March 10, 2006
A Cold February for White Workers
[See also Paul Craig
Roberts:
Jobs Update: More
Jobs For Bartenders, As Factory Workers Lose Jobs]
Bone chilling cold and a crippling
northeastern snowstorm couldn’t derail the American
Job Machine last month. Payroll employment rose by a
better-than expected 248,000, while the unemployment
crept up to 4.8 percent from a five-year low of 4.7
percent in January.
The
"other" employment
survey, based on households rather than
businesses, shows that those job gains were—to put it
mildly—skewed. Total employment grew 183,000 in February
according to the Household Survey, distributed as
follows:
When you add these numbers up, you
get a figure that differs from the total job growth.
This is because Hispanics are counted twice, first as
Hispanic, and then as whites, blacks, or Asians. We
usually compare Hispanic to non-Hispanic job growth to
avoid that double counting.
But with Hispanic employment up,
and white employment down, one thing is certain: white
non-Hispanics are losing ground. They are the only major
racial group to experience job loss in February.
Blacks and
Asians (including the Hispanics among them) garnered
virtually all the new jobs created last month.
Because so many Hispanics are
immigrants and the children of immigrants, Hispanic
employment is the best proxy we have for the impact of
immigration on employment. The ratio of Hispanic to
non-Hispanic employment growth is a strong indication of
how foreign-born workers fare relative to native-born
workers in a particular month.
Hispanics received only about 7
percent of the jobs created last month, considerably
less than their 13.6 percent share of the labor force.
This was a surprisingly strong showing given the fact
that so many Hispanic occupations involve
outdoor work. [See
Looking (in vain) for "Jobs Americans Won’t Do"]
In January, which was abnormally warm, 94 percent of new
jobs went to Hispanics.
Hispanic job growth is hardly a
seasonal phenomenon, however. Since the start of the
Bush Administration (January 2001) through February
2006:
