Discrimination against Whites has pushed many Whites out of the Labor Force







As long as discrimination against Whites continues, there will be Whites for whom a job search will be futile. Race based discrimination against Whites has become much more widespread and blatant in the past decade than it was even 15 years ago, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of White males in the category “discouraged workers.” Discouraged workers is “the grossly understated term for those who have given up looking for work, usually after long and futile job searches, and simply dropped out of the labor force,” according to Thomas McCarroll in an article for Time magazine.

The number of discouraged workers is greatly underestimated because even to be counted as unemployed you must not only be out of work, but you must have actively looked for work in the past 12 months. A study that looked at the labor force status in 1995 of people who were unemployed in 1994, but had indicated that they wanted a job, found that discrimination was a major cause of discouragement for those who gave up searching for a job. Targets of discrimination realize that few jobs are available for them, regardless of their qualifications. And this barrier is so daunting for its victims that many are discouraged from looking for a job for an extended period of time, according to the study.

The study, which was based on data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), found that among discouraged workers, those who cited discrimination were least likely to become part of the labor force. Men were more likely to be classified as discouraged than women, and were twice as likely as discouraged women to be unemployed a year later.

The study did not include discouraged workers who are homeless. To be counted by the BLS as unemployed, you must have an address. So, as the unemployment situation gets worse, more of those hardest hit – the discouraged homeless --will be excluded from unemployment statistics. And as discrimination against Whites get worse, more of those hardest hit will be White.

The study notes that another concept, the “labor reserve,” refers to those likely to join the labor force under more favorable social conditions.

www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1998/07/art3full.pdf

Down And Out: Discouraged Workers - TIME