Tight Labor Market Creates Rising Tide For Almost All Boats; New Doors Open for Minorities, Others
The nation's economic boom continues to produce jobs for some groups, such as minorities and persons with limited education, who have had far more trouble finding them in the past, the Labor Department reported yesterday.</br></br>The overall U.S. jobless rate inched up to 4.3 percent last month, but the rate among blacks fell to 7.3 percent, the lowest since separate figures for blacks were first published in 1972.</br></br>Fifteen months ago, in April 1998, the national unemployment rate was the same as last month, 4.3 percent, and the rate for blacks was 9 percent. While the national rate has barely changed during that period, joblessness among blacks has fallen sharply.</br></br>Among whites, unemployment last month was 3.8 percent, less than half the rate for blacks. But the figure was hardly changed from the 3.7 percent rate of April 1998.</br></br>A strong demand for workers and the shrinking pool of unemployed workers has led many firms to hire -- and often to train -- people with less education and fewer skills that they had insisted upon in the past. As a result, incomes of workers in the bottom fifth of the income distribution have been rising significantly for the first time in decades after adjusting for inflation.