While U.S. employers added 157,000 jobs during the month of January, the unemployment rate for Latinos rose to 9.7% from December’s 9.6% unemployment rate.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, of the jobs that had the biggest increase in the job market, construction companies added 28,000, followed by retailers adding 33,000 positions, health care with 23,000 jobs, restaurants and hotels adding 17,000 jobs, and manufacturers with 4,000 extra jobs.
Abraham Mosisa, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics feels that even though Latinos had a higher unemployment rate overall, these new additions to the workforce helped Latino employment since these fields show a high number of Latino workers.
“The proportion of Latinos in those sectors is higher than other ethnic and racial groups, so when they do well, there will be a movement in Latino employment,” says Mosisa. “But during the recession, they were hit the hardest – immigrants and minorities were hit harder than whites.”
As previously reported on La Plaza, even though 155,000 jobs were added during the month of December, the unemployment rate hadn’t changed much.
And while the unemployment rate for Latinos has decreased since November 2010, it still remains higher than the pre-recession level.
With the overall U.S. unemployment rate rising from 7.8% to 7.9%, Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at the Conference Board, says that the payroll tax cut last month and lower consumer confidence were factors for the rate to rise.
“The combination of both of them together and overall slow GDP growth that we’ve seen means that employment is probably not going to grow very fast in the next several months,” says Levanon.
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