It is a great pleasure for me to participate in this meeting of the Urban League. Your organization, more than any other, has labored to bring the Negro to economic equality. Today your efforts are meeting a more sympathetic response from American business than before. Attitudes are changing rapidly. The white collar and the managerial ranks of our large enterprises at las tare opening up. The demand for qualified Negroes all of a sudden exceeds the number you are able to find. And Whitney Young's radical call of just two years ago, asking American business not just to be an equal opportunity employer, but to actively recruit and develop Negro applicants, has come to be widely accepted. The recent research report of The National Industrial Conference Board on Negro Employment, containing 35 company case studies, shows that companies can make progress if they wish to make employment available to Negroes, and many companies at last have the wish to open their doors to opportunity.
I am an economist. I cannot advise the Urban League how to enlist greater employer cooperation or how to speed the training of Negroes for better jobs. Instead, at this point of break-through in job opuportunities let me give you an economist's perspective, some qutantitative indication of the task to be met before economic equality can be a reality.
Recent Economic Progress
After eight years of excessive unemployment for the nation as a whole, the economy has once again achieved a state of general prosperity. The national unemployment rate has been at 4% or less every month this year and unemployment is very likely to fall further in the coming months. Negro unemployment rates continue to move parallel to the national rates, but at twice the level. While national unemployment fell from 6.7 percent in 1961 to 3.8 percent in the first five months of this year, the Negro unemployment rate fell from 12.5 percent to 7.2 percent.
The unemployment rates of particular categories of Negro workers also moved parellel to the corresponding categories of all workers. The unemployment rate for adult Negro men fell from 11.7 percent to less than 5 percent, paralleling the national decline of 5.7 percent to 2.5 percent. Only the rate for teenagers does not parallel the white experience. It hardly fell in the five year interval and remains close to 25 percent. The white teenage rate did fall somewhat, but still remains high, abou t12 percent. The reason for these dispartities has not yet been fully identified. The great increase in numbers is certainly one factor. In June of this year, almost 2 million more teenagers were working than three years earlier, including an extra 163,000 Negro teenagers. And the continued heavy migration of Negroes from rural to urban areas converts the disguised unemployment of low productivity agricultural labor into the open unemployment of the city.
The structuralist theories which maintained that general prosperity would do little good for many categories of workers because they were unfit to hold jobs in the rapidly advancing technology, can now be dismissed, at least in their extreme forms. Every category of unemployment has responded to prosperity and will continue to do so. But now that that battle has been won and the general slack in the economy virtually eliminated, it becomes even more urgent to look more closely at the unemployment which remains even in good times. So let me talk today not about the common economic theme of the benefits of general prosperity, but rather about the longer term issues of overcoming the barriers to full economic equality.
Full Economic Equality
The ultimate economic goal for Negroes is full equality. From the point of view of employment I interpret this to mean that Negro workers are represented close to proportionately in the major occupations and professions. Of course, it does not require that Negroes represent exactly the same percentage in every type of profession and every skill; no such uniformity is found among other groups in American society, and differences will inevitably develop because of the uneven geographic distribution of the Negro labor force, and different degrees of interest in various kinds of work. But in terms of broadly defined occupational categories, the sort on which our national employment statistics are organized, a reosonable uniformity is a condition of full equality.
This is a very ambitious goal, and one which will surely not be reached in our lifetime. But it can provide a useful target, as a measure of the gap between Negro aspiration and achievement, of the task remaining to be done.
Let me therefore give you the results of a statistical exercise which reveals these tagrets for true Negro economic equality. (I use Negro and nonwhite interchangeably in this discussion. The figures are for all nonwhites; Negroes are over 4/5 of all nonwhites, and the figures are representative for them.)
Let us begin by looking at the present situation (see Table 1).
TABLE 1 Source: Joe L. Russell, "Changing Patterns in Employment of Nonwhite Workers," Monthly Labor Review, May, 1966. The immense over-representation of Negroes in the unskilled and service categories is of course well known. Although Negroes constituted only 10.7 percent of total unemployment in 1965, they are 26.3 percent of all service workers, 43.6 percent of all private household workers and 25.6 percent of all laborers. On the other hand they are dramatically under-represented in the more attractive occupations. They are only 5.9 percent of all professional and technical workers, 2.8 percent of managers and proprietors, 3.1 percent of all sales people, 5.7 percent of all clerical workers, and 5.6 percent of all skilled craftsmen. While these figures are a distburbing measure of the extent of economic inequality, they are a considerable improvement over just seven years ago. Comparing 1965 with 1958, the percentage Read more in News
