The Mirage Of Hispanic Job Growth

The recession of 2008 reveals the financial vulnerabilities Hispanic families face. Loan defaults, home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies are rising for everyone, but are likely to be much higher for Hispanics than others. The reason: Economic distress is quickly materializing for many Hispanics due to sharply higher unemployment rates. By the end of 2008, one year after the recession began, the unemployment rate for Hispanics hit 9.2 percent, compared to 6.6 percent for whites.

But what about the gains Hispanics made before the recession? Well, the last business cycle (March 2001 to December 2007) holds a clear lesson for Hispanics—simply having a job or two is not enough. Despite experiencing stronger job growth than other groups, Hispanic workers remained in a precarious economic situation because relatively strong job growth was accompanied by low wages and few benefits. Policymakers focused on resurrecting job growth should take care to ensure that newly created jobs are well paid and offer workers decent benefits. Hispanics would be the clearest winners.

Let’s consider a few figures. Hispanics did see strong job growth during the last business cycle with the number of employed Hispanics growing by 26.2 percent—significantly more than the 6.0 percent for African Americans and 4.1 percent for whites. This relatively strong job growth is largely due to dramatic gains in the residential construction and accommodation and food services sectors, which are large employers of Hispanic workers. Residential construction employment grew by 16.3 percent and jobs in hotels and restaurants by 14.0 percent, a sharp contrast to the 3.8 percent increase for the entire private sector during the last business cycle. As a result of these strong job gains, Hispanics were the only group to recover the employment losses relative to the population that occurred after the last recession ended in November 2001.

Importantly, though, most of the job growth for Hispanics occurred in the low-wage labor market. At the end of 2007, Hispanics’ usual median weekly earnings were just $498.68, in inflation-adjusted terms, which was markedly below African Americans’ $564.58 and significantly below whites’ $710.15. Hispanics worked more, but their poverty rate was almost three times as large as that for whites and actually increased during the last business cycle. In 2007, the poverty rate for Hispanics was 21.5 percent, up from 19.2 percent in 2000, compared to only 8.2 percent for whites.

Moreover, low wages were also accompanied by low benefit coverage. In 2007, just 67.9 percent of Hispanics had health insurance coverage, compared to 80.8 percent of African Americans and 89.6 percent of whites. Hispanics’ participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans also lags behind other groups, with 30.6 percent of private-sector Hispanic workers covered in 2007 compared to 47.1 percent of African Americans and 57.6 percent of whites—even though Hispanics had stronger job and wage gains than African Americans and whites before the current recession began.

Similarly, Hispanic families’ homeownership rates also increased—to 49.7 percent in 2007 from 46.3 percent in 2000—compared to whites and African Americans, but these gains came at a substantial cost. Just 10.5 percent of loans made to whites in 2007 were subprime, compared to 28.6 percent for Hispanics and 34.0 percent for African Americans. Not surprisingly, Hispanics (along with African Americans) are bearing the brunt of the rolling home foreclosure crisis.

Policymakers in the Obama administration, in Congress and in local governments across the country must heed these lessons. They must focus on creating jobs with good wages and benefits alongside an emphasis on wealth and asset building. Together, this could make a substantial dent in the financial insecurity of Hispanics in the coming years.