by James Parks, Feb 27, 2011
Assaults on public employees’ right to bargain for a better life hurt all working people. But blacks are being hit especially hard. Black unemployment was 15.7 percent in January, compared with a national rate of 9 percent. Calls to slash the freedom of public employees could hit black job seekers especially hard because so many blacks are public employees.
In a Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, says these attacks are already dealing a sharp blow to the black middle class.
