Coronavirus Causes First U.S. Layoffs, More Likely To Come + Study Says African-Americans Are POORER Today Compared To Five Years Ago

The Coronavirus has caused the first layoffs in the United States and now, hundreds of people are out of a job. Deets on which companies have laid people off, plus the new study that claims African-Americans are poorer today than they were five years ago. Everything inside…

 

It's not enough that our anxiety is at 200 strictly because of the health aspect of this Coronavirus.  But the devastation to our pockets and the economy is predicted to be far worse than the devastation to our health. Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has a pandemic:

 

BREAKING

"We have therefore made the assessment that #COVID19 can be characterized as a pandemic"-@DrTedros #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/JqdsM2051A

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 11, 2020

 

Since then, everything is shutting down – the sports world has come to a complete halt, Disneyland in California has closed, major festivals are being postponed (i.e. SXSW), school systems across the country and being shut down, Broadway has been shut down, colleges have shut down and move to online learning. Everything is shutting down. So, naturally, the economy is affected when small businesses like restaurants or stores don't have customers and artists and teachers aren't at work.  The hourly wage workers also are going to be a hard hit group.

Here are the first set of jobs that have been snatched from citizens (via MSN):

At the Port of Los Angeles, 145 drivers have been laid off and others have been sent home without pay as massive ships from China stopped arriving and work dried up. At travel agencies in Atlanta and Los Angeles, several workers lost their jobs as bookings evaporated. Christie Lites, a stage-lighting company in Orlando, laid off more than 100 of its 500 workers nationwide this past week and likely will lay off 150 more, according to chief executive Huntly Christie. Meanwhile a hotel in Seattle is closing an entire department, a former employee said, and as many as 50 people lost their jobs after the South by Southwest festival in Austin got canceled.

Many job losses have been concentrated in the travel, tourism, events and trucking industries. Economists fear more layoffs in the coming weeks as supply chains come to a halt and people stay home and spend less.

“We will definitely see an effect on jobs from the coronavirus, and it could be pretty large in leisure and hospitality,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at ZipRecruiter. “The first thing we’ll see is a reduction in hours. We hear many reports of employers canceling staff everywhere except in health care.”

It doesn’t end there either:

Monday in Los Angeles, Sam Creighton and about 20 colleagues were fired from the China Visa Service Center. Creighton helped Americans get travel documents to China, but business plummeted as groups and individuals canceled trips to Asia out of virus fear. The company processed around 400 visas a month; in February, that number fell to 22. The visa center did not return a request for comment.

Baiden King lost her job at a bake shop in Omaha on Tuesday because online sales and customer traffic dried up dramatically — especially after the state’s first case of covid-19 was reported nearby. King said her manager told her when she showed up for her shift that morning she had no choice. King made $11 an hour.

This news is even worse for African Americans, especially after the findings of this new study.

The researchers at Lending Tree - the popular website that connects borrowers with lenders – completed a study and found that African Americans as a whole were more likely to be unemployed than Americans overall in 2018 than they were in 2013. Despite substantial advancements in some areas, Blacks are still behind the national average.

While unemployment decreased for African Americans by 36 percent – from 16.6 percent in 2013 to 10.6 percent in 2018 — it was still five percentage points higher than the unemployment rate for Americans as a whole, according to this study.

The study also revealed the median household income for African-American households remains 33 percent below the national average.

Among other key findings, the median household income for African Americans grew by 13.4 percent, roughly the same rate of 13.7 percent for Americans as a whole. But, it remains 33 percent below the national average.

The study revealed that the median household income for Blacks in 2018 was $40,155 — more than $20,000 less than the $60,293 median household income for Americans as a whole.

The study found that the wage gap between Blacks and Americans as a whole increased 11 percent from 2013 to 2018. So yeah, while some things have advanced for Black Americans in the social aspect, the numbers economically are still disproportionate AF. And that's a problem.

You can read the full study findings here. Thoughts?

Photo: Andrey_Popov/Shutterstock.com

source: theybf