Government Job Cuts Threaten Black Middle Class

Enlarge this image toggle caption Andrew Harrier/Bloomberg via Getty Images Andrew Harrier/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The planned downsizing of the U.S. Postal Service, which wants to shed thousands of jobs and reduce hours at post offices, struck Baltimore native Eric Easter at his core.

For him, it will mark the end of an era in which a post office job has meant stability and a path to a better life, as it did for him and his six siblings living in public housing in the 1960s.

"You hate to see that disappear," says the 49-year-old Easter, now a documentary filmmaker and producer, who describes his mother's hiring at the post office as a defining moment in his childhood.

"It meant moving to a nicer neighborhood, sort of establishing that I have a place in the world," Easter says. "I remember my mom having cocktail parties, and she and her co-workers could hold their heads up among teachers and other folks as people who had taken solid positions in the middle class."

Rivaled only by the manufacturing industry, postal and other government jobs built the modern black middle class.

Blacks are 30 percent more likely than nonblacks to work in the public sector, according to the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education. And roughly 21 percent of black workers are public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of nonblacks.

A Crumbling 'Pillar' Of The Black Middle Class

But government jobs, long considered the most secure form of employment in America, have rapidly disappeared since the start of the last recession in December 2007 — particularly at the state and local levels, where officials have cut budgets to cope with declining tax revenues and the rising costs of unemployment benefits, employee pensions and Medicare.

Public Sector Job Growth

Government has shed 2.6 percent of its jobs over the past three years, marking the greatest reduction in history, according to the nonprofit Roosevelt Institute, a progressive-leaning organization. Roughly 265,000 workers were shed from all levels of government last year, after about 221,000 job cuts in 2010.

"Most government jobs have good pay and benefits and are probably what we would consider a good foundation for middle-class incomes, so any loss of government jobs is going to disproportionately hit the middle class," says Howard University research scientist Roderick Harrison. "The black population, which is more dependent on government for middle-class job opportunities, is going to be more heavily hit."

Public Sector Vs. Private Sector Job Growth

Though the recession has ended, government job losses continue to be one of the most powerful drags on the economic recovery.

In April, private employers added 130,000 jobs, but that growth was partially undermined by the loss of 15,000 government jobs. As a result, the net growth of 115,000 jobs fell well below most economists' projections and was down from March's revised 154,000 jobs added. The unemployment rate dropped slightly, to 8.1 percent.

After the civil rights gains of the 1960s opened opportunities in government, blacks began a steady move into local, state and federal government, particularly in civil servant and teaching positions. And since the collapse of U.S. manufacturing, the public sector has been the biggest employer for African-Americans.

Beyond the jobs themselves, their relatively competitive pay scales have lifted generations of blacks into the middle class. Berkeley's labor center found that among industries that pay blacks the highest wages, the biggest proportion of those blacks work in the public sector.

The earnings gap between whites and blacks, which exists in all industries, is the narrowest in government, the Berkeley research has shown.

For every dollar earned by white government workers, black women in government earn 89 cents and black men earn 80 cents. Overall, black women earn 85 cents and black men earn 74 cents for every dollar earned by whites.

Cuts Trigger Resentment

But that security is waning. To express their frustrations about the economy, many African-Americans often invoke an old metaphor, to their chagrin: When everyone else gets the sniffles, we catch the flu. April's jobless rates bear out the same, showing unemployment for whites at 7.4 percent, Latinos at 10.3 percent and blacks at 13 percent.

The three pillars of middle class African-American life were the public sector, good manufacturing jobs, and black entrepreneurs that served the black community during segregation.

"The three pillars of middle-class African-American life were the public sector, good manufacturing jobs, and black entrepreneurs that served the black community during segregation," says economist Steven Pitts, who led the Berkeley Center's research. "With the end of segregation, you put pressure on the black entrepreneurs, and then there was the decline in manufacturing. Now we see the erosion of the third pillar —