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The Impact of the COVID-19 Recession on the Jobs and Incomes of Persons of Color Jared Bernstein and Janelle Jones1

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The Impact of the COVID-19 Recession on the Jobs and Incomes of Persons of Color Jared Bernstein and Janelle Jones1 May 13, 2020 The Impact of the COVID-19 Recession on the Jobs and Incomes of Persons of Color Jared Bernstein and Janelle Jones1 The health response to the coronavirus has unquestionably caused one of the deepest economic downturns in our history. This current recession began with alarming speed in March of this year, as measures to contain the virus required the shutting down of huge swaths of commerce, both here and abroad. In just six weeks, the number of layoffs, proxied by the increase in claims filed for Unemployment Insurance, spiked by over 30 million. For context, consider that over the full Great Recession, payrolls declined by 9 million. The most recent national jobs report, as of this writing, revealed a magnitude of payroll job losses—over 20 million in one month (April)—for which there exists no historical context. Though the April jobs report showed huge losses for all workers, regardless of race or ethnicity, history is clear that different groups experience downturns with significantly differing intensities.2 By design, certain groups of workers and their communities are more exposed to the economic pain of recession in general, as their jobs and incomes are inherently less secure and they’re less likely to have the necessary savings to fall back on. In this unique recession, wherein conditions have deteriorated so quickly, this absence of insulation is particularly threatening the well-being of economically vulnerable households and communities. Who are these highly exposed populations? Certainly, race and ethnicity are key determinants, as our research is clear that on every indicator of economic wellbeing, racial and ethnic minorities have larger-than-average responses to overall indicators, meaning indicators of labor-market slack, like unemployment or employment rates, deteriorate faster and further for people of color, and, depending on the strength of the recovery, can take longer to make up lost ground. But we also want to be careful to emphasize that the groups on which we focus in this report have long faced high inequality, diminished mobility, and persistently slack labor markets, well before COVID-19 1 Bernstein is a senior fellow, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (views in this report do not necessary reflect those of the Center). Jones is the Managing Director of Policy and Research at Groundwork CollaBorative. We thank Kathleen Bryant for data, analysis, editing, and formatting help. 2 Jared Bernstein, “The US job market catches the virus and crashes,” On the Economy: Jared Bernstein Blog, May 8th, 2020, http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-us-job-market-catches-the-virus-and-crashes/. arrived here. Structural racism has amplified the health and economic consequences of the current crisis on persons of color, but all those pressures predate the virus. Though the recently ended expansion began quite weakly in terms of job and wage growth, the labor market eventually tightened up considerably, and before the crisis, it was closing in on full employment. As various papers by Bernstein et al and others have shown, persistently tight labor markets were lifting helping less advantaged workers, boosting the pay of lower-paid workers and pulling non-workers, disproportionately persons of color, in from the sidelines.3 Now, as near-full- employment conditions quickly unwind, these workers face a very steep risk of losing any gains they’ve made and potentially being relegated back to the sidelines of the labor market. In fact, this is precisely what is predicted by forecasts we share below. Our key findings are based on historical relationships between overall slack measures, mostly unemployment, and those of workers by race and ethnicity. We find: ● It took 10 years for the African American employment rate for “prime-age” workers (25-54) to climb 10 points, from 66 to 76 percent. Our forecast is that these gains will fully evaporate this year.4 ● We expect Black unemployment to peak at about 30 percent and Black underemployment at about 42 percent. The comparable rates for Hispanic workers are 22 and 41. ● Because of their amplified response to the ups and downs in the business cycle, racial gaps in labor market variables narrow and widen in expansions and recessions. We expect the gaps caused by the current recession to be the largest on record. ● Real incomes fall most quickly for low relative to higher-income workers in downturns, but the declines are steepest for low-income workers of color. ● In the past downturns we example, the real earnings of low-income African Americans fell twice as fast as all low-income workers, driven mostly by the decline in their share working. ● Our simulation of the change in low-income black earnings predicts that their