Latinos make big comeback
Only demographic group to return to pre-recession levels
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WASHINGTON – After scraping by on handyman jobs for a year, Bert Qintana figured he’d have to leave his wife and teenage son at their home near Taos, N.M., and find work elsewhere.
Then Qintana got a call last month from Chevron Mining, which runs a mine 20 miles away. Would he be interested in hauling muck from the molybdenum mine for $17.05 an hour? He leaped at the offer.
“Thank God,” said Qintana, 45, a Latino who had worked as a general contractor. “I was able to hang in there and not have to move.” About a dozen other workers, most of them Latino, also were hired.
Like Qintana, many Latinos with ties to the home-building industry got slammed by the recession, which wiped out about 2 million construction jobs.
But now, as the economic rebound picks up a bit of steam, Latinos are scoring bigger job gains than most other demographic groups and proving to be a bright spot in the fledgling recovery.
While they make up only 15 percent of the country’s workforce, Latinos have racked up half the employment gains posted since the economy began adding jobs in early 2010, Labor Department data showed.
The improving labor market for Latinos, a key voting bloc, could boost President Barack Obama’s political fortunes in the fall.
They backed Obama heavily in 2008, but many became disgruntled over recession-induced job losses, a top concern among Latinos, and his handling of immigration issues.
Among registered Latino voters, 54 percent approved of the president’s handling of his job as of late last year, down from 63 percent a year earlier, according to Pew Hispanic Center surveys. Among Latinos ages 18 to 29, the president’s approval rating took an even steeper fall.
A rosier jobs picture could turn that around.
So far, Latinos are the only demographic group whose employment numbers have returned to pre-recession levels. The latest Latino jobless rate of 10.5 percent remains higher than the overall rate of 8.3 percent for the nation and 7.4 percent for whites, partly reflecting their large immigrant population (foreign-born U.S. workers tend to have higher unemployment because of a variety of factors) as well as education and skill levels.
The construction industry remains weak, but other sectors in which Latinos have a relatively large share of jobs – hotels, food services, health care and manufacturing, for example – are seeing more robust job growth.
Mining support services, in which Latinos make up about a fifth of the workers, are expanding employment significantly. And, because Latinos account for a relatively small share of workers in the public sector, they aren’t bearing the brunt of deep cuts in government jobs.
There are other reasons, experts say, why Latinos are faring better than some other groups. For one thing, they might be more willing to take low-wage, temporary jobs. And they tend to be more mobile, willing to move from one county to another to get a job.
Some of the decline in Latino unemployment reflects the fact that many discouraged workers have stopped looking for jobs. Also, with jobs generally hard to find, fewer people are moving to the U.S. from Latin America, and more are returning home. The result is a smaller pool of workers who can more easily get employment.
At the start of the recession in late 2007, the Hispanic unemployment rate was 6.3 percent nationwide. As the economy worsened, the jobless rate for Hispanics topped 13 percent in November 2010. Since then, that rate has fallen to 10.5 percent.
The declines, said Adriana Kugler, the Labor Department’s chief economist, were “very striking” and cut across workers’ ages. That suggested that the trend wasn’t occurring simply because Latinos have a large percentage of younger workers.
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