a bigger concern lies.”
This problem already contributes to the growing racial wealth disparity that has Black families at the bottom of the class hierarchy. “The racial wealth gap is not determined by just one thing,” Broady said. “Changing or improving just one of those things is not going to change the racial wealth gap. But policymakers can look at any of those facts and statistics to decide how they can collaborate across different groups, philanthropy, higher education, state and local government, etc., to work on those policies.”
Issues like unemployment contribute to disproportionate wealth and economic mobility for Black and Latino households. Data from the Federal Reserve System shows that between 2019 and 2022, the median wealth for White households was $285,000. It was $62,000 for Latino households and $44,890 for Black households—an increase from $27,970.