A “Now Hiring” sign is displayed during a job fair for Hispanic professionals in Miami, Florida.
Marco Bello | Bloomberg | beautiful pictures
The unemployment rate among Hispanic workers fell sharply in September, but that may be because fewer qualified adults are looking for work.
Hispanic workers saw their unemployment rate drop to 3.8% from 4.5% in August. Breaking down by sex, the unemployment rate fell to 3.2% among Hispanic men over the age of 20 and 3.6% among women.
The decline was much larger than the decline at the national level. The government said the overall unemployment rate fell to 3.5% from 3.7% in August, the lowest level since July. A total of 263,000 jobs were created last month, less than expected. Dow Jones report is 275,000.
But Hispanics have seen a sharp drop in labor force participation, which tracks the number of people employed or looking for work. It fell to 66.1% from 66.8% in August, showing that fewer and fewer people are looking for work or are looking for work as the employment-to-population ratio that tracks the ratio of the employed population declines. 63.5%.
“That drop from 4.5 per cent in August to 3.8 per cent, while really significant,” said Michelle Holder, a distinguished senior fellow at the Center for Equitable Growth in Washington. must be remedied by the obvious fact that Latinx workers have withdrawn from the workforce.” Many Hispanic workers seek work in certain parts of the market that have been hit hard by the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, she added.
Lea ester articulo en eit’s spañol.
While Hispanic workers saw the largest month-on-month decline, she noted that Black women still had the biggest drop in labor force participation since the pandemic began.
William Spriggs, chief economist for the AFL-CIO, said: “While the drop in participation is a cause for concern, areas of the labor market where Hispanic workers are in the majority have already been in the majority. posted significant gains in September, noted William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO. Those sectors include entertainment, hospitality and construction, where payrolls increased by 83,000 and 19,000 respectively.
But those numbers don’t come without their flip side, he said.
“This is worrisome because it means Hispanic workers are having great difficulty moving money out of their pockets and the big story of this recovery is the success of women and black workers escape the trap of only working in low-wage industries”. he say.
The job market volatility tends to show up first among Black and Hispanic workers, Spriggs said, noting that the unemployment rate among Black workers is falling and the labor force participation rate is low. The labor force increased after two months due to the trend of increasing unemployment and decreasing participation rate.
“The good news for black workers is that in many ways it is wiped out for Hispanic workers,” he said.
To be sure, Valerie Wilson, the Economic Policy Institute’s program director on race, ethnicity and the economy, said individuals should stop drawing firm conclusions from one-month data.
Volatility is common in monthly reports and requires several consecutive periods of a similar move before one can infer a trend.
“It is still difficult to understand whether we are seeing volatility in this series because it has a smaller sample size,” says Wilson.
– CNBC’s Gabriel Cortes contributed reporting.
