Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: The Latino Experience In The Recession & Recovery.

Although they have steadily increased in number, Latinos in the U.S. labor force have yet to recover from the effects of the 2001 recession, lagging non-Hispanic Whites in restoring employment growth and the unemployment rate to their pre-recession levels. Immigrants and young Latinos have encountered particularly hard times while college-educated Hispanics experienced substantial improvements in employment levels.

These are among the key findings of a new Pew Hispanic Center report on the labor market experience of Latino workers since the economic slowdown began at the end of 2000. The report examines a variety of trends in employment, unemployment and
wage rates for both Hispanics and non-Hispanics and explores outcomes by industry, occupation, geographic region, age, nativity and education.

The Pew Hispanic Center is a project of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. It was founded in 2001 with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Center conducts non-partisan research that aims at improving understanding of the Hispanic population.

“The economic slowdown has had similar effects on Latinos and non-Latinos in many ways, but the distinctive characteristics of the Hispanic work force, such as the fact that it continues to grow rapidly and that it is concentrated in certain niches of the economy, have produced some particularly difficult setbacks,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Center. “The last few years have been especially hard on this population because it is streaming new workers into a very tough labor market.

“Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: the Latino Experience in the Recession and Recovery” was written by Rakesh Kochhar, a veteran economist who is senior research associate at the Center. The report relies on new tabulations of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau to explain how changes in the economy have affected Latino workers, focusing on the two years from the end of 2000 to the end of 2002.

A key characteristic of the Latino labor force is that it has continued to grow in size through the recession and the aftermath due to immigration and the steady flow of native-born youth reaching working age. Meanwhile, population and labor force growth among non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks have been at a virtual standstill. While all groups have seen their employment growth fall below potential during the slowdown, the report finds that the shortfall is larger for Hispanics than for non-Hispanics.

Latinos are the principal source of new workers to the economy, and demographic growth was powerful enough to produce increases in the number of employed Latinos even while the number of employed non-Hispanics declined. The report, however,
estimates that Hispanic employment is more than 500,000 workers below its potential level because of the effects of the slowdown, a shortfall equivalent to 3.5 percent of the Latino workforce. Non-Hispanic employment is estimated at 3 million workers below its potential, a gap equivalent of 2.5 percent of employment.

While employment growth for non-Hispanic Whites has returned to its prerecession level, the growth rates for both Hispanics and non-Hispanic Blacks have not fully rebounded. The rate of growth in real wages is somewhat lower for Hispanics than for non-Hispanic Whites and considerably lower for non-Hispanic Blacks. The report concludes that full recovery for Latinos and non-Hispanic Blacks is probably farther away than for non-Hispanic Whites.

Other major findings include:

• More than half of the immigrant Latino workers added to the labor force during the slowdown failed to find employment. The fast-growing Latino second generation—the children of immigrants—scored disproportionately high gains in employment but also suffered the highest rate of unemployment relative to other segments of the Hispanic population.

• Hispanics comprise about 13 percent of the labor force, but were responsible for over 50 percent of the increase in the labor force over the two-year period covered by this study.

• The largest gains in employment for Latinos occurred in the Midwest. Meanwhile non-Hispanic Whites did best in the Northeast and non-Hispanic Blacks fared better in the South than other regions.

• Overall, Hispanics and non-Hispanics tended to gain and lose jobs in the same industries and occupations, but there were some exceptions. The major occupations in which Hispanics gained jobs while non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks lost jobs are precision production, craft, and repair, and sales occupations.

• Gains for one group of workers did not always take place in the same geographic region as the losses for another group. For example, employment in construction, and business and auto repair services for Hispanics went up principally in the West, while non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks lost employment in these industries mostly in the Midwest.

• The economic slowdown decreased the rate of growth in real wages for all groups of workers. However, real mean weekly wages for Hispanics increased by a total of 2.5 percent between 2000 and 2002, somewhat less than the 2.9 percent gain for non-Hispanic Whites. The real mean weekly wage of non-Hispanic Blacks fell by 0.5 percent during the same time period.

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