Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz -
Marie Lourdie Pierre-Jacques still breaks down when she recounts the phone call that pulled the rug out from under her. One of thousands of hotel workers placed on temporary layoff at the start of the pandemic, she thought the October call with her employer was to discuss health insurance. Instead, she said, she was told her layoff was permanent, and she’d have to reapply to any openings.
Pierre-Jacques, 47, who immigrated from Haiti 28 years ago and worked at the Swissotel in downtown Chicago for the past 18 years, was crestfallen. She’d spent long hours away from her two young sons working her way up at the hotel, where she was a full-time banquet server, and thought her job was secure.
Now her family has no health insurance, and she’s worried she won’t find work again.
“I cry because I’m scared about what’s going to be next,” a distraught Pierre-Jacques said recently from her Bolingbrook home, a few hours after suffering a panic attack that sent her to the hospital. “I fill application, no job call me.”
Women have endured the brunt of the job losses during the pandemic as industries where they make up the bulk of the workforce, such as hospitality, struggle to recover, and continued school and day care closures make it difficult to juggle family with work. It has setback efforts by women, and particularly women of colour, to work their way into higher-paying jobs.
Women, though 47 per cent of the US labour force last year, accounted for 55 per cent of the 2020 job losses, according to the National Women’s Law Project. The imbalance continued in January. While employment among men grew by 200,000 last month, it fell by 21,000 among women, according to federal data released last Friday.
Women are not just losing jobs but dropping out of the labour force altogether at a higher rate than men. That’s especially pronounced among Black women, who historically are more likely to participate in the workforce than white women.
In January, there were 4.8 per cent fewer Black women in the labour force than a year before, compared with a 3.1 per cent drop among white women, according to data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
To be sure, the pandemic has wreaked economic havoc across demographic lines. The 3.6 million unemployed white men in the US last month was more than double the number from a year earlier. Black men continue to have the worst unemployment rate, at 9.4 per cent compared with 6.3 per cent for the overall population. But immigrant women, mothers, and particularly Black mothers, have been hardest hit.
Women with children suffered significantly greater employment declines than other groups, including fathers and women without kids, during the spring, summer and fall of last year, according to a report last month from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Moms lost 190,000 more jobs than other groups of workers during the pandemic.
The decline in those who are working or looking for work was most pronounced among Black moms, single moms and moms with no more than a high school education. That’s concerning because the groups hurt most are also those that historically have had the hardest time getting back to work, — dpa
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