The robust job market of the 1990s eased the way for millions of African-Americans to join the middle class, and Barbara Mitchell was among them.
The South Side native landed a customer-service job with a telecommunications company, and for many years, she thrived, earning $51,000 at her peak. When her job was eliminated in a restructuring, she took a company transfer to a different, lower-paying position in Wisconsin to stay employed. Ultimately, the job was a poor fit, she said, and fearing termination, she opted for an early retirement.
Mitchell assumed she would be well-positioned for another customer-service post, but more than a year later, at age 57, she's living in a subsidized apartment on the Near West Side with no job, no medical insurance and almost no remaining retirement savings.
"I pray, I stay prayerful," said Mitchell, who is trying out for a part-time phone sales job this week. "The recession will never take me back to where I've been."
The cold fact, however, is that this deep recession is hitting African-Americans more severely than the overall population, due largely to the staggering levels of unemployment for this segment of the population.
When October unemployment data come out Friday, the nation's seasonally adjusted rate is expected to nudge upward, close to 10 percent. But among African-Americans, the jobless rate was 15.5 percent in September. In Illinois, the black unemployment rate was closer to 18.6 percent in the third quarter, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.
For black teens nationwide, the rate was 40.8 percent in September.
The United States historically has seen higher unemployment rates for minorities, but the gap has widened in this recession, in part because of job losses in the manufacturing and auto sectors. And the jobless growth, coupled with the predatory lending that flourished in segregated neighborhoods during the real estate boom, have led to dramatic spikes in mortgage foreclosures, sending home values into a downward spiral. The bottom line: A silent depression for African-Americans.
"The untold story is that between unemployment, a significant drop in property values, the wave of foreclosures and a lack of credit, there is a whole generation of African-American wealth that is disappearing," said Jean Pogge, executive vice president of ShoreBank, which operates in many minority communities across the city and is under financial pressure itself due to loan losses.
"The traditional way Americans have acquired wealth and gotten into the middle class is through buying a home and building equity in that home," she said, "and a lot of that has been wiped out by the recession."
Robert Williams, a 38-year-old who made more than $50,000 a year training travel agents, is among those who have come perilously close to losing a home due to a layoff.
The South Shore condo owner had sought a modification of his mortgage terms earlier this year after his employer had cut salaries and hours. And then he was laid off altogether in May, derailing his mortgage negotiations with ShoreBank.
"I was preparing myself mentally that there was a 90 percent chance I'd lose my place ... and I'd be out searching for someplace to live," Williams said. "It stresses you out. You don't want to spend 50 cents on a pack of gum, it got to be that bad."
ShoreBank was able to get him a modified mortgage through the Obama administration program launched in March, reducing his monthly payment to $468 from the original $1,150.
The disparity in the unemployment rates for whites and blacks has grown since the recession started in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a study by Algernon Austin, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
The national white rate increased by 3.8 percentage points, to 7.8 percent in the second quarter of this year, while the black rate rose by 6.1 percentage points, to 14.7 percent, the highest of any major racial or ethnic group.
African-American workers "have a relatively high representation in manufacturing and the auto industry, and those industries have been hit pretty hard," Austin said.
As well, "black workers tend to be younger and lower-ranked in organizations," he said. "And both factors make it more likely that when layoffs come, you're going to be laid off."
That factor also makes African-American workers more vulnerable to having their hours cut.
"I'm at the bottom so it's hard for me to get any days -- I have no seniority," said Chanel Hall, 22, a room attendant at a downtown convention hotel who has seen her shifts cut back as the travel business has slowed.
She expects to make about $20,000 this year, about two-thirds of what she would make if she had a full schedule. She recently took out a $400 high-interest payday loan so she could pay bills and the rent on her apartment in the Washington Park neighborhood on the South Side. And she's searching for a second job.
"I've had no call-backs," said Hall, who has been looking since September.
The landscape is so bleak that some laid-off workers are using this time as a sort of sabbatical, living off unemployment while they go back to school or into training programs.
Shawan McDonald, an unemployed machinist, is learning to program and run computerized milling and lathing equipment in a training program run by the Jane Addams Resource Corp.
"I hope by March that I will be able to work, that it will be a more stable situation and I will not be walking on eggshells," said McDonald, a 40-year-old Edgewater resident.
The climb to recovery may be a tougher one for African-Americans, particularly because unemployment is expected to continue rising into next year.
"If history is our judge, I think it will take longer," ShoreBank's Pogge said. "African-Americans tend to be the last hired, and there has been this incredible decline in property values in African-American communities that is going to take years to recover.
"People have decimated their savings just to survive, and that needs to be rebuilt. It's a pretty serious situation."
Barbara Mitchell, the unemployed customer-service employee, worked part of the past year as a hostess at a quick-serve restaurant in Wisconsin before moving back to Chicago to care for sick family members. Now she applies for three to four jobs a day, attends job fairs and networks with friends.
"I do believe it will get better, and if it doesn't, I will go to Ready Maid, any kind of day labor," she said over a cup of coffee at a Loop cafe. "I will go to any length to find employment."
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