annual earnings will fall at least 35 percent relative their actual 2018 level, almost fully reversing the gains that group made over the last expansion. These forecasted losses must be avoided though targeted monetary and fiscal policies. Providing relief to those hurt most deeply and quickly by the recession will not only provide them and their families with essential material comforts. It will help the near and longer-term recovery. In the near term, relief to income-constrained families has high “multiplier effects” as these recipients spend the extra money, generating more economic activity than would otherwise occur. In the longer-term, helping displaced workers quickly get back into the job market pushes back on potential “hysteresis” or scarring effects, meaning a lasting deterioration in their marketable skills which takes them out of the nation’s labor supply, reducing the potential growth rate. 3 Jared Bernstein and Keith Bentele, “Got Work? The Highly Responsive Labor Supply of Low-Income, Prime-Age Workers,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, updated December 13, 2019, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full- employment/got-work-the-highly-responsive-labor-supply-of-low-income-prime-age-workers. 4 We mostly analyze quarterly data through 2020q1, so we do not capture April’s historically awful jobs report, but our forecast appears to have been born out in the report. This report proceeds by looking at the extent to which vulnerable groups have been disproportionately hurt in past downturns, and uses that information to make at least rough predictions, given the uncertainty associated with the virus and its containment, as to what to expect in the next few quarters and years. We then turn to the implied policy agenda, focusing on monetary and fiscal policies designed to offset the damage we see coming. Finally, we build out this agenda not just to address the challenges posed by the virus and the current downturn, but to ensure that the groups that are the focus of our analysis have a much better chance of achieving lasting economic justice on the other side of the crisis. The goal is to build a policy architecture that provides long term economic stability and is far more robust than the current one to market failures, racial injustices, weak demand, climate degradation, as well as pandemics. Groups with high-beta response rates A recent paper by Aaronson et al (2019) examined “high-beta responses” by various groups to changes in economic conditions.5 That is, it is a regularity in many economic statistics that ups and downs in the business cycle are amplified for some groups over others. As Sam Fullwood III wrote in 2015:6 “There’s an old saying in some African American communities that is often applied to the broad- stroke disparity of nation’s economy: when white folks catch a cold, Black folks get pneumonia.” The table below shows some simple examples of such correlations. The entries in the table represent the coefficient (called “beta” in statistical jargon) on an overall economic indicator, with different racial and ethnic indicators as the dependent variable. For example, the 1.8 coefficient for African Americans means that a one-percentage-point increase in the overall unemployment rate is associated with a 1.8 point increase for Black people. For Hispanic workers, the comparable coefficient is 1.4. But for white people, the coefficient is 0.9, a “low-beta” (i.e., less than 1) response.7 5 Stephanie R. Aaronson, William L. Wascher, Mary C. Daly, David W. Wilcox, “Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy?”, Brookings papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/wp- content/uploads/2019/03/Aaronson_web.pdf. 6 Sam Fulwood III, “When White Folks Catch a Cold, Black Folks Get Pneumonia,” Center for American Progress, January 28, 2015, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2015/01/28/105551/when-whites-folks-catch- a-cold-Black-folks-get-pneumonia/. 7 Note: “Latino” generally refers to people whose origins are geographically located in Latin America, while “Hispanic” is not tied to geography but rather refers to those who have Spanish-speaking origins. In the Current Population Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics asks respondents to self-identify as “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” (this is asked in a single question). TABLE 1 Responses to 1 percentage-point change in the overall rate Unemployment Black people Hispanic People White People All 1.81 1.40 0.91 HS* 1.61 1.28 1.04 College* 0.83 0.63 0.45 Underemployment 1.31 1.39 0.85 Emp rate, 25-54 1.34 0.60 0.93 *The overall unemployment rate is the regressor in these regressions, not the overall rate for that education group. Education by race data run from 1992. Underemployment and employment rate data start in 1994. Note: Table entries are coefficients from regression of the race/ethnic rates on a constant and the overall rate. The rest of the table looks at variations of these relationships for different subgroups.
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