US Black Jobless Rate Remains Above 6 Percent

The economy added 201,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate stayed at an extraordinarily low 3.9%. But black Americans have a rate that was 62% above the national rate, or 6.2%, 247WallSt.com reported. The black unemployment rate was 5.9% in May and has been above 6% since then. Granted, the rate was 7.9% in August 2017. However, the ratio to the national rate has changed very little. The comparison is even starker when measured against two other groups. The unemployment rate for white Americans was 3.4% in August. For Asian Americans, the number was 3%. The summary of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data for August: The total number of unemployed persons was at 6.2 million. Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.5%), adult women (3.6%), teenagers (12.8%), Whites (3.4%), Blacks (6.3%), Asians (3%), and Hispanics (4.7%) showed little or no change in August. Both the labor force participation rate, at 62.7%, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.3%, declined by 0.2 percentage point in August.